Selling my soul for biodynamic food

It is not easy being an ignorant savage in an increasingly progressive world. Even simple tasks like finding an appropriate place to eat food can be extraordinarily complicated if you are saddled with guilt about the environment, animal rights, and not being appropriately progressive. During a recent trip to Tempe, which is a typical college town, I endeavored to find a restaurant that met all the requirements of being socially acceptable to even the most stuck-up hipster nerd.

Through an exhaustive search which consisted of me Googling the phrase hipster-nerd restaurants, I managed to find a café that promised to be biodynamic, organic, and artisan. Wow! Jackpot! It was like winning the pretentious foody trifecta in one go. Of course, I wasn’t sure what any of these terms meant, but they sounded annoyingly socially conscious. Perfect.

I think I understand what organic means. That means the food is grown by people with bare feet who use their dog’s feces to fertilize it and then sell the produce for ridiculously high prices. I am vaguely aware of the term, “artisanal.” I think it means you will pay a lot more for it and it because it comes in a glass jar with hand-drawn labels.

However, I had no idea what biodynamic meant. It doesn’t sound healthy. I immediately thought of that scene in the movie, “Alien,” when that creature jumped out of John Hurt’s chest. OK, maybe that was an extreme example of biodynamic. Maybe the term just meant you’d get a tapeworm from the food. 

I asked the receptionist at the restaurant what biodynamic meant. She said she didn’t know because she was just a receptionist. “Perfect answer,” I said. She thought about it some more and came back to me eager to provide a better answer. She told me it meant that no pesticides were used on the food, blah, blah, blah. “That sounds like organic farming,” I said. She admitted that they were similar.

So, I turned to the ultimate source of all human knowledge—Google.

It turns out that biodynamic doesn’t mean that a body-snatcher plant will duplicate your human form and then consume your body husk. It means something completely different and somewhat more unbelievable. It is a type of farming that combines organic farming techniques with spiritualism and lunar and astrological influences.

You will be surprised to know that biodynamic farmer wasn’t invented by a Millennial. It was invented by this guy from Austria named Rudolf Steiner who got into spiritualism after he saw the ghost of his aunt on a train in 1870. He invented his holistic approach to agriculture in 1924 in response to requests from farmers who were concerned about the future of agriculture. Steiner laid down the techniques for natural farming that became the basis for organic farming today.

But, Steiner took it a bit further. He required that farmers put manure compost in cow horns and bury them in the ground through the winter to prepare the soil. Next, powdered quartz was put in the cow horns and buried in the spring. Then, things get a little weird. The biodynamic farmer must bury various combinations of herbs, cow guts, peat, flowers, and the skull of a domestic animal stuffed with bark at precise points in the astrological calendar to properly prepare the soil for the intended crop.

At least there was no mention of demon blood being sprinkled on the ground or people dancing naked around the cow horns in the moonlight.

By the way, the food was excellent. I just hope they didn’t steal my soul in the process.