As a kid growing up on a farm in central Illinois, I remember my father tuning in to WGN radio’s noon show with Orion Samuelson and Max Armstrong at lunchtime most days. He’d listen intently as the announcers read off the list of various commodity prices for the day, which inevitably included pork bellies. Now, as a kid of 9 or 10 years old I could only surmise what the heck a pork belly was and really, if I’m being honest, even as an adult I may not completely understand the business of trading pork belly futures.

“Whatta ya mean my luggage is in Topeka!” – Glenn Loving, photo © Piolov, Inc.

However, as our country and really, the world, faces the global pandemic that is affecting all of us, chinks in the global food system have been exposed. Questions like “is our food system broken?” have arisen. Articles like this from Homesteaders of America and this from the New York Times make one wonder if sourcing food closer to home might be the way more people are headed.

Like many homesteaders, or homesteader wannabes, we’ve been thinking about what we can do to minimize our reliance on the global food system. A garden large enough to sustain us throughout the non-growing season has always been one of our goals, and I look forward to explaining what we’re doing about that in a future post.

But something else we’re interested in doing is raising our own meat or, since we aren’t actually on the farm yet, sourcing it locally. As Covid-19 shut down meat processing plants across the country, many producers were at a loss with what to do with their products that would typically be funneled through grocery stores. Through Facebook groups such as Farm Surplus 2 Table and word-of-mouth, many of these producers have been able to connect directly with the consumer, thereby not losing their entire profit or potentially having to destroy their flocks, herds and crops.

By partnering with a local hog producer and meat locker that, fortunately, still had processing slots available, we have been blessed to secure enough pork that will get us through the foreseeable future. Some day, hopefully not long from now, we plan to raise our own hogs and process them, as well, but for now we’re excited to have this opportunity.

In the meantime, we’ll continue to dream and think about the future when we’ll know where all of our bacon (and other food, but most importantly, bacon) comes from.