Food elitists came together recently in the most brazen style, unapologetically putting together a food forum that was sponsored by Porshe and held on the grounds of an estate formerly held by the Rockefeller family. Because that’s farm reality? They think it ought to be yours. Interesting thought, we guess, as you’re preparing to sit down for a Christmas gathering with your farm family. While you’re preparing your year-end bookwork, thinking about the Farm Bill and crop insurance signup deadlines and filing your tax returns, the food elitists are still hard at work trying to design a “food movement.”

What they can’t seem to understand is that farm families like those that grow corn in Illinois have always been in a food movement. Each year, farmers do their best to handle whatever risk might be controlled and roll the dice with Mother Nature.

But according to those that claim to know better, you’ve been doing it wrong.

This shouldn’t be news to you. But maybe this is…more people are becoming skeptical of this kind of talk.

Thanks to efforts like Illinois Farm Families and the work of the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, consumers are taking the food elitists’ claims with a grain of salt more often than not.

But let’s get back to the aforementioned food forum sponsored by Porshe. Even the online publication Slate added a dose of reality to their coverage of the event. The magazine quoted an Illinois farmer and reported,

           “The cultural gap between the New York and California foodies dominating the meeting and the Midwestern producers yawned wide. “We’re the Big Ag you were taught to hate,” Illinois pig farmer and businesswoman Julie Maschhoff, who was on the panel, told the audience. “I grew up on a corporate farm, and my grandfather had a corporate farm before it was bad.” She spoke of her excitement that biotechnology will “create a better animal on fewer resources” and noted something that would be unremarkable to most urban foodies: ‘One of my good friends is a vegetarian.”

Sure, to get the voices of actual, in-real-life farmers on the panel it took an expensive sponsorship to run with the Porshe folks. But, as they say, sometimes you have to fish where the fish are.

USFRA through a growing relationship with the New York Times will publish an ad in the December 28 edition of the New York Times magazine holiday edition.

In related news, during the period that the USFRA-supported documentary Farmland was available for free download on hulu, it will viewed 117,870 times. Farmland is now available on internet on-demand platforms and through Dish and DirecTV.