I’ve recently discovered a few organizations in the area that impart an immediate sense of community. The common thread to these organizations seems to be food, more specifically slow, local food. This first struck me as odd, or maybe just coincidental, but when I thought about it more, I wondered if there might not be something to it. People do tend to gather around meals, afterall – be it Thanksgiving dinner or Sunday brunch. It might be a learned association, or perhaps it’s innate, but either way by adulthood we all seem to associate food with social activities. Roger Ebert reminded us of this connection in his beautiful essay, Nil By Mouth, in which he describes what it is like to lose the ability to eat and drink. He finds that the most difficult part is not the loss of the fantastic array of tastes once available to his palate, but rather the necessary dissociation between food and society:
Isn’t it sad to be unable eat or drink? Not as sad as you might imagine. I save an enormous amount of time. I have control of my weight. Everything agrees with me. And so on.
What I miss is the society. Lunch and dinner are the two occasions when we most easily meet with friends and family. They’re the first way we experience places far from home. Where we sit to regard the passing parade. How we learn indirectly of other cultures. When we feel good together. Meals are when we get a lot of our talking done — probably most of our recreational talking. That’s what I miss.
And so it really isn’t that much of a surprise that I’ve found the most easy community in those that meet to eat. And eat local food, since the local food movement is working consciously to build a stronger community. The people at these events come to meet and welcome new people into their group; no one is ever a stranger for long.
The first such organization is Friday Mornings @ SELMA (Soule Eberwhite Liberty Madison Affiliation), which meets just a few blocks from my house every friday morning for a breakfast fundraiser benefiting local farms. Each breakfast has four choices featuring local produce & delectable home-cured bacon (on the side and optional for vegetarians) cooked by members of the community (often local chefs and caterers). The breakfast takes place in the same house on Soule street every morning. 100-250 people show up every week. On Thursdays, volunteers gather to prep the ingredients for the morning, stopping midway through the evening to eat a pot luck dinner. I’ve been volunteering both Thursdays and Fridays. They are some of the happiest hours of my week.
My first homemade crust!
Yesterday, I went with a couple friends to Slow Food Huron Valley’s Pie Lovers Unite event. I made my first home-made crust for a blueberry and blackberry pie for the event. It turned out as well as I could have hoped, and I’ll definitely be making it again. I used Joy the Baker’s buttermilk pie crust recipe, and adapted her blueberry blackberry filling recipe (replacing the half cup of flour with 6 tablespoons of tapioca to avoid a runny filling). It’s hard to go wrong with an event about all-you-can-eat pie, but this one outdid itself, imbuing everyone there with a sense of warm ooey gooey community to match the ooey gooey goodness filling the pies. Maybe it was the Pie-ku contest that won me over. Or maybe it was the delicious pie.
Another Midwestern blogger recently wrote a thoughtful piece on how the media gets the local food movement wrong: it’s not the future of agriculture, it’s a very small piece of it. Big ag is here to stay. I’ll have to read more, but he makes a compelling argument. I appreciate the article because, rather than just jump on the bandwagon of rah rah local food, I had to step back and consider what I was supporting and why. Local food probably won’t change the face of agriculture, but it can strengthen a community, and hopefully it pushes big agriculture to think harder about achieving sustainability.
Lingerlust 