Create Your Food Treasure Map

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posted on

July 8, 2025

Create Your Food Treasure Map

A friend recently asked me "what brings you peace these days?" and without blinking an eye, I answered "feeling rested, healthy and strong."

As I pondered my answer that evening while fixing dinner, I took a memory trip back to summer 2023 when I visited Polyface Farm for the first time. I'd attended the Two Days of Truth Summit that June. I remembered chuckling to myself then about how I'd bagged a planned beach trip for a weekend of learning! I could feel something shifting in me then, I just didn't know exactly what or why yet. I sat on the edge of my seat listening to the speakers, filling my notebook with mind-spinning ideas and inspiration. It was the impetus for me making it a priority to understand my health choices; mind, body & spirit.

It's hard to believe that was over two years ago now, and somewhere along the way since then - be it in a book, interview or podcast - Joel introduced to me the concept of creating a "Food Treasure Map," with the big idea being to take one year (that's right, a year!) and invest a good chunk of free time into mapping out the best choices and sources for my (and my family's) food.

"There is peace of mind when you know exactly what is in the food you are eating and feeding your family" Joel writes in the book Beyond Labels: A Doctor and a Farmer Conquer Food Confusion One Bite at a Time, which he co-wrote with Dr. Sina McCullough. I bought this book at the Summit and it has been an indispensable resource for me as I navigate through all the noise out there, and feel empowered instead to listen to my body and "finally figure out the diet my body needs to be happy, healthy & free."

Reading the book feels like having two friends at your kitchen table gently sharing ideas, or "Practical Bites" as they call them, for small shifts toward knowing "what to eat, how to procure it (they list resources and websites to help folks find their local farmers), how to prepare it, how to eat it" and how to save time in the kitchen to boot! Building community and and being mindful in the moment finds a place in the book as well.

Embarking on a year-long adventure to create a Food Treasure Map goes hand-in-hand with endeavoring to feel your best (on all levels) and being empowered by your choices. Practical Bite #1 reads: "You have the power to shape your food supply into what you want it to be." How exciting!

Where to start, you might ask? I'd encourage you to write down all the questions you can think of to help you know what it is that you are looking for and why. What is my body telling me it needs? (Dr. Sina is a big fan of this question!) Is the restless mind craving more quiet and routine? How much time do I wish to spend procuring my food? What will it feel like to trust my food sources? And so on. Paint the picture and ask yourself "what's my why?"!

When I consider the "why" behind my answer to the question of what brings me peace, I know it's because it's the way I want to show up for all the life I am given - rested, healthy and strong.

Food and community play a big part in that. I absolutely relish the time spent investigating this market or that food grower, visiting a farm, sharing tips with friends and strangers alike. It's all part of it!

I hope you have fun with some of these ideas, please share any you might have for creating the Food Treasure Map of your dreams!

Blessings & Happy Hunting!

Kristi

Events of The Month

Check out upcoming events on the farm this month!

Duplication

"How does this scale?" Whenever someone asks me that question, the underlying assumption is that production volume requires consolidation, concentration, and centralization. In other words, the only way to feed the world is to make bigger chicken houses in one place, bigger canneries in one place, bigger machines and bigger warehouses. I remember well being vilified by a Smithsonian historian at a food conference where he and I were both on a panel. When I dared to suggest bigger is not always better, he interrupted me and ranted for 10 minutes on why bigger is always better. "A bigger fort was always bigger than a smaller one. A bigger gun was always better than a smaller one." He went on and on about how historical accuracy and authenticity demands addiction to bigger. But biology is not forts and guns. It's not mechanical. Critters have an optimal size. As animal behaviorist guru Temple Grandin says, living things demand energy for three things: reproduction, growth, and immunological function. All three must be in balance. When anyone selects for only one of those traits, the other two suffer. That's why American dairy cows only have two lactations on average. When they milk as heavily as our one-trait genetic selection asks, they don't breed and have all sorts of sickness problems. Nature does not scale through concentration; it scales with duplication. If nature wants more oak, it doesn't make one big tree; it makes acorns. If nature wants more milk, it doesn't make a great big cow; it makes calves. If nature wants more tomatoes, it doesn't make a monster tomato plant; it makes a bunch of seeds that make more tomato plants. Nature scales with duplication. At Polyface, rather than having a chicken house big enough for 15,000 chickens, we have 170 little 120 square foot portable shelters holding 75 birds apiece and giving us cumulative capacity for 15,000. But they're spread out in modules, duplicated, to give us the production volume. We run pigs in groupings of 35-50. A Smithfield confinement facility might house 5,000 hogs in a bigger-than-football-field-sized facility. The stench is unbearable. By spreading these pigs out across the landscape in small groups we get the same scale without any of the ecological, immunological, or animal welfare dysfunction. This could even be said of farming in general. People see the massive corn, soybean, and alfalfa farms in the mid-west and wonder how we would possibly survive without those massive, single-species outfits. The fact is they aren't even producing food. Half the soybeans are exported to other countries; those markets are drying up rapidly with competition from other countries like Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. Nearly half the corn goes to taxpayer-subsidized ethanol. The alfalfa goes to Japan and Saudi Arabia to feed racehorses. By and large, all that production isn't even food. The fact is we don't need to produce all those commodities and even if we needed it all for food, we could do it in a more spread out, diversified platform. America has 35 million acres in lawns. We have 36 million acres housing and feeding recreational horses. All of this could be turned into duplicative production, like acorns for oak trees. My point is this: scale as commonly understood in modern American lexicon is completely anti-ecological. The real mechanism for scale is duplication. A more democratized production creating volume through multiplicative nodes is the way nature works. This is why farms like Polyface, with spread out infrastructure in repeated modules offers multiple advantages. Polyface can't feed the world by itself, and we have no desire to build an empire trying to. But thousands of Polyfaces can feed the world. Indeed, they're the only way to do it for the next 500 years. This is one reason why we invest heavily in germinating new young farmers. Our stewardship and apprenticeship programs are all about this kind of duplication. In fact, Aug. 21-22 we're hosting the Stockman Grass Farmer's Launching Young Farmers conference where we'll feature 8 of our graduates who were 20 years old, no money, no land, and at 40 are full-time farming without government subsidies. If you ever dreamed of bootstrapping a farming career, you should come. We still have room. It will be the most profound agricultural conference in America this year. Information is on our website on the education tab. For most of you, the fact that you keep us in business to duplicate production and the farmers who will carry these principles forward, indicates your heart investing in an authentic food and farming model. Thank you for making it all possible.

Create Your Food Treasure Map

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Duplication

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