Wayne, Greg and Dan

If, for any reason, you choose to avoid milk—and by this I mean cow’s milk—you face a daunting choice. Allergies, political or health choices may have you seeking a tasty and nutritious milk substitute: soy, rice, almond, hazelnut and oat milks are all readily available in the ubiquitous aseptic brick. But while many bear that nifty USDA organic label, it’s incredibly difficult to work on the local aspect.

I suppose the most local answer would be to grow your own beans and brew your own milk, but for many of us, the constraints of geography preclude growing them, and the pesky 24-hours-in-a-day limitation means we’re not going to add to our bursting to do lists.

Purchased it is, then. In my neck of the woods, there are too many to count. We originally started out with Trader Joe’s brand, since we started drinking it long before USDA organic certification, and TJ’s was the only one who promised not to use GMO soybeans. And it was tasty, too. Little one still douses his granola with this one. For me, the baseline test is cocoa, since that’s my daily habit. I prefer fresh to aseptic, but was alternating between Silk and Organic Valley (as well as almond milk, read more here).

But this weekend, I made the mistake of leaving Dear Husband at the mercy of the Costco marketers. Soymilk wasn’t on the shopping list, but the Sample Lady made him cocoa. He came home with a case of Costco brand organic soymilk. Now, I know that Costco isn’t in the business of making soymilk any more than Microsoft writes all its software, so I got online and dug a bit. Sure enough, it’s really Silk, repackaged for the mega-marketer.

Which brings me back to my original problem: It’s extremely difficult to know just how these beans wend their way from field to my larder (or fridge). Nothing on the label tells me more than the address of the distributor, who I know has often repackaged another company’s product.

Enter Organic Valley, who not only makes their own soymilk, but also offer me a chance to find out where my beans came from. There’s a URL on the back of the carton, and it tells me that if I type in the expiration date, it’ll generate a list of the farmers who grew my beans. (As an aside, I’m impressed that it’s done by date, not by lot number: if this were an immense industrial operation, they’d have to use lot numbers to identify the factory, à la Peter Pan Peanut Butter.)

All the beans in my carton came from Iowa: Flying W Farms in Decorah (Wayne Wangsness, the model on the carton is in my carton!), Greg Franzenburg in Keystone, and Parizek Farms Tama, IA. A click through lets me read more about the farm. I learn that Wayne’s farm will be handed down to his son, and that the variety of soybean grown is WFP 8205, planted May 27, 2004.

Wayne

There’s no picture or description of Greg (yet), but Dan Parizek’s bio reads like a poster child for the struggling small farmer: He holds down a job in manufacturing and comes home to farm in the afternoons; his dad and three brothers had cancer, and his dad and one brother died from the disease. He’s also planning to hand down the farm to his son, and is growing a soybean variety with the fetching name of WFP 8C285, planted on June 7, 2004.

As far as I can tell without more research, the variety refers to a number assigned by the United Nations World Food Programme. The WFP has been at the center of the maelstrom on GMO importation, as many countries have refused shipments of food aid from the US because they contain genetically modified product. (That people would rather go without than eat GMOs is the subject of another musing.)

As I drink this morning’s cocoa, containing soymilk made with beans from Wayne, Greg and Dan, I feel a little more reassured in my choice. Is the whole meet-your-farmer website a marketing gimmick? Maybe, but it’s also the kind of transparency we need to reconnect us with our food.

(Fool Disclosure: DH and I own stock in Organic Valley, mainly because we feel it’s a healthy combination of doing the right thing and a sound business model.)