Eat All About It

Stone-Buhr flour, which has long advertised that it uses wheat grown in the Northwest, went one better in January: Its “Find The Farmer” website now lets buyers see exactly which farms grew the wheat for each separate bag of flour. Stone-Buhr owner Josh Dorf blogged that he was inspired by the writings of Michael Pollan.

The New York Times took a look at the site this week, talking about the food-safety benefits of adding “traceability” to products. One farmer told the Times that the site helps rebuild some of the old connections that once existed between farmer and consumer, with customers understanding that “there’s a real person behind this.” Another farmer noted that it went  the other way too, with customers contacting farmers through the site: “We never knew where our wheat went to. The story always ended at the grain bin and the big commodity operations,” said Fred Fleming, 59, who operates Lazy YJ Farms in Reardan, Wash., which is part of FindtheFarmer.

“Now we can actually have a conversation with our city customers. We can get back to the old days,” he said.

I happened to have some Stone-Buhr in my pantry when I read that — I’m most often a King Arthur girl, but I liked the local connection, and it’s usually competitively priced — so I decided to type in my own bag’s lot code. Three pins showed up on the map, telling me my latest loaves of bread originated at another farm in Reardon, an old family homestead farm in Colton, and what look like three separate farms in Genessee, Idaho. 

The NYT points out that you can do the same thing with Dole organic bananas (but not non-organic? Is there no crossover in interest?), so I went to the Dole site with the sticker from the bunch in my fruit tray, only to find that I’ve apparently been buying a different brand, Organics Unlimited bananas. The sticker tells me they came from Ecuador, and, anyway, when it comes to bananas I doubt any answer I get would feel any better.