A Pizza Farm

I've been rushing around the last few hours, getting ready to leave later tonight for D.C. We can barely afford this trip, but our birthdays are right around the corner, and I'm missing the other occupant of this address. So I'm headed off to the nation's capitol for a few days. I'll post when I get back, of course.

In the meantime, I thought this was neat: there's apparently a "pizza farm" in Alton, Illinois (see here and here). Lest you think pizzas are actually grown, not tossed, it's a farm where a circular plot is divided into wedges, with each "slice" containing a crop that is used on a pizza. For example, one area is all tomatoes, while another has peppers. Fenced in areas have pigs for pork toppings, and goats for milk and cheese. While I'm sure the farmer was having fun, I think the idea is a great one. Too often I don't think people make the connection anymore where the products they buy at the grocery store come from; certainly I think it would be great for kids to understand that the supermarket isn't some magic place where they can just get anything they'd like whenever they want it. For example, in the article, a 62-year-old is quoted as saying she didn't know that pepperoni came from pigs. While I'd like to make sure my future kids never go to the same school she did, I think the concept of farms, ranches, and other similar places doing things like this would benefit everyone immeasurably-- not only do you have a working farm, you also have opportunities for education, with tourism thrown in. In an age when the family farm is struggling at times against huge corporate operations, this is the kind of enterprise I'd love to see more often.

I'm not planning to drive to Illinois, though. Hopefully some farmer out here in the Central Valley will seize upon a similar idea. In the meantime, I'm off to D.C.!