The sprawling and lovely 34,000-acre ranch headquarters is located at the northernmost corner of California, near the Oregon border, with the volcanic Mount Shasta providing a scenic backdrop for the sometimes thousands of grazing cows. Prather’s web site describes the operation as “a unique closed-herd operation that raises its own hay, breeds its own cattle and does its own slaughter and processing.” The ranch was one of the first ranches to be certified organic for beef products and to gain Certified Humane Raised and Handled approval.

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Raised in the hamlet of Frankenstein in central Missouri, a few miles from where he still lives, Kremer wasn’t even old enough to attend grade school when his father gave him the job of bottle-feeding orphaned piglets in the house. By age six, he had graduated to tending sows and their litters. At eight, Kremer’s father handed him a recently weaned female and said, "She’s yours." Kremer named her Honeysuckle and raised her like a pet, often lying beside her in her stall. She gave birth to 15 young -- a challenge because she only had 13 nipples. Normally, at least three piglets would have died, but Kremer switched the babies on and off their mother during the critical early weeks. All 15 survived.

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Production vs. Transportation

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The Tabuk plain in the northwest of the country, close to Jordan, gets an average of just 2 inches of rain a year. Yet it is a prairie of wheat fields. Fortunes are being made here. The biggest farm — covering nearly 90,000 acres, or eight Manhattans — is run by the Tabuk Agricultural Development Company (TADCO). Its irrigation pumps extract up to a million acre-feet of water each year from beneath the sands.

TADCO is part of the vast business empire of the al-Rajhi brothers — Sulaiman, Saleh, Abdullah, and Mohammed. As the Economist put it, they have made “one fortune from money brokering and another from farming.” Each brother became a billionaire as they turned a small money-changing business servicing migrant workers in Saudi Arabia into the world’s largest Islamic bank, the Al-Rajhi Bank. Then they joined the country’s 1980s cropping boom which, for a while, made Saudi Arabia self-sufficient in wheat.

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After dinner, we sit with her father in their living room and make small talk over decaf coffee and cookies. He is a criminal defense attorney who specializes in civil rights law and a professor at a local university. I am an occasional poet and part-time barista, although the latter position I have recently resigned.

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?

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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.

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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.”

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

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On their way from Birmingham, Ala., to Detroit, her group of 12 riders had reached Columbus Junction, Iowa, near a humongous pork plant operated by Tyson, the multinational meat processor. A former Tyson employee named Julio was describing his working conditions.

"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."

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Here in Brooklyn, we've seemed to hit an apex of food enthusiasm. Its seems like every weekend this summer a new food-related event happens and every weekend my wallet is emptied by $20 lobster rolls or an even more expensive indulgence.

Happily though, the food movement of today is part of a nice history of food appreciation and reaction to the food industry with roots in a freer (read cheaper!) group of ideas.

Above and below are some samples from The Diggers Archive, a group of radical thinkers from 1960s San Francisco that used food (free healthy food!) as part of their art and political message. These pieces are from their newspaper FREE CITY NEWS, that showcased some pretty cool hippie graphic design.

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Unlike many in agriculture, cattle farmer Ken Jaffe has had a good decade. But lately he's been nervous, worried fracking will destroy his business. Jaffe's been good to his soil, and the land has been good to him. By rotating his herd of cattle to different pastures on his Catskills farm every day, he has restored the once-eroded land and built a successful business with his grass-fed and -finished beef. His Slope Farms sells meat to food coops, specialty meat markets, and high-end restaurants in New York City, about 160 miles to the southeast. "If you feed your micro-herd -- the bacteria and fungi in the soil -- then your big herd will do well, too," he said when I visited him recently on a cool, sunny afternoon.

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Gallons of ink have been spilled in the debate on the politics of buying local and/or organic. At the moment, I'm more interested in the practical mechanics of eating local. How far out of my way will I have to go to cook an entirely local meal? How will using all local ingredients inhibit or enhance my cooking experience? Will it taste better?

Figuring out how to cook with locally/seasonally available food has been part of the human experience since the dawn of time -- it's only in the last 60 years or so that sourcing your dinner ingredients from your immediate vicinity has taken on the patina of the unusual. But one person's exotic is another's bread and butter.

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Man 1: "Well, how are we going to drive home the point that sustainable seafood is good? I think I should have, like, five to seven minutes to talk about it before we serve."

Man 2: "You're going to have to do all the talking while I cook. I have to focus on the food while I cook. Don't let people bother me."

Woman: "I think mussels. We have to do mussels. They're responsibly farmed, and they carry around their own sauce. They're perfect."

Man 1: "OK, but will we serve wine too? Or is just the lecture and the food enough?"

Aren't you sad you didn't get an invitation to the World's Most Sanctimonious Dinner Party? I am. I want to know what gets served for dessert at a soiree like this.

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Farmhouse chic is kind of the rage in Brooklyn these days, so doing things the 19th-century way must appeal to locals. For a neighborhood once known for artists and squatters, this could usher in a whole new era of urban farmers and strollers. Maybe raising chickens could be Williamsburg's latest do-it-yourself-but-in-a-yuppie-way fad. Oh wait, that happened two years ago.

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A few years ago, Bittman was in a TV commercial. Goofy words flashed on the screen: "BIG DEAL FOOD WRITER" and under them, the man who normally exudes an utterly casual confidence looked nonplussed. They had him leaning in a weird way, a way that was supposed to suggest a level of informality, but only made him look, unfortunately, like he couldn't stand up straight while he was singing the praises of the product.

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I grew up in Del Paso Heights, a mixed-race inner city of Sacramento, Calif. -- the kind of neighborhood that had just two grocery stores between endless fast-food and liquor shops, and where we all paid for our groceries with food stamps. It was where we grew organic food and raised chickens in our backyards to survive. And where we did it in secrecy.

Like most Hmong in the United States, our community was from Laos, transplanted here after an alliance with the CIA turned our isolated tribe of farmers into mercenaries -- a failed secret war against the Communist Vietnamese that left Hmong as the targets of ethnic cleansing. Lifelong farmers-turned-international refugees, the older generation was ill-prepared to thrive in modern America. They settled into inner cities where many turned to social services as safety nets.

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Maybe I could let myself off the hook by saying something about how the culture of ramen in Japan -- fresh noodles in from-scratch broths, not the pre-hangover treat -- is one of the great Japanese culinary traditions, an object of Everyman devotion that's inspired at least one classic movie and is just now making its way to my town in a serious way. And while all that would be technically true, the fact is that I wasn't mindful and vigilant of what I was eating, which is really what this whole challenge is about: learning to value my food more.

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