In much of the world, real meat is a luxury. In Matthew Marmaduke’s Missouri Freehold, the expensive ingredient in a zebra pastrami sandwich may be the pepper.
By Caleb Stone
Modern Soil
I had met Matthew Marmaduke before he was Lord Marmaduke, before extraterrestrial refugees landed on his farm and before half the planet seemed to have an opinion about what went on inside his borders.
He did not remember me.
That was probably fair.
“We met at MU years ago,” I told him. “Back when you were dating Kaori Tanaka. I was an aggie undergrad finishing a journalism master’s.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t remember you,” Marmaduke said. “If you knew we dated, we probably did meet.”
Then, before I could continue, his expression changed.
“But for both personal and professional reasons, I’d appreciate it if you left her name out of your reporting.”
“Of course.”
There was nothing theatrical about the request. No explanation followed, and none was needed.
I told him she and I were still friends.
“She’s actually the one who reminded me,” I said. “Sent me that old video of you doing Bardcore Rap on a recorder.”
That got him.
“Boy, that takes me back.”
He laughed hard enough that two people passing nearby looked over.
“I wonder how the internet would react to that now.”
Probably badly.
Which, admittedly, made me want the video.
But I had come to Missouri to talk about food.
That is harder than it sounds because food here is so abundant that the people producing it sometimes forget how strange their normal has become.
The Freehold feeds itself. It exports agricultural surplus. Its residents eat fresh produce and real meat at prices that can look almost fictional to visitors from major corporate cities. Even lower-income residents can generally assemble a diet heavy in locally grown fruits, vegetables, dried staples and meat without treating fresh food as a luxury purchase.
That makes Marmaduke’s food system interesting for reasons that go well beyond yield.
The question I put to him was one agricultural economists have been arguing over since the Collapse.
How much productive capacity should a community spend on things it does not strictly need?
“The Freehold feeds itself and exports surplus,” I said. “How do you balance post-Collapse food security with the demands of luxury, culture and memory in your kitchens?”
Marmaduke looked around at the food moving past us.
“Look around. We eat luxury almost every day, at least by corporate-collapse standards.”
He started with steak.
“A real porterhouse in Boston runs you two hundred FiatDollars a pound. Here? Around twenty-five NewDollars a kilo.”
The two major stablecoins trade close enough to parity that the comparison is brutal. A kilo is 2.2 pounds. At roughly equal exchange value, the Missouri price works out to a small fraction of the Boston one.
That does not mean meat is free.
“Still not cheap,” Marmaduke said. “Not for families with five kids. But it’s within reach.”
Then he gave me the line that explains more about Freehold agricultural policy than most of its economic reports do.
“We made local abundance the baseline. What’s unaffordable out there is just Tuesday here.”
That abundance is not primarily the product of some futuristic farming breakthrough.
It is geography, labor, land and distance.
Outside cattle country, real beef can cost well over $100 a kilo. Cultured beef is much cheaper and, in many cities, is what ordinary consumers mean when they say they bought beef at all.
The Freehold sits inside productive agricultural country and maintains short supply lines between farms, processors, markets, institutional kitchens and consumers.
Transportation is the killer.
Marmaduke knows that better than most. He has an agricultural education, an engineering background and a logistics empire. Ask him about the cost of a steak and he will eventually start talking about how far it had to travel.
“A lot of the price difference is transportation,” he said. “You can grow something cheaply and still make it expensive by moving it far enough.”
A server came past carrying a tray.
Marmaduke stopped them.
“Try one of each of these.”
This is a dangerous sentence when uttered by a man whose local ecosystem contains creatures that disappeared from ordinary American agriculture centuries ago, plus several that were never supposed to become American livestock in the first place.
I took one.
Then another.
“That’s shockingly good,” I said. “Not something I tasted as a student.”
“Every bit of that except the pepper and sugar is local.”
“So the pepper was the expensive part?”
“That,” Marmaduke said, “and the fact it’s zebra pastrami.”
I stopped chewing.
He looked pleased with himself.
Zebra is not a theoretical meat in the interior. Feral and managed populations have existed long enough that, depending on where you are, the animal can fall somewhere between exotic stock, nuisance animal and dinner.
That does not make zebra pastrami inexpensive everywhere.
Marmaduke had seen essentially the same product for sale in Vancouver the previous year.
