Then he asks why we are going.

Jenne and I exchange glances. After a pause, she mumbles something about food and sustainable agriculture. I murmur my assent.

Her father, nodding slightly, looks even more confused than before.

Why were we quitting our jobs and subletting our apartment (effectively putting our lives on hold) to spend our summers sweating on organic farms?

In a more inviting environment, I might have been able to explain part of it. We had been feeling restless in Portland (little about our lives felt tethered to the city), and volunteer farming provided us a cheap way to travel. Of course, we did want to learn more about where our food came from and sustainable agriculture. But there was something else, too, murkier, more difficult to talk about, impelling us away from our Portland home. It had something to do with the festering distaste we felt with northern cities, Portland the latest in a succession of such communities that had housed us since birth.

Jenne and I were both raised in Seattle, we began dating in Brooklyn, N.Y., and we moved together to Portland. We had been born and bred in blue America. Our parents held college degrees, professional jobs and predictable points of view on issues like reproductive rights, marriage equality and preemptively launched wars. We were raised to believe in recycling, temperance and respecting other people’s differences.

Recently, however, we had begun to feel a little disillusioned with the culture. The brew pubs and brunch spots. The high-class cafes and cheapo burrito shops. The happy hours and house pets and crass condo construction. We were tired of the hipsters, with their gaudy mustaches and flannel shirts, unimpressed with the environmentalists, with their blinkered social concern and preening sense of self-righteousness, disgusted by the corporate shills, with their shimmering cocktails and newly minted lofts, and put off by the housewives piling their shopping carts high.

After 25 years surrounded by such people, we were looking for something new. Farming provided us with a point of departure.

Among 20- and 30-somethings of a certain disposition, “woofing” is well-known as a reputable, more economical alternative to straightforward backpacking. The exchange is simple: Woofers provide grunt work; farmers supply room and board; no money changes hands. The organization that facilitates the exchange, WWOOF, or World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, was founded in Great Britain in 1971 by a low-income clerical worker. Now the organization spans six continents and approximately 100 countries, including such far-flung locales as Slovenia, Kazakhstan and Sierra Leone.

Our destination is somewhat less exotic, though perhaps no less foreign: the southern regions of the United States. We contact three farmers — one in Alabama, a second in Texas and a third in New Mexico — via email, arranging dates and clarifying the exchange. (A typical scenario is four hours of work per day in exchange for meals and a place to sleep, although arrangements do vary.) We plan to commute between the farms using a combination of Craigslist ride share and Greyhound bus.

Our decision to venture south of the Mason-Dixon line confounds many of our Northwest friends. They seem to conceive of the South as a backward place: plainly racist, politically reactionary, possibly inbred. It doesn’t matter that most of them have never even been.

—–

We head first for Alabama, where our hosts turn out to be refugees from suburban Michigan. Will is pudgy, ponytailed and partial to vintage rock T-shirts; he addresses everyone — man, woman or plant — as “dude.” Laurie, meanwhile, laughs loud, talks fast and seems to make sure everything gets done.

In mostly red Alabama, we have landed on a pinprick of blue. But plenty here is unfamiliar. We are 100 miles from the nearest city, 15 from the closest town. Pigs pace pens yards from where we sleep. The woods behind the barn seem to extend into forever.

Jenne and I mostly work the weeds. But we also learn how to harvest squash blossoms (early in the morning, before they close up in the heat), distinguish among different herbs, and properly use a hoe and shovel. In the mornings, we gather eggs from the hens. In the afternoons, we pour slop for the pigs. At night, we sleep in our own house equipped with a kitchen, bathroom and soft, wide bed.

“If you need a break,” Laurie tells us on our first day, “take one. We’re not into pain.”

In fact, they’re into pleasure. Just days before we arrived, they processed (a euphemism, we learn, for slaughter) one of the farm’s few pigs; they are remorseless in their enthusiasm for the taste of its flesh. We eat some form of the animal with nearly every meal.

Jenne and I are by no means vegetarians, but we eat animal protein sparingly. After a few days stewing in the presence of unabashed carnivorousness, I find myself conflicted. After yet another dinner of meatloaf and sausage with a little grilled squash on the side, I bring up the subject with Laurie and Will.

