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Vermont Almanac Welcomes Chuck Wooster to the Board

We subscribe to a USDA newsfeed, and so we get press releases concerning food that’s being recalled. Over the past three weeks there have been alerts concerning around 100,000 pounds of meat products, from taquitos and chimichangas that had hard plastic in them, to meatballs, chicken, and meat patties that were released without inspection, to an ambiguous near-17,000 pound jag of “meat” that was “misbranded.” (They forgot which company they were packing for? They forgot what animal the meat came from?)

Let’s be fair about this: If you look at the historical trend line in food safety in this country, it’s clear that the USDA and the packing houses have done and are doing a remarkable job in ensuring that the food we eat is safe. And there have been no reported injuries or sicknesses from any of the product that was recalled. In a sense, the recalls are an example of a system working. Still, the system itself is sobering and overwhelming. If the past three weeks are representative of a year, that would mean over a million pounds of meat will be recalled. The scale is so large. The players so ambiguous. (Ever heard of BrucePac? Hafiz Foods? Coco’s Italian Market?) The system itself just feels so disjointed, and overwhelming, and so divorced from the land, that it makes you stare long and hard at everything on your plate.

Virginia Barlow and I had the pleasure of walking around Chuck Wooster’s Sunrise farm the other day – we were there to ask Chuck if he’d be on the Vermont Almanac board. And what we saw there was an antidote to the sinking feeling I got trying to wrap my mind around the recalls. The chickens in the cooler at the CSA stand had, just weeks earlier, been scratching in the pasture on the hillside. We walked up and saw their replacements. Chuck and his crew are the farmers and the packers and the marketers – the whole food supply chain is on display for the consumers to see. They can also see how the farm is an integrated, circular system – how the land and the vegetables benefit from the animal manure, and how the animals in turn benefit from the healthy land.

It was a great visit, and Chuck agreed to be on our Board. Besides his many other talents, Chuck will be bringing real world farming experience and a vision of what healthy agriculture was and can be again. Having him as an advisor and a partner in this project makes the publication stronger, and we’re thrilled to add him to the team.