The Luckiest

"There's nothing like poverty to get you into Heaven. They got a lot of wine and fish up there, and the bread is unleavened. They got a lot of ears that heard a whip go crack, lots of missing toes and fingers and scars upon their backs. Daddy's been working too much for days and days. He doesn't eat. He never says much but I think this time it's got him beat. It isn't that he isn't strong or kind or clever. Your daddy's poor today and he will be poor forever."
-Patty Griffin, A Poor Man's House.

Tucked cozily into a straight-backed bar stool at a hand crafted wooden counter, I scribbled down words inspired by a glorious winter walk while I waited eagerly for the waitress to round the corner with my morning meal at The Village Bakery last Sunday morning. After spending an hour sleepily lulling about a wooded, creek guided trail through dusty snow that glistened up the rays of a rare January sunrise, the butter yellow walls and warming glow fueled by happy diners and wall ovens were more than welcomed. While defrosting my left hand around the comforting curvature of a red mug full of Snowville swirled, organic coffee, my right hand was wielding it's usual black ink pen, writing about love. It is romantic to me to hearken the voices of the transcendentalists, tread out into nature and hear the words for myself; inspirational to say the least. While the smell of sharp, melting local cheddar and sizzling scrambling eggs swirled about me I found myself eaves dropping on the loud conversation to my left, interrupting the flow of my day, between a father and his newly minted Bobcat daughter.

"You don't know how lucky you were, kiddo. Trips to Europe, a new car when you turned sixteen, always getting new clothes and handbags."

This comment made by the girl's father came about ten minutes into their conversation about Athens, college-towns, and alleged hippies. It came about five minutes after they discussed how he didn't know how students survived before the uptown appearance of Chipotle. It came just seconds after he said, "When I was a student at the University of Dayton, there was a college nearby called Antioch. That's where all the weirdos went." It was the comment about luck, however, that hit a nerve within me. Until that point, I was able to retreat into my Cancerian shell, turn off the world around me and delve happily, quietly and alone into griddle cakes and my own thoughts. As soon as my ears noted this particular comment, the switches to my analytical nature were tripped, and I wrote in all capital letters on the top of my earlier scribbling: "What makes a life, a person, an experience 'lucky'? What defines 'luck'?"

Within the context of the situation, it was hard for me to digest the fact that this pair of people were sitting in a locally-owned, locally-operated, food conscious cafe, plagued and ridden with people that probably, based on fundamentals and personal codes of ethics, fell into the previously mentioned category of "hippie" and "weirdo." In fact, they were sitting next to me and while I fit nicely into what the man obviously considers an acceptable social appearance, despite my lack of dreadlocks and body odor, I fundamentally agree with many people who self-identify as "hippies." I self-identify as a hippie.

This morning while reading a chapter in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, this weekend scenario began to replay in my mind. In the chapter I was reading, she began to explore the divide between our unofficial American caste system, or rather the classist division of urban and rural. I know into which caste my breakfast neighbors fall. It is the same one into which I fall: the urban middle-class. However, my hippie friends, and my farming friends (many of which claim both those identities) often fall into the socially deemed "lower" of the classes: the rural poor. While the three of us were sitting over pairs of whipped local eggs, handmade biscuits with locally milled flour, and thick, smokey pieces of bacon from a notoriously local family farm, we were actually caught up in the flavors, the texture, the grit of the cause; we were eating food, and food is ensuring a chronic separation of two Americas- the rural and the urban-and more importantly of Americans themselves, more and more each day.

Barbara says of the modern American farming industry...