“Three hundred FiatDollars a pound,” he said.
“And here?”
“We stick it in school lunches.”
There is a sentence designed to make an urban food editor angry.
It also gets at the central distortion in modern food economics.
Luxury is often less about the inherent value of a food than about where it is produced, how much of it exists nearby, who processes it and how far somebody has to move it before you eat it.
In Vancouver, zebra pastrami can be a three-hundred-dollar curiosity.
In central Missouri, it can be Tuesday.
The irony is that Marmaduke does not run his agricultural system entirely for efficiency.
Walk the south side of the homestead and that becomes obvious.
Large sections are divided into one-acre orchard grids. Blocks are replanted as they age, but many are maintained specifically for varietal and heirloom stock. They are not the Freehold’s highest-yielding agricultural acres.
That is intentional.
“So why keep them?” I asked.
“Because high yield isn’t the only thing agriculture is for.”
There it was.
Marmaduke is often presented as a hard utilitarian, sometimes by admirers and more often by critics. Spend enough time around his farms and the description stops fitting.
He likes efficiency.
He also keeps things that are inefficient on purpose.
A fruit variety does not have to be the best commercial producer to be worth preserving. A recipe does not have to be the cheapest way to deliver calories. A community does not become more resilient simply by reducing every meal to the crops with the highest output per hectare.
“If you only preserve whatever wins this year,” Marmaduke said, “eventually you don’t have much left except whatever won.”
That is agricultural diversity stated as family philosophy.
It is also memory management.
The Freehold’s food system has another layer that visitors from corporate cities can miss because they expect agriculture to begin at a commercial farm and end at a retail terminal.
Here, food production leaks into ordinary housing.
Gardens are encouraged. Many rental properties have seasonal fruit trees. Families with room may keep poultry, rabbits or cuy. Hunting functions partly as recreation, partly as food procurement and partly as crop and orchard protection.
Processing can be just as local.
Someone raises the animal. Someone down the road knows how to butcher it. Another person smokes meat, preserves fruit, makes sausages or trades excess garden production.
It is not subsistence farming.
It is a modern economy with unusually short gaps between producer and consumer.
That distinction matters.
A resident does not have to produce all of his own food to benefit from living among people who produce food.
Neither does a school cafeteria.
Neither does a hospital.
Neither does the massive hospitality operation surrounding the Marmaduke homestead.
The result is a system in which institutional meals can contain ingredients that would be status food somewhere else without anyone here thinking they are serving haute cuisine.
Marmaduke seemed amused by my fascination with the pastrami.
“You’re an agriculture reporter.”
“Yes.”
“And the zebra is what surprised you?”
“The part where children are apparently eating it between math and science surprised me.”
“They eat what’s available.”
That may be the most rural answer possible.
Yet the larger food system is not accidental.
Freehold policy strongly favors local supply, household food resilience and enough agricultural redundancy that a market shock elsewhere does not immediately become a dinner-table emergency here.
Marmaduke does not call that autarky.
The Freehold imports plenty of things.
The pepper on my zebra proved it.
What he dislikes is dependence without alternatives.
“If a ship doesn’t come in, or a truck doesn’t make it, I don’t want somebody wondering whether their kids eat,” he said.
That is the security side of the system.
The heirloom orchards are the other side.
They answer the question I originally asked, how a community that remembers scarcity makes room for luxury, culture and memory.
Marmaduke rejects the premise that those things must compete.
Food security means calories tomorrow.
Agricultural security means having the capacity to produce them.
Culture is knowing what you want to do with them once you have them.
A society can survive on the first two.
It needs the third if it wants anyone to care about preserving the society itself.
That is why an orchard can remain in production even when another cultivar might yield more.
It is why families maintain old recipes.
It is why one community’s ordinary lunch becomes another city’s luxury food.
And apparently it is why somewhere in central Missouri a schoolchild can open a lunch and discover zebra pastrami without finding anything particularly noteworthy about the experience.
Before leaving, I asked Marmaduke whether he thought people outside the Freehold understood what he meant by abundance.
“Probably not,” he said.
Then he reconsidered.
“Actually, that’s unfair. Everybody understands abundance when they’re sitting at the table.”
He picked up another piece from the tray.
“The problem is remembering what it took to put it there.”
