community

 We lost someone from our community recently, someone important to me and others.  As is by now typical with us, we lose more than we gain, we have a shortage of people coming up to fill the shoes of those leaving. My earliest memories of him are from when I was twelve.  He was perhaps eighteen, had gotten done with high school, had a job bagging groceries, a decent car of his own and was spending his spare time chasing around after girls.  I admired that.

He moved to employment with our local petroleum and fertilizer supply co-op, soon worked his way up to manager and spent thirty plus years in that capacity, managing a crew of twenty five and more seasonally.  He was the one I needed to approach when I wanted to get our meat products into the convenience store that was part of the operation.  He was reluctant at first, wanting to do it but not quite sure our licensing was legal(it was).  He worried about it and it took nearly a year for him to get to the place where he wanted to chance it.  This was now ten years ago, perhaps and we have done well there.  

I have thought much about this lately, in these times of upset in food supply and worries about pandemic.  That convenience store was (and is) well stocked with "food" from who knows where.  The shelves are restocked by a truck that just shows up regularly.  But our products, produced on our own farm, and processed locally only showed up on the shelves after an extended period of worry on the manager's part and serious conversation between us including whatever guarantees I could make.  He and I had grown up in the same community, had spent at that time perhaps fifty years working near each other, had done much business together which taught us that we could trust each other, and yet he worried.

This is what our food system does to us. We are all tempted to give too much credit to the food supply illusion that surrounds us, letting it take precedence over our own hard won knowledge of the people around us, only to see that system fall apart at the first pandemic.