“How do you feel about eating animals?” I ask.

“If God hadn’t wanted us to eat critters,” Will says with a guffaw, “he wouldn’t have made them out of meat!”

Laurie smiles, waiting for him to quiet.

“These pigs aren’t pets,” she says. “We all have our role to play.”

It seemed like a reasonable attitude — provided you took care of the animals yourself. Treat the critters well until a certain point, after which they become food.

As our two-week stay comes to a close, Jenne and I joke that if things go to hell back in Portland, there are worse places we could land.

At the next farm, located about an hour south of Austin, we find an altogether different situation. The incongruity begins with a couple of fellow Woofers who pick us up at the Greyhound bus station. Mark and Lindsay hardly look like volunteer farmers: He has bright blond hair sculpted in the military style and a stiff collared shirt tucked into blue jeans, while his wife wears a shy smile and a skirt covering her knees. It is Sunday, I remember absently; they are coming back from church.

It turns out they are taking a year off from their white-collar jobs in Austin to volunteer on organic farms and camp in national parks. They are only a few years older than we are, but their parents — in Dallas and Virginia, respectively — have been expecting grandchildren for some time. The trip is their last chance to wander unencumbered.

After the conversation turns to politics, Mark expresses regret about John McCain’s recent electoral defeat, while Lindsay professes to liking Ron Paul. Neither has even heard of our favored choice, Dennis Kucinich.

We swerve away from political talk. After we discover Mark has suffered a recent death in his family, as I have in mine, we talk grief, loss and the protracted process of healing. After Lindsay reports she went to an inner-city public high school, as I did, we talk race, class and the supreme relativity of privilege. After we learn Mark loves photography, as does Jenne, we talk cameras, composition and the criticality of self-expression.

An hour later, we arrive at a long narrow driveway that brings us up to the main house. The farmer, a woman named Kathleen, is smoking a cigarette on the porch. She smiles wearily as we approach, stubbing the butt out, beckoning us in.

Inside, a young boy watches television in a corner of the room. When Jenne goes over to say hello, he won’t look away from the cartoons.

The next morning, we begin work in the vegetable garden, an acre or so plot that comprises the bulk of the farm. Where Laurie and Will’s farm had been nearly weed-free, here gaudy flowers bloom, crowding out the vegetable plants, and thick grass carpets the walkways. I go to work prying up the carpet while Jenne tugs out flowers on her hands and knees.

By noon, the heat is swarming, intense, so we break for lunch. With Kathleen nowhere to be found, we rummage through cupboards for cans of tuna fish, as we had been instructed to do this morning. Discovering a jar of pickles, Jenne chops a wedge up and mixes it in.

A moment later, Kathleen appears. She looks noticeably older in the daylight, her face gaunt, her shoulders bony and brittle.

She points to the jar on the counter.

“Did someone eat one of my pickles?” she asks.

We shrug our shoulders sheepishly.

She fixes us with a glare.

The next morning, we wake at the agreed upon time. The house is dark, quiet. I tiptoe to the kitchen to start the coffeemaker, as I’d seen Lindsay do the morning before.

A moment later, Kathleen appears wearing nothing but a baggy T-shirt.

“I don’t provide coffee for Woofers,” she snarls, swooping past me to disable the machine.

It doesn’t take much to recognize the woman is having a hard time. She is moody, self-absorbed and difficult to communicate with. (“You ask too many questions,” she admonishes after Jenne attempts to clarify an instruction.) She feeds us inorganically and sometimes not enough. (Dinner the first two nights consists of corn dogs and potato chips.) Our sleeping area, which doubles as the packing room for her CSA (Community Supported Agriculture: a subscription program by which farmers provide produce to urban consumers), is open to the public, not to mention cramped and hot.

The situation is obviously less than ideal. And there are times, during our first week there, when we consider packing it in. In the end, though, we decide to stick it out for the full two weeks, in part because the third farm, in New Mexico, won’t yet be expecting us, and in part because we don’t want to bail on our commitment.

