Building Community through Local Food

Around Memorial Day, we begin our local food club season with deliciously sweet, melt-in-your-mouth strawberries and tender, buttery asparagus, plus flavorful lettuces, green onions and eggs. Several years ago, I began organizing the food club to support local produce by buying in bulk at a nearby produce auction. The club has grown over time; over the last five years it has provided fresh, healthy food at wholesale prices to sixty families and households each season.

In working with the club, I have met local food activists—quiet, humble and serious-minded people who devote years and sometimes decades to help support the “triple bottom line” of economy, community and ecology. Mixing high ideals with practical knowledge and hard work, local food activists seek to market local foods in competition with unsustainable but enormous global conglomerates aiming to monopolize the food market. The activists I work with are rebuilding the marketplaces that connect local growers to nearby consumers that we lost in the United States following World War II.

The volunteering I do helps their work of bringing low cost, healthy, fresh food to people in town while supporting growers in poorer areas outside of our town. Though I began my work solely to support the produce auction, I have built friendships with growers, activists, volunteers, and members of the club. For me and for others as well, the food club creates a hub for people to meet and build community.

The produce auction itself is a hub for the outlying communities and connects it with the more urban town. It is a place where neighbors and friends meet to enjoy each other’s company and to watch as the auction unfolds. It is also a place where local people from different backgrounds and subcultures meet. As a friend once said, the auction is one of only a few places where you can see an Appalachian person, an Amish person and a hippie in dreadlocks talking together in a friendly, welcoming way.

As I’ve expanded my volunteer work, our kitchen has been filled with inexpensive, high quality, fresh, healthy and delicious food. An open secret for most local food activists and workers is that our kitchens and pantries often brim over with tasty food, flowing from the earth like a river throughout the growing season. Many of us learn to store food in our basements to provide meals during the winter and into early spring. Just last week we had a great entree mainly composed of six-month-old potatoes and tomatoes we canned a year and a half ago.

The work of the food club allows me to flourish as a sensitive person, pursuing good works and the ideals of supporting the triple bottom line of economy, ecology and community. In a practical way, it helps move my family and many neighbors and friends toward improving our sustainability as a human community re-integrating itself into the natural world around us. In pursuing this work, we gain rewards of fresh, delicious food at low costs, a healthy lifestyle and relationships with idealistic and well-meaning people.

By pursuing these ideals in a practical, concrete way our lives are improved. As a sensitive person acting on my ideals, we receive a life filled with beauty, nature, sensuality, friendships and good health. Rather than the stereotype that pursuing our ideals will bring suffering, our lives and our community are better as a result. By caring for others, the ecology and the local economy, our ideals benefit our own lives.