New age takes on nostalgia (Off the Secretary’s Desk)

(Editor’s note: Douglas Fisher is the New Jersey Secretary of Agriculture.)

About 50 or 60 years ago in the food spaces, there was little confusion as to the makeup of our mass-produced selections.
Apple Pie? It had a crust made from all-purpose flour, sugar, baking powder. The filling was pie apples, like Rome or Courtland’s. If you’re old enough, you even remember “mock apple pie” recipes on the boxes of certain crackers, where the apple filling was replaced with crumbled crackers and cream of tartar.
Beef stew? Chunks of meat from a steer, potatoes, maybe some peas and carrots, and so on. Cheese? It came from the milk of cows or sheep. Very basic and very recognizable.
You get the point.
There rarely there was any mystery to the ingredients that came from your farms and into the marketplace.
I’ve written before about the evolution of food and the movement toward ultra-processing and packaged offerings, with a cascade of preservatives and extenders added to the same commodities that farmers have produced on-farm.
Manufactured foodstuffs like rice or corn cereals, or canned tomatoes, or cranberry sauce and jellies, as examples, were modified, but we still had a common notion of the main ingredients being grown or raised by traditional farmers.
Fields of grain turned into breads, cakes, and muffins. Live cattle ended up as beef. Cows produce milk, and swine resulted in pork products. And chickens gave us poultry products, either eggs or their own meat.
Now there is a third movement, which are foods that appear as, or at least resemble, conventional fare, but are made entirely from something else than the familiar, mainstay products of a much simpler time.
So many products mimic the original but are in fact something more like complete fabrications, or clone produced, or laboratory creations, or even “printed.”
The examples are popping up in dizzying and epic proportions.
Some examples: Tuna from Fungi, plant-based eggs. Cell factories for casein or even foie-gras, cultured fish flesh, layered proteins that mimic muscle formerly known as steak.
But mostly, in New Jersey, our farmers grow fruits and vegetables, raise steers for beef, pigs for pork chops, eggs from chickens, milk from cows and sheep, and so on down the line.
Now, while this shift is happening, there has been much chatter in the farm community to push for definitions:
Milk only can be from the mammary of an animal. Beef only from a dressed animal.
Some of the fights revolve around whether there could be almond milk, or plant-based steaks, or plant-based “turkey” burgers.
Day in and day out, these lines are attempting to be drawn, but most generally are not going to happen. The cat is out of the bag, the genie out of the bottle.
The products are hitting the stands, the markets, and the stores, and the public in many cases is eating them up.
They can no longer be classified as being fooled, or even unaware.
As I mentioned, we are witnessing a new era that is launching alongside the pathways of the past.
Not supplanting, but just co-existing for various reasons, the most prominent being consumer demand.
It’s analogous to the explosion of organics, or aeroponics and hydroponics a few years back.
The train is out of the station and these new culture-crafted creations exist not just to satiate the palette but also to satisfy social leanings.
Some people have gravitated to plant-only diets as a healthy alternative.
Other folks like the taste of meat but not the slaughter of an animal.
The public at this point is, I think, aware enough to know what milk means in various contexts. They are aware of the many terms referring to meat.
It’s probably time to just decide how you are going to continue what you do and how you will present yourself, tell your story, explain your products and operations.
It’s time for you to talk about all the good you do for society by virtue of your farming.
By holding onto the past ways of farming, you might become new again, but you have to stay in tune and adapt to the times and not fight the future.
As they say, it’s going to happen with or without you.