If you could look past the erratic behavior, then, and our own occasional pangs of hunger, you began to make out the contours of a farm brimming with wonder. The creek that ran behind the house was crisp and inviting after a long morning’s work. Chickens wandered the farm freely, immune to the yapping dogs. Each morning the scratch of cicadas filled the air, a sound I grew to recognize as a kind of music.

This was new for me, this noticing nature. I had always been someone who preferred cities, those thrumming, human ecosystems, to more undeveloped spaces. On the farm, though, life went on before your eyes. Creatures competed for territory. Plants unfurled their leaves. Vegetables matured in dirt. Jenne and I played our role, too, picking parasites off plants and hacking away at the thick growth. We swung at the vines as though life depended on it. Of course, it did.

Imagine. As you stoop to clear a vine, a cocklebur pierces your finger. Wincing, you tease it out.

Funny, it almost sounds like pain.

As the week wears on, our apprehension of Kathleen gives way to feelings of sympathy. Her CSA has been in decline ever since the advent of the recession; attempts to make up the difference at farmers’ markets have yet to bear much fruit. She is a single mother trying to manage an organic farm alone. She teeters on several kinds of brinks.

We do what we can to lessen her burden. We weed her rows, sound out her complaints. One night, we even baby-sit her kid.

After two weeks, it is time for us to leave. She seems sad to see us go.

—–

Our third farmer, Joe, is arguably in worse shape than Kathleen. The farm, situated somewhere south of Santa Fe on a mostly deserted hamlet (population 35) squeezed between two Indian reservations, is a bedraggled, weed-ridden affair. Joe works the land for another man, a wannabe cowboy in blue jeans and oversize belt buckle, in exchange for a share of the profits. We meet the owner only once: When he smiles, he shows the impeccable white teeth of a winner. Joe’s smile, on the other hand, is scarred with yellow, and there is a sense about him that he hasn’t won anything for a very long time.

It has been an especially difficult year by all accounts. A late frost put him behind on planting, which delayed the harvest, which means by the time we arrive, all he has to take to market are a couple of buckets stuffed with yellow squash and a cabin full of curing garlic. His income, while we work there, appears to be nonexistent.

We eat even worse with Joe than we did in Texas. Hot dogs and TV dinners, packaged ham and cups of noodles, canned vegetables and canned meat: The man’s diet runs the gamut of cheap, mass-produced quasi-edibles. One night, the roast beef rolled into my tortilla tastes suspiciously like cat food.

As with the other farms, our job is the weeds, in this case a notoriously insidious vine called bindweed. The plant has a long taproot that drills deep into the soil, making it nearly impossible to pull out cleanly. Chopping the vine out doesn’t work because it reroots with ease. If you ignore it for too long, the plant sprouts seedpods that contain hundreds of future plants. And it grows fast.

Joe assigns us to a plot infested with the stuff and basically leaves us alone. We go at it with hoes at first, raking the plants into wheelbarrows and carting them away. Then we sprawl out on all fours and yank the roots out by hand.

Taproots curl on the ground like the carcasses of slaughtered snakes. Dirt begins to show through where before there had only been vine. As our burn pile grows tall, we learn to look on it with pride.

For two weeks we work that plot, stopping only when the sun grows too hot. Lunch is a piece of liverwurst sausage slapped between halves of a supermarket bagel. In the afternoons, we hike to the river, where Joe or someone has strung up a hammock, and dangle our feet in the water, or read old novels, or make notes in our journals. And sometimes we fight, the fatigue, dry heat and high altitude taking a toll.

Mostly, though, all is peaceful in New Mexico. There is no Internet or television, our only contact with the outside world a transistor radio Joe keeps tuned to NPR.

“Damned conservative media,” Joe, a professed anarchist, likes to growl, but he keeps it on.

Our sleeping quarters consist of a defunct camper parked a few hundred yards from the main house; we sleep on a pull-out bed beneath an unzipped sleeping bag, our only light the plastic camping lantern Joe provided the day we arrived.

One night, an overripe bladder pushes me outside where the sun still glows. It shines a distant, eerie red, seeming to illuminate the earth’s edge. I stand there for a while, just staring. Whole worlds exist between me and that light.

