God’s littlest Cow

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Explore a Growing City of Meticulously Crafted Miniature Paper Buildings by Charles Young

And fuckin magnets! How do they work?

Candy cane snail, Liguus virgineus, Orthalicidae

Thanks to FreshDirect and Instacart, consuming meat no longer even requires coming into contact with a deli butcher or grocery clerk. With a few taps on a keyboard or the swipe of a screen, consumers can get as much beef, pork, and chicken as they want delivered to their doors, without ever having to think about where it comes from. And yet, as the popularity of bestselling books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals attests, a lot of Americans do think about this. In recent years, more and more consumers have begun to carefully scrutinize the labels on the packages of the meat and poultry they buy. The ranks of such consumers have grown exponentially, paralleling the rise of the “good food” movement, which promotes healthier eating habits and reform of the industrial food system.

Although the movement is, in Pollan’s words, a “big, lumpy tent,” composed of a broad coalition of advocacy organizations and citizens’ groups that sometimes push for competing agendas, one of its aims is to persuade consumers to become more conscientious shoppers and eaters. Among those who put this idea into practice are so-called locavores, who buy food directly from local farms, ideally from small family-run enterprises that embrace organic, sustainable practices: ranchers who raise grass-fed cows that never set foot in industrial feedlots; farmers who sell eggs that come from free-range chickens reared on a diet of seeds, plants, and insects rather than genetically engineered corn and antibiotics.

Locavores engage in what social scientists call “virtuous consumption,” using their purchasing power to buy food that aligns with their values. The movement appeals to the growing number of Americans who want to feel more connected to the food they eat and to the people who raise it, with whom locavores can interact directly at farmers markets or through community-supported agriculture programs. It is a captivating vision, and the benefits of eating locally grown food—which is likely to be more nutritious, to come from more humanely treated animals, and to be better for the environment—are manifold.

But locavores have some blind spots of their own, most notably when it comes to the experiences of workers on small family farms. As the political scientist Margaret Gray discovered when she set about interviewing farm laborers in New York’s Hudson Valley, the vast majority of these workers are undocumented immigrants or guest workers who toil under abysmal conditions, often working sixty- to seventy-hour weeks for dismal pay. “We live in the shadows,” one worker told her. “They treat us like nothing,” said another. In her book Labor and the Locavore, Gray asked the butcher on a small farm why so few of his customers seemed to notice this.

“They don’t eat the workers,” the farmer told her.

“He went on to explain that, in his experience, his consumers’ primary concern is with what they put in their bodies,” Gray wrote, “and so the labor standards of farmworkers simply do not register as a priority.”]