Why Do We Want to Live Like Agrarian Peasants So Badly ?

The Ballerina Farms controversy holds up a mirror to a growing middle class desire: to break free from our diseased food system. Godspeed to anyone who can!

Picture this: you’ve built a pen and filled it with meaty little chickens. You head out to the backyard in the early morning on a balmy late spring day.

You have to feed, water, and tend to the animals early morning before you head to your real full-time day job.

My DIY chicken pen. Not pictured: zombie carnage

As you approach the pen— in which you imagined raising happy, pastured, organic, sustainable, ethically raised and harvested meat chickens in order to fill your freezer— you come upon scene that makes Texas Chainsaw Massacre look like a Pixar movie.

You are greeted by the maniacal clucking of blood soaked chickens with bones protruding from their overgrown breasts that have collapsed under the weight of their unnaturally heavy bodies, waddling around in swamp of poop filled grass.

Your pen is filled with maimed chicken zombies because you forgot to take away their feed at night like all instruction manuals told you to. That’s the way farming is though. One mistake, one storm, one night of the zombie chickens and all your dreams drown in a shit puddle.

I tell you about this nightmare because I lived it! Like many of us, I harbored dreams of detaching from our country’s diseased supply chain and instead investing in growing my own food for my family. I think this is a pretty noble aspiration and one that I actually found some success in (more on that in a minute) but given the general tenor on the internet it seems like only SOME people are allowed to homestead, which brings us to: Ballerina Farms.

NOT GOOD.

The Mormon family who runs Ballerina Farms, Hannah and Daniel and their 7 (!!) kids have been the subject of a lot of Internet hand-wringing and scrutiny. The family resides on a 328-acre working ranch in Park City Utah in the foothills of snow capped mountains. If you’re one of their 3.9 million Instagram followers then you are treated to pictures of towheaded kids wearing Dust bowl style smock dresses and recipes for lasagna that start by milking your own dairy cow to make homemade ricotta cheese (suck it, Ina Garten!).

Who do these wholesome assholes think they are?

What you don’t see the bonkers amount of wealth that the family comes from. Hannah’s husband Daniel is heir to Jet Blue. Any family that lives on a 300+ acre ranch is going to have many dollars, even millions of them. But I guess because the family didn’t include their tax returns under their apricot jam recipe, they are getting dragged.