Two weeks later, we are back in Portland. Back sleeping in the old apartment, sipping Stumptown in cafes, looking for work on Craigslist. It doesn’t take long to slip back into your native culture.

Every so often, though, I find myself thinking back to the farms. The nighttime sun in New Mexico. The cicada screech in Texas. The fresh pork in Alabama. And I remember that Jenne and I experienced something remarkable on our trip last summer.

Farming, even our amateur brush with it, was not easy or glamorous work. It was a relentless, economically perilous vocation that could make you crazy like Kathleen or leave you broke like Joe. Even in the era of Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, small-scale organic farming remains a tenuous pursuit, at best.

But our trip was about more than just farming. It was about pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zones, shedding some of our prejudices about what makes a life worth living, and opening to another way.

In some small way, it was about growing up.

Now, I want to go back. To pour slop for the pigs and harvest squash blossoms in the dawn, before they close up in the heat, and tear bindweed out with my fists. To weed and water and water and weed.

I want to grow.

The Atlantic bluefin tuna — an animal that reaches 1,500 pounds, swims at 40 miles per hour, heats its blood 20 degrees above ambient and crosses the breadth of the ocean — is in serious trouble. The western, American stock has declined by about 80 percent and the Mediterranean-spawned population by about 70 percent. Even after the fish garnered a series of major PR hits (such as campaigns by Greenpeace and Sea Shepherds to liberate netted tuna in the Mediterranean last year and my subsequent New York Times Magazine cover story), the bluefin remains persistently present on menus around the country and around the world.

Why is this the case? Why is any chef out there still serving bluefin?

The answer is complicated, and a work in progress. So much so that the answer may change by the time you read this article. But as delegates to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) sit down this week in Istanbul to discuss the fate of the bluefin, it’s useful to identify a few reasons why we are still eating what ranks among the most abused fish in the sea.

Reason No. 1: Confusingly, there is more than one species of bluefin

Since the seafood world has few recognizable brands, the “brands” seafood consumers respond to most are species names. “Sea bass” “snapper” and “cod” all have many actors playing those respective, marketable roles. So it is with the bluefin.

There are not one, but three species of bluefin: the Atlantic, the Pacific and the southern. Each species has declined severely, but each fares differently from year to year. Recently, Pacific bluefin have probably been the bluefin most commonly served in American restaurants and some argue that this is due to the Pacific being the healthiest of the three species. Others would point out that we have yet to even complete a full stock assessment of Pacific bluefin, and we have no idea how many there may be. And quite often, because of poor labeling and tracking, an even more distantly related fish, the bigeye tuna, may be fitted in and passed off as bluefin when no bluefin can be found. But whatever the case, the confusion of species means that different creatures can be substituted when a deficit occurs in a particular ocean, giving a false sense of abundance in the marketplace.

Reason No. 2: Every fish, even one in serious trouble, can have a good year, which can cause bad decision-making by regulators

One of the trickiest things about managing fisheries is that fish populations go up and down naturally — a typical fish abundance graph looks something like the Dow Jones going through successive bear and bull markets. This is because most fish play penny stock odds that only occasionally yield significant dividends. Large blue water fish like tuna lay hundreds of thousands of eggs, and out of those, only a few individuals survive. But a slight shift in temperature or planktonic blooms or some other random factor can radically, albeit temporarily, shift the odds in a given fish’s favor. When this happens a boom year ensues, something that can persuade fishermen and science-ignorant regulators that the fish has recovered and can now be caught with abandon.

The Atlantic bluefin did indeed have a year of “strong recruitment” a few years back and if this good class of fish was protected — as was done in the recovery of American striped bass — it could probably fuel a recovery for future generations. But instead, regulators seem to have taken a short-term approach, fishing this momentary good blip as if it were a long term trend. Not a good idea. As Andre Boustany, a postdoctoral tuna researcher at Duke University wrote me, regulators are not taking into account “that there are several years with extremely poor recruitment behind this good one, so when looking at the overall picture, it becomes quite a bit less rosy.”

