eating neighborly 149world’s cheap grower of the moment. In a refreshing change of pace, the
fries here are made from potatoes. This is the Farmers Diner, where it’s
not just quarters in the jukebox that support farming, but the whole trans-
action.
It is the simplest idea in the world, really: a restaurant selling food
produced by farms within an hour’s drive. So why don’t we have more of
them? For the same reason that statue down the street clings to his ham-
mer while all the real stonecutters in this granite town have had to fi nd
other jobs, in a nation that now imports its granite from China. The giant
building directly behind this diner, formerly a stonecutting works, is now
a warehouse for stone that is cut, worked, and shipped here from the
other side of the planet. If ever a town knew the real economics of the lo-
cal product versus the low- cost import, this ought to be it.
Buying your goods from local businesses rather than national chains
generates about three times as much money for your local economy. Stud-
ies from all over the country agree on that, even while consumers keep
buying at chain stores, and fretting that the downtown blocks of cute
mom-and-pop venues are turning into a ghost town. Today’s bargain
always seems to matter more.
The Farmers Diner is therefore a restaurant for folks who want to fi ll
up for under ten bucks, and that is what they get: basic diner food, afford-
able and not fancy. The Farmers Breakfast—two eggs, two pancakes, your
choice of sausage or bacon—is $6.75. The Vermont- raised hamburger
with a side of slaw, home fries, or a salad is $6.50. At any price, it’s an un-
usual experience to order a diner burger that does not come with a side
of feedlot remorse. For our family this was a quiet little red- letter occa-
sion, since we’d stopped eating CAFO- produced beef about ten years
earlier. Virtually all beef in diners and other standard food services comes
from CAFOs. Avoiding it is one pain in the neck, I’ll tell you, especially on
hectic school mornings when I glance at the school lunchroom calendar
and see that, once again, it’s hamburgers or tacos or “manager’s choice.”
(The manager always chooses cow meat.) But I slap together the peanut
butter sandwich; our reasons are our reasons. In Lily’s life, this was the
first time we’d ever walked into a diner and ordered burgers. Understand-
ably, she kept throwing me glances—this is really okay? It was. The cattle