I took a bit of a road trip for work recently, and on the way back I followed a route that ran across northern Illinois through my mother's hometown, Belvidere, where my grandmother is buried. She passed away in 1989 after nearly a century of life.

Sadie Gilbert helped raise me and thanks to her long life, and the fact that I come from a long line of babies born late in their mothers' lives, I heard first-hand stories of growing up in a log cabin lit by kerosene lamps and subsistence farming on the prairie.

Some of them were funny. My gentle, bird-like Grandma took fiendish delight in describing how her dad would take an axe to the chickens' necks and the corpus would run senselessly around the barnyard until it collapsed. Her daily chore was to feed the chickens and she hated them for the way they pecked at her legs. She also hated the weed-pulling and the pests and the slugs in the garden.

Grandma was warmer in her recollection of the farm's calves and goats and occasional pig. There were horses, too, but this being the 19th century, they were working stiffs and like service dogs weren't meant for children to play with.

My grandmother's childhood ostensibly was of a kind to which we should all aspire, farming organically on small holdings and raising a handful of livestock — or at least it is supposed to be a goal for our food supply. But if Sadie Gilbert were to somehow return from beyond the veil and hear such ideas, she would scoff. Growing up on a little farm on the prairie was no Laura Ingalls Wilder tale. It was back-breaking, scarring work, an existence that sucked the life out of adults and children with equal ease. (True to an old saying on the Plains, her parents had eight children but raised only seven; an older sister died as a toddler.)

The self-proclaimed movement around a return to a "simpler" food supply chain is a facile marketing ploy. It ignores 21st century economics, and is wholly ignorant of the realities of such an endeavor. Not that some families aren't having fun doing just that and making a decent living at it, but they are niche operations that exist to supply a subset of well-off consumers who can afford to indulge the fantasy. The operation simply doesn't scale up.

Marketers should be mindful of how Sadie spent her adult years: She finished high school in town (at a time when rural children rarely were educated past elementary school) and became a teacher, never to return to the farm. She never had a garden or even so much as a cat, and loved the convenience foods and packaging that became the hallmark of the mass market in the U.S. In that, she was much more like most consumers of the 21st century, and that is the real-life consumer meat processors should remember when mounting a marketing campaign.

Little house on the prairie

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