Photo courtesy of Jasper Gribble, Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/@jaspergribble

The email query from last week keeps swishing around my brain. A customer wrote to ask for all the ingredients of our livestock feed.  She was looking for chicken that had been fed no corn or soy.  The feed had to be processed in a mill where there was no possibility of wheat chaff residue coming into contact with it.  Everything that went into it needed to be organic.

That’s a set of criteria that neither we, nor our local farming infrastructure, have the resources to meet.  I told her so.

I suggested, if she was that sensitive to the grains possibly being fed to pigs and chickens, that she go grass-fed and stick to red meats — the herbivores, like beef and lamb.

Even that suggestion weighed heavily on my conscience.  Grass-fed and grass-finished is an ideal, but grass farmers are on the front line of climate change.  They can’t always get top quality hay to keep good condition on their animals in winter.  Or they’re hit with drought in the middle of summer, which limits their access to forage  Sometimes, to keep their animals in good condition, they have to rely on a little feed supplementation.  That’s nothing like factory farmed livestock production by any means, but if the customer couldn’t abide any corn, soy or wheat residue coming into contact with the animal’s feed, then she was reliant on the farmer having a perfect season. 

But that didn’t matter.  She didn’t want to eat red meat anyhow, for fear that it would cause cancer.  

She had read a new diet book that insisted she source her food from farmers who could meet all of the above conditions for food production.  She had been doing a lot of searching online.  She wasn’t finding much to eat.  I can’t help but wonder if the sources she was finding were being totally honest with her.

BUT:  If she could adhere to the highly restrictive diet,  the book promised that her cholesterol would be just where the doctor wanted it.  And her post menopausal paunch would melt away.    A few weeks in, she really felt she’d seen improvement.  I wasn’t sure how she would sustain this over the long haul.  She admitted she was already over-spending, trying to locate the absolute perfect food sources. 

For fifty years, I’ve lived on the land, and for over thirty of them, I’ve stood across from or answered letters and phone calls from customers on diets.

Most of them have been women.  That’s no surprise.  In April of 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that the weight loss industry was valued at $76 billion dollars(1).   According to a study reported in Elise Loehnen’s book, On Our Best Behavior (2), “Women of all ages report astronomical levels of body dissatisfaction, ranging from a low of 71.9 percent of women ages seventy-five and up, to a high of 93.2 percent of women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four (p.118)”

I’ve never doubted the wisdom of switching to real, farm-fresh food, to home-cooked meals, to removing processed foods from the diet.  

But there comes a point where the dietary restrictions put forward in the form of endless (and extremely contradictory) advice from the weight loss industry overreach a person’s ability to feed herself and to enjoy life.  There are also legitimate questions about the wisdom of labeling anyone carrying a few extra pounds as a health risk, that the definition of obesity might need to be revisited, and that all fat may not be equal(2).  Carrying a few extra pounds has been indicated as a reason some folks have better recovery from hip fractures, certain surgical procedures and cancer.

And there comes a point where the family farmer is simply unable to meet the demands of whatever the latest dietary tome requires of them. 

As a female farmer, I feel the pressure from all sides.

I feel it when I stand on the scale each year for my annual physical and have to listen to the report about pounds gained, with no reminders that I am perfectly normal.  (Psst – by the way: Did you know that a typical post-adolescent American woman, just shy of five foot four, actually weighs 171 pounds?.   Just sayin’….)

I feel it when I go for my skin cancer screening and listen to the women at the registration desk engaging in confessionals about “cheat days” and their self-admonishments if they eat something they weren’t supposed to on a non-cheat day, and their plans to atone with extra salad and extra starvation.

I feel it when my customers want food from omnivorous animals that contain none of the ingredients that they’ve currently eliminated from their own diets.

I feel it when customers tell me they’re going to stop eating eggs for fear of cholesterol.

I feel it when they tell me they’re going to stop eating our red meats because they think it will cause heart disease and cancer.

I feel it when my customers report they’re going entirely vegan to be more fit and planet-friendly….With little interest in learning about how our way of farming allows for carbon sequestration, builds soil health, helps nurture biodiversity, keeps the water supply pristine, and supplies nutrient-dense food on mountain pastures that could never be sustainably plowed.  

As women, we are forever being told by our culture that we have to be thinner, and we are forever being sold the next diet plan that will make us invincible.  

And I’m not the only farm woman who goes through this.  I listen to my fellow farmers worry about how they look, how their own blood cholesterol and bone density screenings and cancer screenings reflect on the foods they grow and eat and sell….As though the choice to grow and eat real food can only be substantiated if we, as the farm women, never show the signs of age…If our middles never grow thick, our hair never thins, our skin never wrinkles, our bones and joints never grow tired and creaky.

I’ve been in this business long enough to know that these conversations will not stop.  There’s too much fortune to be had if we, particularly women, are dissatisfied with our bodies, if we are ashamed of our appetites and fearful of our mortality.  I know that there will always be another email asking me to report everything that goes into our feed rations.  And there will be another customer who will suddenly inform me that they’ve given up red meat or white meat or all meat. Or they’ve forsaken dessert.  Or butter. Or cheese, or coffee, or something else that has given them deep pleasure, in the quest to live on this planet forever, or to fit into their skinny jeans.  Some may legitimately discover that they were truly sensitive to certain foods.  Others will accumulate a thick dossier of deprivations that may or may not keep them rail thin.  

For those of us who grow the food, we need a thick skin.  The diet industry profits when people are afraid to enjoy a good meal.  And admittedly, questions about how we produce our food can be constructive.  The push to improve the quality of our feed will eventually lead to a more sustainable, healthier food system.  But if we bend to every diet industry dictate, we’ll soon be out of business.  And as for our own eating habits, well. We cannot expect our bodies to defy the aging process.  It’s normal to put on weight as we age.  It’s normal for our hair and teeth and skin and bodies to change.  And in the end, something is going to get us.  

But there are many days between now and then.  And for farmers to deny ourselves the pleasures of the table is, in my view, to turn our backs on Grace, to reject the abundance our life has afforded.  As family farmers,  life asks much of us.  But it doesn’t demand that we go hungry.  Eat up, and enjoy what your life has to offer.

1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/ozempic-wegovy-mounjaro-weight-loss-industry-89419ecb
2. Loehnen, Elise, 2023.  On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins And The Price Women Pay To Be Good. The Dial Press. New York. 

If you enjoyed this, please share this podcast with friends & family to get the ideas to spread.  Better still, you can help make the magic happen for as little as $1/month by hopping over to Patreon and looking up Shannon Hayes.  Or, if it’s easier, you can also donate to support the podcast by sending a check to Shannon Hayes, ℅ Sap Bush Hollow Farm, 832 W. Fulton Rd, West Fulton, NY  12194.

And that’s a really important thing to do, because all of this— the podcast, the blog, the books and the creative recharging that happens over fall and winter—   are a result of the support of my patrons on Patreon.  And this week I’d like to send a shout out to my patrons Yvaine Melito and Amy Renaud.  Thank you, folks!  I couldn’t do it without you! 

Interested in learning more about Sap Bush Hollow Farm?  Visit us on the web here.