"...as the years have gone by, as farms have gone out of business, America has given an ever-smaller cut of each food dollar (now less than 19 percent) to its farmers. The psychic divide between rural and urban people is surely a part of the problem. "Eaters must understand," Wendell Berry writes, "that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." Eaters must, he claims, but it sure looks like most eaters don't. If they did, how would we frame the sentence suggested by today's food-buying habits, directed toward today's farmers? "Let them eat dirt" is hardly overstating it. The urban U.S. middle class appears more specifically concerned about exploited Asian factory workers." (pg. 208, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

America's supposed "upper" classes are, by their food choices, nourishing rural poverty. In a country where patriotism runs high and mighty, where red, white and blue are practically bled from the veins of American citizens, the upper and middle classes are monopolizing against the history and tradition of American family farming; against agriculture, the first and largest industry in America's life story. Every meal we purchase at McDonald's is slowly killing one family farmer after another, turning the rural poor into the untouchables. Barbara illustrates how this is happening in a passage about corporate grocery stores purchasing locally grown, organic tomatoes in mid-August in rural Appalachia:

"...when the farmers were finally bringing in these tomatoes by the truckload and hoping for a decent payout, some grocery buyers backtracked. "Not this week," one store offered without warning, and then another. Not the next week either, nor the next. A tomato is not a thing that can be put on hold. Mountains of ripe fruits piled up behind the packing house and turned to orange sludge, swarming with clouds of fruit flies. These tomatoes were perfect, and buyers were hungry. Agreements had been made. But pallets of organic tomatoes from California had begun coming in just a few dollars cheaper. It's hard to believe, given the amount of truck fuel involved, but transportation is tax-deductible for the corporations, so we taxpayers paid for that shipping. The California growers only needed the economics of scale on their side, a cheap army of pickers, and customers who would reliably opt for the lower price." (pg. 211, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

Buying organic produce in the grocery store is certainly taking a step in the right direction as far as your health is concerned, but where your community is concerned, buying locally produced goods becomes the determining factor between a home-cooked meal and a trip to the soup kitchen for many family farmers.

It is not that the rural poor wish to become the urban middle-class. After stewing over the idea of luck, and what it means to be lucky for some time, as well as reading this particular chapter of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year in Food Life, I believe you'd find that the rural poor consider themselves lucky, and that luck is defined and determined solely on our rearing and raising. One does not need trips to Europe, new clothes, or handbags to be "lucky." One doesn't need a new car or any of the other socially deemed "privileged" experiences to consider them self "lucky." That notion of "lucky" exists only in the minds of those who also consider themselves the "have mores," who recognize their status as middle, or upper-class. If I asked my friends who own, work and tend a dairy farm, whose milk is locally processed into half-gallons, into cream, into cheese and yogurt whether or not they felt "lucky," I imagine their answer would involve something along the lines of "We feel lucky every day that we wake-up with our feet on the ground and our livelihood still living." I believe those who we categorize as the "rural poor," (a category which includes many American family farmers) in fact think of themselves simply as being who they are, and every day that they can continue to be who they are, they find themselves steeped in the wealth of luck.

I wish that every Ohio University student who finds them self to be of the middle and upper class, thrown suddenly into rural Southeastern Ohio, who found them self out for breakfast with their folks that Sunday morning of the annual "Parents Weekend," would have eaten at The Village Bakery. If all of us who "have more," could spend our "more," on locally produced food products, it'd be the greatest oath to our nation we could take, it would be an act of great patriotism. We're Americans, our country was carved by plow, driven by tractor and agriculture fed the passing of knowledge, the building of family, the fellowship of community. Even though we also have an industrial, corporate history, we must never forget that even within those contexts we are still a nation of individuals. Ford doesn't pay the bills of the assembly line worker in it's Detroit plant We do. We pay that worker. We're the consumers, and we ought to be smart, caring, compassionate consumers.

Visit a Farmer's Market, buy a locally produced jam, join a CSA, buy locally raised meat once a week, buy eggs from the farm up the road, buy local honey, eat local apples, use pure maple syrup tapped from trees just miles from your house, find a locally owned and operated bakery, and most importantly, if you find yourself in a position that allows you to do any of those things, then count yourself as the luckiest.

(One final note, because sometimes I can't help myself: If you're one of those Americans who is so concerned about illegal immigration from Mexico, if you want to build the fence, if you so desperately want to keep "them" out, then you should probably stop buying produce from the grocery store. You're ensuring that "those people," have a job. Someone has to pick those cucumbers for less than minimum wage, then they have to be shipped to where you live using your tax dollars, in order for you to buy them for next to nothing. Just saying.)