Reason No. 3: The Atlantic bluefin trade involves dozens of countries, and a consumer boycott would have to be global to be effective

Most successful fish rebuilding campaigns to date have had one distinctive quality: The fish being rebuilt were pursued by just a few nations. In the 1980s, only Americans were fishing striped bass when the fish went into decline. When consumer pressure to preserve them became political, draconian limits and even moratoria on the catching of stripers could be imposed.

But there really is no single lever that can be thrown to stop the vast global bluefin-catching machine. The majority of Atlantic bluefin are consumed in Japan, where fish abstinence campaigns are unheard of. And the Japanese don’t really do any of the catching of Atlantic bluefin anymore. Most of that happens in the Mediterranean, where 20-plus countries that range from post-revolutionary Libya to desperate Greece share portions of an overall quota. A recent study by the Pew Environment Group found that the total poundage of Atlantic bluefin sold in the world exceeded the legally sanctioned quota by 50 percent. Indeed, one of the biggest “asks” being made by conservationists at this fall’s ICCAT meeting is to institute an electronic tracing system aboard bluefin vessels, so we can at the very least nail down who is catching what.

—–

So, will the Atlantic bluefin tuna ever get a break? There are nascent campaigns like that of World Wildlife Fund which maintains a badge-of-honor list of purveyors that have exited the bluefin trade. And there is a coterie of artisan hook-and-line and harpoon fishers on both sides of the Atlantic which have the potential to fish the bluefin less egregiously than the large ships and spotter planes that regularly scoop up entire schools in today’s over-the-top fishery.

But like many of the major environmental problems facing humans today, it is no longer up to a handful of nations to change the dynamics of the bluefin business. Regulators, fishermen, chefs and diners from New York to Paris to Beijing to Tokyo will all have to agree that a fish has no business being on a menu until it is managed well enough to endure.

But Jordan doesn’t take the credit. The secret to her booming business, she says, is instead a complex and seemingly rather dull legal contract called an agricultural easement. The arrangement, made with a land trust, allows farmers to be paid in return for stripping their land of its development rights – no new subdivisions or shopping malls allowed – and instead keeping it as farmland. In 2004, the Jordan family placed 47 acres of their property under an easement with the Cape Elizabeth Land Trust for an undisclosed sum. “The Jordans settled Cape Elizabeth,” Jordan says. “We would not have kept the farm, let alone been able to invest in the business, without this.”

Interest in small-scale agriculture has soared over the last decade. But it’s still anything but easy for farmers to get in or stay in the game, not least because farmland itself is disappearing: In Maine, for example, 75 percent of farmland has vanished since 1950. What’s left is often worth more as future house lots than as a farm—especially if it has panoramic views like the Jordan farm. Over the next decade, about 400,000 acres, or about one-third of Maine’s remaining farmland, will be in transition as older farmers retire or die. Here in the Pine Tree State, agricultural easements are an increasingly powerful tool to help revive and grow small farms.

John Bliss and Stacy Brenner have built their business – a 150-member CSA, a farm stand and flower design studio – thanks to an agricultural easement. Their 150-acre Broadturn Farm is actually owned by the local Scarborough Land Trust, which leases it “at a very modest rent” to the young couple. Bliss and Brenner are your stereotypical new farmers. They’re young, business savvy and hip – you can just picture them sampling cheese and sipping a craft brew at a bar in Brooklyn – and neither of them grew up farming. (Plus, if either of them decides to give up on farming, they have a future as models for J. Crew.)

Over the next decade, about one-third of Maine’s remaining farmland will be in transition as older farmers retire or die.

After apprenticing for a few years, Bliss and Brenner learned enough to want to set out on their own. But had they bought the land they currently occupy, it would have cost $750,000 and one of them would have had to take an off-farm job to pay the mortgage. “This is an arrangement where we have an affordable rent and we can reinvest in our business, not the real estate,” says Brenner.

