What can I eat?

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Jackpot, Nevada

context: We spent this week camped on public lands in Nevada learning more about grazing. Our week included a visit with Jon Marvel, the director of the Western Watersheds Project. Jon is fiercely anti-grazing on public lands and has a reputation as a bit of a bully among ranchers in the area. We also visited Steve and Robin Boise, ranchers in the area who are practicing rotational grazing and limiting the number of cattle on their allotment to allow the land to recover.

I have no idea what I can eat. Well, that’s not strictly true. I know I can go to farmer’s markets, pay $6 a pound for Thundering Hooves ground beef, ask my food producers questions and eat relatively sustainably.

Buy how do we feed the world? If ranching means incised channels and toxic waste runoff from feedlots and wheat means methyl isocyanate and Monsanto’s patented genes, what on earth are my customers, coworkers and family members who live on food stamps supposed to buy? How do we change this system from the ground up? Because changing it top-down will never work as long as ranchers control Congress and agribusiness contributes 132.7 million a year to them.

Listening to ranchers on this trip, I like them. They’re good people, people I’d want to have as neighbors. Robin and Steve, Todd Nash…it’s so hard to listen to them and say, “Too bad.” It’s so hard to remember that they’re wrong about some things. Listening to Jon and Suzanne, I don’t get that feeling of neighborliness. They’re not the sort how make you feel at ease. They’re not easy to listen to. But I think more of the truth lies on their side of the fence. How do I speak what they say and sound like a rancher? I don’t want to manipulate statistics the way Jon does—2-3% of cow weight is very different than 2-3% of cows raised on public lands. I don’t want to be frenzied and upset, but it’s so hard not to when you’re seeing things that are unspeakable and no one else will listen to you about them. I guess mostly I want to work with people, not against everything, not with corporations and not from inside the groups causing the problem or tacitly allowing it to continue. But compromise with ranchers seems easy. I can’t see myself a ranching activist, and compromise with the LA Department of Water and Power or Monsanto seems so much harder. Steve and Robin are people, but Exxon-Mobil might as well be Satan. Maybe this is where I take a lesson from Mike*, who helped get some lake back. After all, I still don’t really want to blow up a dam. Maybe compromise is our best hope. God, that’s a scary thought.

*Mike Prather, an activist who has worked to restore Owens Lake in California, after LA’s Department of Water and Power pumped it dry for their municipal water supply. Now, the lake is a series of square pits filled with water, technically designated as a construction site (we had to wear vests and hard hats to go birdwatching). But a lot of migratory birds have come back to the area.