Can anyone really know where their food comes from? One way is to grow it yourself or acquire it from a local CSA or farmer’s market. Some might say limiting one’s diet to that degree equates to deprivation. Sure, it means giving up bananas and avocados for those of us in northern climes (as well as a lot of other things), but it is also challenges us to learn more about what grows nearby, it breeds intentionality around eating, as well as a sense of self-reliance. Most importantly, it leads to a stronger connection with the land.

Think back a hundred years when most people relied upon, if not participated in their regional food system. This was before we moved in droves to cities, before we got addicted to convenience, before everything was imported and became available 12 months per year at the grocery store.

I recently read ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE by Barbara Kingsolver about her family’s year-long experiment dining locally, both from their own farm as well as sources within 100 miles of their home. It was the year she and her husband moved from Arizona to Virginia with two children. The entire family signed onto a pact to become “locavore.”  I found it inspiring, written with a sense of humor while chronicling the challenges, hard work, and planning that comes with farm life and eating locally. There were unmet cravings for sure, but also showers of abundance and joy while the family discovered that buying, dining on, and sharing food within a local economy built health, community, and a connection to place.

Any vegetable gardener will tell you the only thing more satisfying than eating one’s home-grown produce is sharing it. Before cooking, one might say it is the truest expression of love. I’ve experienced that joy on a small scale for years, but the dream that led to our investment in Flynn Creek Farm was wanting to do it on a larger scale. I’ve learned small farms like ours are slowly disappearing. This is because in order to be competitive on price, and to sell food as cheaply as Americans have come to expect, big mechanized operations  specializing in a few crops with lower amounts of labor are more likely to be profitable. Large scale operations, however, use a lot of energy and water, and typically rely on chemicals, not to mention the impact of transportation to market. They tend to lack biodiversity, and around southwest Wisconsin you see a lot of corn or soy for animal feed or for the ingredients in processed foods. Besides damaging the topsoil, many of the practices of big operations have had ill effects on people’s health.

For the past eighty years, our country has been on a terrible diet. It is something most of us are aware of, yet how to source and prepare healthy ingredients four our dining habits is time consuming and expensive. It has become a privilege of the wealthy to have access to healthy, fresh ingredients. At Flynn Creek Farm we are hoping to change that.

Growing up in the seventies and eighties, my mother was a housewife convinced by marketers on the time saving benefits of canned and packaged food. As a result, I grew up on sugary cereals and SpaghettiOs. She would cook a real meal from scratch on occasion (if you consider a Campbells cream of mushroom soup a natural ingredient), but when my father was away on business and it was just the two of us, I spent many evenings dining on a lot of frozen dinners. Later, as a teenager and young adult struggling with weight gain, I was determined to take control of my diet. In the process I learned a great deal about nutrition, and an ensuing distrust of what I’d been raised on as well as what was offered in school cafeterias and college dining halls. The feeling that the system was conspiring against me combined with other factors and resulted in a debilitating eating disorder.

Even as I recovered from the worst parts of that illness, I continued to view the middle aisles of the grocery store as chemically laden junk marketed by men on Madison Avenue. The same men who touted the perfect female body made it almost impossible to be healthy.  It was the same patriarchal system that blinded the average consumer from knowing the truth about where food came from.

Fast forward to September 2023 and the elation I’m feeling as we harvest produce at Flynn Creek Farm and deliver it to Forage Kitchens, the small fast/casual dining chain that is our partner. Those baby seedlings we watered, put in the ground, and took care of are being served in people’s grain and salad bowls.  It’s both the high quality of our veggies and our value of being  100% transparent that gives me great pleasure.  I remember that first team lunch meeting at which we recognized our lettuce and cilantro in our salad bowls and, well we got a little giddy. An average consumer can walk into Forage restaurants, and for about $12, receive a meal packed with nutrition and grown with a lot of love. Even though this summer has been a pilot year, including all the start-up bumps in the road, sharing our food with the community has everyone really jazzed up and ending the season on a high.

We’ve embarked on this enterprise well aware that as Americans, we’ve been trained to have low standards around most meals. People are stretching a budget and extremely busy and, as a result, view eating as a way to get full. We’re betting on the fact that delicious and nutritious will win in the end.  That’s this farmer’s side of the bargain at least, the rest depends on the consumer. When the topsoil, the community, and the climate are at stake, then eating locally is a no-brainer. Flynn Creek Farm hopes to convert consumers who care exclusively about great taste as well.

In addition to ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE I take this moment to recommend a couple of series and films that are streaming. CLARKSON’S FARM on Amazon Prime is one I’ve been both laughing along with and cringing with uncomfortable recognition.  For a less jocular insight into the food system, watch episodes of ROTTEN on Netflix or a documentary titled POISONED.  And don’t be intimidated by a 12 month family pledge to eat local, try it yourself for thirty days (preferably not during the dead of winter)!!