If Not Us, Who?
Most of what we've shared in this series has come from the farm, looking out. This time it comes from the other direction.
Before he helped build Smokin' Oaks, William Kruse came to this work from the other end of the food system entirely — a lifetime in kitchens, behind butcher counters, running his own businesses. He has a completely different vantage point than Justin. He arrived at the same conviction anyway.
Here's his story, in his words.
I grew up in a rural part of Northern California — not the part people picture. No palm trees. Redwoods and pigs. My parents were trying to leave the city and live off the land, so I grew up with animals around and a kitchen garden out the door. The butcher shop in town bought most of its meat from local farms. I never thought twice about it. I assumed that was just how food worked.
I was about seventeen when I learned it wasn't. I saw what a factory farm actually looked like on the inside, and I couldn't square it with anything I'd grown up believing was normal. I stopped eating pork that year. It was the first time it really landed for me that the way most food gets made and the way I'd been raised were two very different things — and that almost nobody eating it had ever been shown the difference.
For a long time after that, it stayed personal. I loved cooking, so I went to culinary school and ended up in a farm-to-table restaurant in Berkeley with a butcher shop inside it. We cooked with meat from a then-tiny outfit called Niman Ranch — small enough that on a good week you could buy nearly everything they made. Local farms planted their fields around what we wanted on the menu.
Our butcher had a rough day and walked off — he was going through something, and he ended up gone about two years. So the knives got handed to me. I wasn't good at it at first. I drove over to Oakland where the Niman Ranch meat was being cut and got a crash course, and little by little I got my feet under me — enough to come back and run that shop for a couple of years. I won't tell you I was the best butcher who ever lived. But I loved the work, and the history, and the work tied me to the people producing the food. That's the part that stayed with me. When you know whose hands raised it and cut it, the food is just better — and once you've seen food done that way, you can't unsee it. You stop being able to accept anything less.
“Once you’ve seen food done that way, you can’t unsee it. You stop being able to accept anything less.”
And Then Whole Foods Changed
After 2008 it expanded too fast and took in money from places it probably shouldn't have. Once the recession cleared, the company started tightening in ways that weren't good for the customer or the people who worked there. The leadership I respected moved on. We started carrying products I didn't think belonged on our shelves. The integrity I'd signed up for was draining out of it, and it became pretty clear the whole thing was being shopped around for sale. When Amazon bought it, I couldn't bring myself to stay. So I left.
That's when I made the heartbreaking realization: the wrong kind of capital will compromise even the best food company there is.
I learned the second thing on my own. After Whole Foods I bought a small frozen pizza company — clean ingredients, organic flour, no seed oils, the real thing. I built it from seven stores to about a hundred and fifteen across the Southeast. People wanted it; the demand was real. But for us, it wasn't one thing. It was a difficult distributor and a facility ruling I didn't have the means to take on, landing back to back. Most small businesses are ready to weather one storm. It's when they hit back to back that it's too much — and a company built on clean ingredients and traceable sourcing has less underneath it to absorb the hit than the big operations do.
“Most small businesses are ready to weather one storm. It’s when they hit back to back that it’s too much.”
So by the time I sat down with Justin — he had cows and was trying to get them to market, I'd just closed my doors — I'd already seen both ways this goes wrong. We found we had most of our convictions in common. And what he was building was the first thing I'd come across that was actually built to survive: capital that isn't structured to force a sale, infrastructure to carry honest food the distance, and a way to reach the people who never had real access to it in the first place.
That's why I'm here. Justin says the same thing from the farm side that I say from the store side. Two sides of the same coin.
I'll be straight with you, because this isn't a small thing and I won't pretend it is. Nobody sets out to feed their family badly — most of us just ate what the food system put in front of us, because we didn't know there was another way or because the better way was never within reach. That's not a failing. That's just how it was.
But it's different now, because we can see it — and once we can, the choice is actually ours.
One of the best men I ever worked with kept a sign on the wall in every workroom: what you ignore, you choose. If you step over it, you've decided you're okay with it. I've never been able to shake that — and I can't unsee what I now know about how most food gets made.
Honest food, raised right, for your family and the ones who come after — it can exist, and it can be within reach. It only takes the people who can see what's at stake deciding to do something about it.
If they don't, who will? If not us, who? If not me, then who?
That's William — the second conviction Smokin' Oaks was built on, reached from the far end of the same food system Justin spent his life in.
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