This American Meal: A Tale of Two Dinners

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Family dairy milk: Eight thousand lucky families in the Boston area get weekly home milk deliveries from Crescent Ridge Farm in Sharon, Massachusetts, a third-generation family dairy that produces and bottles milk from cows free of rBGH injections. Demand has grown so fast that Crescent Ridge now also provides milk from a Vermont dairy farm cooperative. By marketing directly to loyal customers, Crescent Ridge avoids the costly fees charged by grocery stores for shelf space—and gives the upcoming cookies-and-milk generation a better understanding of where food comes from.

IPM (integrated pest management) Strawberries: Red Tomato, a Boston produce broker, puts fresh local strawberries on co-op and family-owned grocery store shelves at prices higher than California organic strawberries—and they sell. While California berries can be in transit anywhere from 3 to 6 days, New England strawberries, picked ripe, are available in 24 to 36 hours. Farmers follow integrated pest management practices—organic berry production is very difficult in the Northeast—that reduce the amount of chemicals they apply. But the secret is the flavor—one whiff of these strawberries, and another quart is headed to the dinner table.

Karen Lehman, currently a Bush Leadership Fellow at the Kennedy School at Harvard University, has 20 years of experience researching and organizing local and international food systems in both Latin America and the United States. She's served as the Endowed Chair in Agricultural Systems at the University of Minnesota and as co-founder of the Youth Farm and Market Project in Minneapolis, a gardening program involving inner-city kids. Special thanks to Mark Smith at Farm Aid for his research help with this article.

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