“I think the co-op is on the forefront of a revolution in the way we think about food. It’s both a center for community and a center for health. Really everything we do, I think, is oriented toward bringing people closer to their food, having more of an understanding about what they’re putting in their bodies, where it comes from, and how that impacts both negatively and positively the world around them, and I think that’s really powerful. I think that kind of food movement is the beginning of a much larger cultural movement and it starts with figuring out what we’re putting in our bodies, why we’re doing it, and where that comes from.
I think we’re really past due for a cultural reinvention. While the manufacturing and all these great technological advances we have have really improved quality of life in some ways, I think they’ve also disconnected us in other ways and a lot of people out there are starting to feel kind of lost, just going through the motions of their day-to-day life, and I think there’s kind of a collective urge towards reconnecting and towards community. And I think that food’s the beginning of that. As we learn how to feed ourselves in the way that our bodies really want, we find that the food that comes from our neighbors that are local people that we know - and they’ve prepared it and then we eat it - that’s a connection we’re building with them.
Like as we begin to know these different farmers, suddenly we begin to realize what larger social changes we want to see and how if we can change the way we eat, if we can change the way we spend our money into a really healthy, holistic, community-oriented way, we can do that in any other facet of our life. We can find people in our community who make clothes and we can buy clothes from them. We can find people who are building homes from materials found locally and we can build our home with them. I mean, it’s really the beginning of reimagining what a connected community means now. And this is like an epicenter, an edge of that battle. Change radiates out of this place. People who step in here for the first time are introduced to a completely new world of what it means to eat, what it means to be well, and what it means to be part of a community.”
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