Understanding the landscape from Factory to Farm

Nothing’s better for charting a course forward than knowing where you’re starting from. We’ve come to think of the course as a journey from factory to farm. I.e. reducing or eliminating the use of factory farmed food, which makes up the great majority of chow that’s out there but has all sorts of downsides, and increasing the consumption of food coming from family farms where better practices (for us, for animals, for the land, for the farmer) tend to prevail.

Here’s the landscape as we’ve come to understand it. We’ve simplified the options with an eye to manageable steps over choice paralysis. Not perfect, but practical and action oriented.

What you see in this picture is that sourcing isn’t an all or nothing proposition. There are some good options in between the factory and the farmers market. Options that offer ways to get moving in a good direction at a pace you can sustain or at least speed up and down when you need to.

Takeaways

• Know the signs of factory farmed food - to start avoiding at the grocery and when dining out
• Be on the lookout for farm network brands - places that are demonstrating some commitment to better practices, often with some version of “natural standards”. With greater volume and medium prices, they may offer beyond-the-factory steps you can take more often to supplement your buyers club and farmers market explorations.
• Access to proteins from “pasture-centered” farms is growing - still significantly more expensive in many cases but small farm networks are emerging and some online searching can often lead to a nice array of buying options.

Options are important because this is all about sustained change. A collection of steps (some small, some larger) you can stick with and build on will likely far outperform an all-at-once approach that leaves you overwhelmed. Which leads us to the next installment of this guide, setting a personal sourcing standard that reflects your priorities and that you can follow as you shop and dine out.

In the meantime, check out our Real Life Sourcing approach to see how we’re applying these ideas. Browse the other tools in our DIY Sourcing Guide or if you’re wondering about a particular food term, check out our glossary.