In Slow Foods, it is one of our goals to encourage ourselves and others to be more aware of where our food comes from.  This involves among many things: trying to shop for locally grown and or organic produce; choosing not to eat meat that is sold from industrial farms whose animals are full of synthetic hormones and maintained in unclean living conditions; and developing healthy, creative and balanced ways of eating.  As college students we are more often than not incapable of growing our own produce or raising our own animals for our meat and dairy consumption.  We can make better purchasing decisions but there is a difference between changing one’s life through shopping choices and changing one’s life through taking an active role in the growth of one’s food.  Even though we might choose to shop for locally grown produce and search for free range meat, we are still largely disconnected from the processes that bring our food from the fields to our plates.

Over the winter break, I had an opportunity to meet and spend time with a family who have decided personally take part in growing and raising the food they cook and consume. The Wouts, a family of eight, live on forty acres of farmland in Navarro County. They moved to this location around ten years ago with three of the six children they now have.  Before beginning their sustainable lifestyle, they had no experience with this type of living.  Mrs. Wout told me that if her and Mr. Wout had known when they first met that they would end up living this way they, “would have shot each other.”  At first, I took this response to mean that they were not satisfied with their current style of living.  Mrs. Wout assured me, however, that they are very happy, it is just not what they would have imagined for themselves as young, bar-hopping adults living between Dallas and Austin.

Upon entering the Wout farm by their long, winding driveway, one would not think that it could be home to such an abundance of sustainable activities.  The simple homestead consists of a two story house which the family built themselves, a small barn and two chicken coups. They have cattle, sheep, chickens and bees which they use to harvest milk, eggs and honey. From the milk, Mrs. Wout makes her own yogurt, cheese and butter.  During the spring, summer and fall months they have a garden which provides the majority of their produce.  Most of the energy for their house comes from the solar panels they have set up a few feet from their house.

One of the reasons they chose to adopt this lifestyle was the health problems encountered by their children.  Their fourth child was born with holes in his heart which Mrs. Wout attributes to the fact that she was vegetarian during her pregnancy.  Their first few years were spent in a travel trailer while they built their house as they had the money to pay for it.

While this lifestyle provides the Wouts with security in knowing that most of their food is hormone and pesticide free, it is quite demanding as well.  There is always work to be done and certain tasks can’t be ignored.  One such task is the milking of their cow which must be done twice a day.  Their cow can produce up to nine gallons of milk a day!  There is also the feeding of the animals and collections of the chicken’s eggs.  Not to mention the mending of farm equipment and making of dairy products.  Needless to say, traveling is a venture not often undertaken and laziness out of the question.  Despite being integrated and tied to their homestead in such a way, Mrs. Wout says that she hopes to be living like this for the rest of their lives.

Although they have cows, they have not yet begun butchering them because Mr. Wout needs to build equipment with which they can handle this type of slaughter.  This is on the to do list.  They do, however, butcher their own chickens five times a year.  One of these butchering events just happened to be on the day I visited their farm.  This was an interesting operation to say the least.  While Mom, Dad and the children old enough to help participated in the butchering, I observed and asked questions. I was struck by the comfortable way in which  the children engaged in the activity.

I was not willing to take part in reaching inside the freshly dead chickens and pulling out their entrails but the children were more than happy to do so in my stead.  I talked with Mom and Dad during the process while avoiding chicken guts that occasionally flew through the air. The children took pleasure in pointing out the various organs and other body parts of the chickens for me.  For this family of home-schoolers, I think their dissection credit for biology is more than earned.

I guess to some this comfort with dead animals might seem odd but I saw it as being more healthy than running away in fear from the meat they were going to eat.   These children were able to take pride in their knowledge of the animals they were to consume and how to prepare them.  One of the daughters proudly announced to me that although she was only ten, she already knew how to “eviscerate” the chickens.

This experience for me was intriguing, yet eye opening. I have, for some time now, had a romantic idea of living on a self-sufficient farm.  The tranquility, the relationship with nature and animals, the participation in growing my own food, all seemed like great reasons to forgo city life at some point and engage in this type of living.  While it is amazing, I did not realize how much one is tied down by a farm.  As a lover of travel and change, this was one obvious aspect I overlooked in idealizing this lifestyle.

This is not to say that I have completely nixed the possibility of farm living, only that I am not so sure I would want to make the switch from city life, to farm life anytime in the near future.  One must consider the costs and realities that it entails.  Animals are not cheap and neither is farm land or building a house.  If one is to be committed to this way of life, there will be limited adventures outside of the farm and a work load that never ends.

However, I think the tranquility of this lifestyle is hard to match.  Who wouldn’t enjoy watching the sun set over your fields every evening with your children running happily around the yard.   The Wout home felt bathed in serenity despite holding six children.  Like anything, it is a tradeoff in which sacrifices must be made.  For me, this experience opened my eyes to some of those sacrifices and forced me to add a little reality to my romantic notion of sustainable living.

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