Show me what you eat

We might be so preoccupied in the farming business that we don’t give much thought to the food business. How do people use the commodities that come from prairie fields and barns? Where does all that food end up? The answers might seem obvious, but perhaps not as obvious as photos of actual breakfast, lunch and dinner plates.

In this post you’ll see photos of some recent lunches and dinners eaten by people at The Western Producer. Several colleagues, and our photo student mentioned in previous blogs, contributed these photos and as you see, they reveal that few of us around here are gourmands given to exotic fare — at least not in our office bag lunches.
Michael Raine’s photos provide one or two exceptions, since he was recently on assignment in North Carolina and took shots of the local delicacies he sampled.
A recent New York Times article discussed the popularity of food blogs and food photos on the web. According to a story called First Camera, Then Fork, by Kate Murphy, people love to share photos of their food. Social media are crowded with them, and food diaries abound. Groups using Flickr, Twitter and Facebook have thousands of food shots. Various sites are dedicated to them. Some people become obsessive about photographing everything they eat, even down to a single square of shredded wheat, wrote Murphy.
It put me in mind to periodically post photos of the food prairie people are eating — and in the future, hopefully not just the food Western Producer people are eating. I’ll branch out a little! And I won’t become obsessive. I hope.
This site more commonly posts photos of what people are growing or raising, and photos of all the work that goes into that, but it might be instructive to see photos that connect farmers’ day to day efforts with the end result. How many of us have been encouraged to keep the customer in mind as we go about our agricultural business? This is one way of doing that. If you’d like to submit photos of what you’re eating, send them to me. I’ll post them here for all of us to visually taste and enjoy.