Locally Grown - Availability for April 8th , 2015

Hey Local Food Lovers,

The Northeast Georgian newspaper in Clarkesville just gave Locally Grown some great press over the last week or so. One was a short column that I wrote. It had been almost four years since I’d written about local foods for the paper and a lot has happened since that time. Here’s the column. Hope you all had a great EASTER WEEKEND and we hope to see some of you at market this week!

Local Food getting easier to find

When I moved back to Clarkesville in 2009 local food was hard to find. While the normal thing to do is to eat the food that the grocery store sells, I’d had a few experiences that convinced me that fresh local food was better. And that’s a hard lesson to ignore once learned. Local food just tastes better. Scientists have proven it’s better for us nutritionally. And I just like knowing who grows my food. Farmers are interesting, generous, and good people. Each week when it comes time for me to make decisions on how I fill my belly, there are a hundred reasons why I’d like to fork over at least a portion of my money to a local farmer rather than a supermarket.

But in 2009 that was still hard to do. There were a few farmers markets around, but some were a little too far away, or they were small. Slowly but surely small farmers all across the area started talking to each other. And in April 2010 a little experimental website farmers market got going called Northeast Georgia Locally Grown. A year after that, the Clarkesville Farmers Market got started, then a nearby dairy opened, and a fruit and berry farm, and a honey farm, and a fella started growing mushrooms. And before I knew it, I was eating real good, and year-round.

Here we are about five years later, and a lot has changed. For one, if I want to eat local food now, it’s easy. Right now in my fridge I have local eggs, meat, milk, chard, spinach, lettuce, onions, butternut squash, potatoes beets, fig jam, and carrots. Those items come from about five or six different farms located near Toccoa, in Clermont, in Dahlonega, in North Hall County, and of course here in Habersham County. I know the farmers names. They are Nick, Scott, Tony, Ronnie, Larry and Brooks. I’ve been to all their farms. I’ve shared a meal with all of them, and hope to share many more.

But that’s not all that has changed in the last few years. School children here in Habersham and also up in Rabun County have eaten some of these same foods, from some of these same farms that I have. I’ve watched kids eat turnips and kale for the first time and tell me they thought it tasted good.

Last June over 500 people attended a tour of many of the small local food farms in our area. That’s a lot of people coming to the area because of their interest in fresh local food in the mountains.

Some change is slow and some change is fast. Some change is good and some change is bad. But watching local food becoming part of the culture of our rural area again is a welcome and beautiful thing.

We choose the things we value in life and local food represents values we all relate to, the health and well-being of our children, our relationships to community and to the land, our desire to learn more about the earth and our own health, and the joy of a good meal.

Last summer, farmers collaborated in getting more local food to our nearest urban neighbors in Gainesville, making local food easier to find there as well. Each of these steps, these relationships, these new farms that arise, or the expansion in their production, they seem so small when examined individually. But change is happening. It’s happening fast, and it’s the good kind of change. The kind that results in people valuing the important things in life, like eating well.

Justin, Chuck, Teri and Andrew