Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Farmers milk their own cows and then transport the
milk (often in buckets) to a cooperative where it is mixed
with other local milk and sold at much higher prices than
nonlocal milk. Why? The main reason seems to be a fond-
ness for traditional culture, and it has as much to do with
the landscape as it does the milk quality. Transylvanians
adore a hayfield teeming in color and plant diversity, and
their vocabulary has many more terms to describe land-
scape than other cultures. Pesticides and chemical fertil-
izers are disliked partly because they kill the flowers and
other plants that grow naturally with grass in the meadows.
When Transylvanians buy local milk they acquire far more
than the milk itself: they are paying to preserve their past.
Modern agriculture with its large and efficient production
methods may produce cheaper food, but it changes the com-
munity, a change Transylvanians avoid by willingly paying
a higher price for local milk. Because they believe in the tra-
ditional way of producing milk, they believe this local milk
to be “real whole milk,” though it is unclear the extent to
which they believe the milk to be of higher quality.
Because it is real whole milk . . . a piece of the past which
their city life has left behind.
—A Transylvanian's answer as to why cities were
paying higher prices for local milk. Adam Nicolson,
“Hay. Beautiful,”
National Geographic
, July 2013, 124.
This rather romantic picture of local foods is not just held
by Transylvanians. For many of the same reasons, some
Americans and Europeans refer to themselves as locavores,
meaning they prefer to purchase food from small, nearby farm-
ers. For some this means visiting farmers' markets, or Amish
food markets where, like the dairy farms in Transylvania, anti-
quated farming methods are used. Others belong to a network
of community-supported agriculture, where one becomes a