In Damariscotta, about an hour north, the Maine Farmland Trust, a state preservation non-profit, purchased a 67-acre farm for $500,000 along the state’s main thoroughfare, Route 1. Its plan: To sell it for less than half that to the local food co-op, Rising Tide, or to a new farmer. It’s an example of what the Trust calls a “Buy, Protect, Sell” program, which has preserved 3,000 acres of farmland since it was launched in 2008. “Buy high, sell low doesn’t seem like a good business plan. But to preserve land, it makes sense,” says John Piotti, the Trust’s executive director.

Initially, the farm’s owner planned to sell the land to Wal-Mart. But the community revolted, and the deal was abandoned. Concerned that the land would still be developed, the Trust purchased the land and put an easement on the property. The easement payments, which come from federal and state agencies, plus private fundraising, will allow the Trust to sell the acreage at the farmland value, $180,000, and still just about break even.

For the Jordans, an easement was their ticket to stay on the farm, which was experiencing financial issues. Money had been diverted from the business to help pay for family health care, among other things, and there were overdue bills and unpaid taxes.

The money the Jordans received for the easement allowed the family to make a substantial capital investment in the farm. They almost doubled the number of acres under cultivation, from 40 to 70. They built a new three-room farmstand, where at this time of year you might find squash, shell beans, kale, salad greens, beets, eggs, apples, cider and maple syrup. Retail sales, which are far more profitable for farms, now make up 90 percent of the family’s business.

Business certainly was brisk on a recent sunny autumn afternoon. Older couples parked their cars and greeted sales staff by name. Mothers piled apples and greens in their baskets and appeased their children with pumpkins stacked on a bale of hay by the door. “Writing an easement – it was the hardest process. But it forced the family to confront the hard decisions that had to be made,” says Jordan. “And that’s what saved the farm.”

As it turns out, this has may have to become the motto for the fish-farming industry.

This past week, the disease Infectious Salmon Anemia (or ISA) was first discovered in wild salmon off the coast of British Columbia.This was something people in the anti-farmed salmon camp have been anticipating, perhaps even greeting the news as validation. In the last decade ISA mutated from its benign wild state in densely-packed populations of farmed salmon until it finally became a virulent epidemic. The disease has done serious damage to the European farmed salmon industry; the Chilean salmon industry was leveled and is only now starting to hobble back to life. Until now, though, ISA had not reached the heartland of the world’s last truly robust wild salmon populations. British Columbia and Alaska are home to wild runs of hundreds of millions fish a year and contribute billions of dollars to the region’s economy. Should ISA make the jump from the farm to the wild in those parts we will be facing a serious economic as well as a potential ecological catastrophe.

The fish farming industry is understandably skeptical. The Canadian government’s high profile “Cohen Commission” is just now in evidentiary hearings on the question of farmed salmon’s impact on the wild and more than one fish farmer has suggested that the anti-aquaculturists have gone looking for the ISA disease rather than applying a scientific method to judge its real threat. But whatever the case, many “what ifs” are being suggested if ISA has indeed taken up Canadian residency.

Which brings me back to my niece’s compartmentalized Barbie plate. In a world where nearly 50 percent of our seafood is farmed, we really don’t have the luxury to say we will no longer farm fish and shellfish. The demand is too great. The industry is too entrenched. But with the alleged appearance of ISA on America’s west coast we have to think about how we might separate the farms from the wild.

Fortunately, good technology and methods already exist to make this happen, and have lots of benefits besides. The first and most obvious way to get farmed fish out of the way of wild fish would be to put them into land-based tanks. While energy intensive, “recirculating aquaculture systems” not only keep wild fish from catching farmed-fish diseases, they also do the reverse, providing a sterile environment where fish can thrive. Temperature and water current can be carefully regulated, which adds to fish health and growth rates. Using these advantages, companies like SweetSpring of Washington state have managed to grow coho salmon in containment that reach maturity in a year and the market at a reasonable price. Closed containment’s other major advantage is the ability to create fish farms close to markets. In an experimental facility in downtown Baltimore, Yonathan Zohar, the director of the Center for Marine Biotechnology at the University of Maryland, is growing a variety of chefs’ favorite species in containment and providing fish to local restaurants that are steps rather than miles away.

