Hope For The Future of Food

One of the GOOD news pieces:

snips:
Claire’s might be just another trendy restaurant—and in fact it made Conde Nast Traveler’s 2009 “Hot List.” What sets it apart is its emphatically untrendy location: a rural community 45 miles from the Canadian border where the median household income is $42,000. Yet more than 100 local residents banded together to buy 50 certificates, worth $1,000 each, in this community-supported place (think CSA, the restaurant version) that opened in the spring of 2008. Prices for this “new Vermont cuisine” are relatively modest: appetizers average around $6 and entrees range from $9 for the vegetable tagine to $24 for certain cuts of grass-fed steak from a farm two miles away.

To fans of local food and sustainable agriculture, Claire’s and Hardwick are the sun around which planets are aligning—the planets in this case being a network of innovative food entrepreneurs and organic farmers who are working together to build a new food infrastructure and breathe life into the struggling economy. They want to save the town, and the world, through good food. Community, in all its manifestations, is at once the clientele, beneficiary and by-product of what Claire’s serves.

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High Mowing Organic Seeds was growing organic squash and pumpkins to extract seeds, but it had no use for thousands of pounds of pumpkin meat. So Johnson, who had just set up an industrial kitchen to offer prepared food as part of his growing farm CSA, took a half-ton of free pumpkin puree, got Cabot Creamery to provide butter, a local farmer to provide eggs and a local baker to help out. Thus was born “Pies for the People,” a project that donated hundreds of pies to the local food shelf last fall and looks to become an annual event. Unused crops from the various businesses get composted at the Highfields Institute in Hardwick, which promotes community-based composting as a way of improving soils, and that compost is then used to fertilize fields at High Mowing, Pete’s Greens and other area farms.