150 animal, vegetable, miraclewere raised on pasture by an acquaintance of the owner. When Tod asked,
“How’s your burger?” it was not a restaurant ritual but a valid question.
We told him it was great.
Tod Murphy’s background was farming. The greatest economic chal-
lenge he and his farming neighbors faced was finding a market for their
good products. Opening this diner seemed to him like a red- blooded
American kind of project. Thomas Jefferson, Tod points out, presumed
on the basis of colonial experience that farming and democracy are inti-
mately connected. Cultivation of land meets the needs of the farmer, the
neighbors, and the community, and keeps people independent from dom-
ineering centralized powers. “In Jefferson’s time,” he says, “that was the
king. In ours, it’s multinational corporations.” Tod didn’t think he needed
to rewrite the Declaration of Independence, just a good business plan.
He found investors and opened the Farmers Diner, whose slogan is “Think
Locally, Act Neighborly.”
For a dreamer, he’s a practical guy. “Thinking globally is an abstraction.
What the world needs now isn’t love sweet love—that’s a slogan.” What
the world needs now, he maintains, is more compassionate local actions:
“Shopping at the hardware store owned by a family living in town. Buying
locally raised tomatoes in the summer, and locally baked bread. Cooking
meals at home. Those are all acts of love for a place.”
The product of his vision is a place that’s easy to love, where a person
can sit down and eat two eggs sunny side up from a chicken that is having
a good life, and a farmer that will too, while Tammy Wynette exhorts us
all to stand by our man. It’s also an unbelievable amount of work, I sus-
pect, for Tod, Pam, and their kids Grace and Seamus, who start the day
early on their farm and keep things running here until closing time. The
diner has had to create a network of reliable year- round producers, facili-
tating local partnerships and dealing with human problems, for better and
for worse. Supplies have to keep running even if a potato grower falls ill or
the onion farm gets a divorce.
Trying to make a small entrepreneurial economy competitive with the
multinationals is an obvious challenge. Tod has met it, in part, by creating
an allied business that processes all their breakfast sausage, bacon,
smoked ham, and turkey, and also sells these products in regional stores.