community food centre

I learned, early on, the rallying call of Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D'Artagan, "un pour tous, tous pour un." It shaped my sense of justice and solidarity.  And lately it has been echoing in my mind as I wonder about loneliness and lack of connections between people.

Kitchen Literacy illustrates that our relationship with food has undergone radical changes in the past 150 years.  Nothing is static... which means that everything can always change.  Indeed, we are seeing lots of new changes taking place in the food system.  By joining community gardens, shopping at farmers' markets, enrolling in CSAs or food box programs, people are starting to alter how they consume food or connect to it.

It all started rather innocuously.  Pawlick wanted to make a very simple salad.  He bought four attractive-looking tomatoes at the supermarket and discovered, once home, that they were too hard to slice.  So he decided to place them on the counter, to let them ripen.  They didn't.  After several days, out of curiosity, he picked one tomato up, took it outside and threw it against a fence, to see how it would fare.  "It bounced off, undamaged, like a not-very-springy, red tennis ball."  (p.2)  Why was it so?  Pawlick was hooked on finding out how the answer.

An hour away from Ottawa, Perth is a small community of 6,000 which swells to a total of 20,000 when including the greater Perth area.   Board members at the Food Bank were dissatisfied with their work. They were itching to try something new that would enable them to make a philosophical shift toward addressing the root causes of hunger and poverty.  At the same time, The Stop was looking for a partner interested in joining its food revolution.  The moment was ripe.  In a very short period of time, a new community food centre took root.