Pay more for the cheese

The other evening, my husband and I sat in Narrowsburg Roasters on Main Street enjoying our tea and coffee. The shop’s gracious hosts had set out a sample wedge of cheese and some crackers. After a few savory bites, we decided to purchase a wedge of our own, it was that good. I balked a bit at the price, but then realized I had to walk the walk. Buying the cheese, produced by locally owned and operated Calkins Creamery, one of the region’s oldest dairy farms, established in 1841, was a way to support sustainable agriculture in our area.

I found myself thinking about the possibility of natural gas drilling on many large tracts of land in Wayne County, PA, where Calkins Creamery is located, trying to understand the forces that have brought this prospect of industrial development to our region.

Most of the time, we go not so merrily along while corporate interests invade our lives like a virus. Five years ago, I tried to escape the juggernaut by moving to Lackawaxen from once rural New Jersey, where strip malls and developments replaced family farms, and Wal-Marts, Home Depots, Rite Aids, car washes and self-storage units moved onto fields where cows once grazed and hay grew.

I didn’t personally know any of the farmers who relinquished their land to developers or corporate interests, but I would bet that they were not evil money-grubbers who blithely abandoned their chosen livelihoods to rape our landscape. And I don’t know any Wayne County farmers, but I doubt they’re eagerly joining hands with Halliburton to pollute their own drinking water. My supposition is that they work very hard, just like we all do, to support their families and live lives with value. If I had trouble making payments on my monthly bills and someone knocked on my door offering money to make those troubles disappear, what would I do? I wonder.

When I read Tom Kane’s recent series of articles in this paper exposing the plight of our dairy farmers, my only response was to shake my head and say, “What a shame.” What if that empathy were collective? Could it galvanize us to work in our collective best interest? How might we pull together as a community to solve our problems?

Now that the threat on the horizon is gas drilling, we are ready to point fingers at each other, blaming landowners for selling out and spoiling our bucolic landscape and environmentalists for encroaching on property rights. But we need a united community, not one that’s polarized, to address the complex forces that may transform our home into an undesirable place to live.

Our outrage seems to rise only in the face of threats like New York Regional Interconnect or gas drilling. But if we value our environment, our concern has to be embedded in our daily lives with a commitment to preserve what we value. Barbara Kingsolver, in her book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” makes the salient point that we Americans want our food cheap, but we don’t consider the real costs we pay down the road in diseases like obesity, diabetes and cancer, in undrinkable water and un-breathable air and in the loss of biodiversity, not to mention tainted food. Witness the recent recall of 143 million (yes, million) pounds of contaminated beef processed at a corporate slaughterhouse.

We forget where our food really comes from. We buy tomatoes in January and don’t do much to support our local farmers. Our long-standing habits have aided and abetted the corporate drive to marginalize family farms.

We need to shift our perspective. We need to pay more for the cheese.

- Marcia Nehemiah