Eat Like A Farmer

“When the chores were done and he came back with Father and Royal to the warm kitchen, breakfast was almost ready. How good it smelled! Mother was frying pancakes, and the big blue platter, keeping hot on the stove’s hearth, was full of plump brown sausage cakes in their brown gravy.

Almanzo washed as quickly as he could, and combed his hair. As soon as Mother finished straining the milk, they all sat down and Father asked the blessing for the breakfast.

There was oatmeal with plenty of thick cream and maple sugar. There were fried potatoes, and the golden buckwheat cakes, as many as Almanzo wanted to eat, with sausages and gravy or with butter and maple syrup. There were preserves and jams and jellies and doughnuts. But best of all Almanzo liked the spicy apple pie, with its thick, rich juice and its crumbly crust. He ate two big wedges of the pie” (Farmer Boy 37-38).

Wow! What a breakfast! Doesn’t that sound amazing?

I loved reading all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books as a child, and I still love reading them to my children. But I have come to realize that this is not at all what eating like a farmer is like!

Every once in a while, we make an amazing brunch and I find lots of inspiration from this passage from Farmer Boy. But I definitely notice a lack of vegetables in his meal!!!!!

SO what does it mean to eat like a farmer?!? Well, I suppose it is different for every farm family!

In our family, eating like a farmer means eating seasonally. It means eating as much as possible from our own farm products. It means eating foods prepared mostly at home, but not always. It means avoiding certain ingredients, like MSG, soy, corn syrups, vegetable oil, processed sugar, and GMOs.

But eating like a farmer is more than avoiding certain things! It’s about appreciating the vegetables, meats, eggs, and other ingredients that someone has grown. It’s about enjoying the creative spirit in the kitchen. And it’s about sitting around the table as a family at least once a day to eat together.

Let me tell you a little bit more of our story and how we were inspired to eat this way. In 2011, after being married a little over a year, we found out that Stephen had cancer and I was pregnant with our first child within the space of a month. This was quite the contrast of good and bad news!

Thankfully, Stephen’s cancer was a relatively “easy” cancer to cure: he went through 5 or 6 grueling months of chemotherapy. The chemo itself was very taxing and difficult. There were so many things that he could not do on his own–for instance, driving was way too overstimulating! There are so many things that you have to pay attention to while driving, and the effects of chemo really made this too much, so he had to rely on many other people to take him to his appointments and grad school classes. Yes, amazingly, Stephen was able to not only finish but excel in his last semester of his Theology Master’s degree program at the John Paul II Institute in DC while going through chemo–he even graduated with honors! And thankfully we lived close enough that Stephen’s mom was able to take him to every single chemo-infusion appointment!

During the same time, I was pregnant with our son Raphael and continuing to teach in Southern Maryland, just about an hour’s drive from our home in Bowie.

Stephen finished chemo treatments and grad school within a month of each other. We were told that the type of cancer he had (Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma) was one of the best to have because it rarely comes back.

About three months later, Raphael was born. When Raphael was about 6 months old, friends of ours introduced us to a book called Nourishing Traditions. This cookbook that is more than a cookbook changed our outlook on food: it introduced us to the idea that traditional foods with their traditional preparations were healthier than the Standard American Diet that eschewed healthy fats and red meat in favor of soy-based products, industrialized oils, and lean proteins. It suggested that the source of American obesity and obesity related diseases were more related to our heavy load of carbohydrates: especially processed sugars, processed flours, breads-that-can-hardly-be-called-bread, low-fat foods, and various other additives. It even suggested that the increasing intolerance of wheat and gluten arose from the mistreatment of wheat in our food production over the last few generations.

After Stephen’s philosophy work in college and grad school, where he studied the nature of things, these claims made a lot of logical sense to us. We wanted to eat in a way that honored the nature of the animals, the nature of the grains, the nature of the vegetables that we were eating.

And as we learned more and more about those natures, and more and more about farming practices that respected and honored those natures, the more attracted we were to becoming farmers ourselves.

While we were learning about farming, we also started researching and experimenting in the kitchen. We had the double motivation of avoiding cancer again and raising a child we wanted to feed the healthiest food possible. We tried tons of recipes from Nourishing Traditions, discovering recipes we absolutely loved (Peach Chutney!) and failing disastrously with others (Homemade Fish Sauce!). We went to the library and found more books and cookbooks, we ordered a series of cookbooks with recipes from around the world, and we found a sourdough recipe that actually worked and tasted delicious!

We cut out processed sugars, found sources of raw honey, real maple syrup, and sucanat. When we were disappointed that replacing the white and brown sugars in the standard Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe with sucanat led to a cookie that was more cake-like than cookie-like, Stephen’s brother Mark helped us out with a recipe from Serious Eats that worked perfectly!

We found sources of meat that were grass-fed and finished–and I learned that grass-fed lamb is my absolute favorite meat! I’ll never forget how good the spaghetti sauce was the first time Stephen used ground lamb instead of ground beef!

We found sources of organ meats and learned how to cook them so they tasted like the gourmet delicacies that they are.

And we learned, in a longer time than all of that, to be gracious with ourselves and others when we were invited over to share a meal. In other words, we learned that it scared people off when we said we could not eat the above list of things, so we stopped saying it, and we allowed ourselves to eat out occasionally, and yes, we even found a store-bought ice cream that was acceptable (Turkey Hill Naturals, in case you’re curious!) and more realistic for our growing family than making all our own ice cream homemade! We learned that it was ok to not follow the “rules” 20 percent of the time if we followed them 80 percent of the time.

These things that we learned have been the foundation for the way we farm, the foods we sell (or don’t sell), and the support we give to our CSA members and farm customers as they navigate cooking and eating local farm products.

Cooking together, and teaching our children to cook, has been essential to enjoying a creative spirit in the kitchen for our family. From a young age, we had Raphael helping us chop vegetables, and each of the other children have followed suit. Once they learned to read, Raphael and Miriam were able to start baking on their own because they could read the recipe and had learned many of the prerequisite skills through helping me at other times. Raphael even read a book about smoking meat last summer and taught himself to smoke chicken on the grill, preparing a delicious dinner without any help from us at all!

Eating around the table together is also something we make sure happens at least once a day, most often at dinner. This can take great sacrifice, sometimes meaning we are eating later, after evening activities, than we would prefer. But we realize that eating a shared meal together around a table, free from screens and media, is something so essential to our humanity, our faith, and our close-knit family that it is worth every sacrifice. And that is what it really means to eat like a farmer.

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Interested in reading more on this topic?

Check out our article “On the Table” published in Humanum in 2022

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