The second, slightly lower tech way is to choose species and waterways that do not interact with the wild. Farmed “striped bass” are in fact a hybrid of striped bass and white bass that are sterile and cannot interbreed with wild populations. They are grown in manmade ponds and raceways that have limited interaction with the surrounding environment. It’s interesting to compare the fates of salmon and striped bass since the modern age of aquaculture was born. Whereas wild salmon populations have generally declined, striped bass have not. In fact, striped bass populations have been largely rebuilt over the last two decades even as the farmed striped bass industry grew. Today, 60 percent of all striped bass eaten are farmed.

The third path to separation is markedly less popular among conservationists. Instead of removing fish from the ocean, “offshore aquaculture” seeks to move fish farms away from sensitive coastal migration routes and put them offshore where there is little or no interaction with similar species. This, of course, has its problems. Wave action is considerably more extreme far offshore and a heavy storm can make mincemeat of the best technology. Moreover, an aquaculture operation three or more miles from land incurs a pretty heavy gasoline tax. Indeed, depending on how you run the numbers, a recirculating land-based facility can come off as more fuel efficient that an offshore pen.

The fourth and final way to separate things is on a hemispheric scale. Despite its salmon farming industry, salmon are not endemic to Chile. The equator acts as a “thermal barrier” to salmonids and so there are no wild populations in the global south farmed salmon can impact. But damage has been done: The introduction of salmon and trout to the region has probably dealt a blow to indigenous fish we never even had data on. A family of southern hemisphere fish called galaxiids probably suffered considerably from the competition. But a cynical argument can be made that this is already old news, and we needn’t worry about lost, unknown fish so much so long as farm-based diseases do not cross back up to the north and infect salmon populations there.

Whichever of these four avenues humanity chooses it’s clear now that wild populations will increasingly be exposed to the vagaries of a globalized farmed fish sector. Nevertheless we may still have time to keep the farmed food and the wild food separate. For the sake of both, it might be worth trying.

“Julio told us that in a day’s work there, he had to move 4,000 hog hearts by hand,” says Khanna, a 31-year-old South Asian American who has devoted her life to pushing for more equitable and ecologically sustainable food systems. “He talked to us about the number of injuries he’s sustained — everything from both of his shoulders being messed up to losing 20 percent of his hearing and his wrists getting broken. Every worker that we talked to said that in the morning they have to run their hands under hot water for 10 or 15 minutes just to get their fingers to move.”

For Khanna, Julio’s story epitomized everything that was wrong with the industrial food system in the United States — a system she has been trying to change since she was 17. Consciously modeled on the Freedom Rides of the 1960s civil rights movement, the Food Rides aim to shine a light on issues of “food justice” — a catchall term that focuses on “ecological and community revitalization and reorganization” as it relates to diet and agriculture. Julio’s workplace travails represented a kind of food injustice — part of a larger system that deepens racial and class divisions, contributes to surging rates of obesity and diabetes, and weakens the traditional relationship between farmers and the land across the globe.

Khanna has been well positioned to trace all these links from her earliest years. At the age of 9, her family moved from New York, where her father worked for Kodak, back to his native India. Leaving the affluent Rochester suburbs for the crowded poverty of Bombay, says Khanna, induced an intense culture shock. Another two years of high school in England meant that, before Khanna was 17, she had grown up on three continents. The result: an intimate understanding of the “stark realities” of global economic disparity, as well as the ties that bind everyone in the world together — simply because of what we eat.

While getting her master’s degree at the University of California at Davis, she organized the creation of the first undergraduate major in sustainable agriculture. Since then she has worked steadily at organizing awareness and action around food justice issues. If we “change our relationship to food,” she says, “we can change our relationship to the planet.”

Khanna doesn’t believe the problem can be solved simply by ramping up farmers’ markets and promoting the consumption of locally produced organic food. To address food injustice, she argues, we have to attack poverty. She describes a vision that recalls the Ford Motor Co.’s policy of paying its workers relatively high wages that enabled them to afford to buy the cars they were building.

“There is definitely a lot of room in the food chain for quality jobs and higher wages. If the 20 million people in the food chain all were paid well, that would probably revitalize our economy … and people would actually be able to afford good food.”