Growing Grains, Cultivating Communities
Thoughts on food and community for this Thanksgiving Holiday
Welcome to all our new subscribers! We’re glad you’re joining our community. While our thoughts this week tend toward the USA for the Thanksgiving holiday, we hope that everyone is able to find the time to connect with those you love.
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Cheers!
Meet Your Community
As I have sought a genuine community, I've discovered that my most profound connections often revolve around food, specifically grains. Perhaps it is because of their role as the core of many cuisines - in bread, noodles, dumplings - that it is nearly impossible for me to separate my thoughts about grains from my thoughts about community. Whenever I am asked about feeding a sourdough starter (or natural leavening), my mind fixates on the idea of connection. Natural leavening embodies a network of relationships that require nourishment and time to flourish - a perfect metaphor for community. While the term “community” gets tossed around a lot these days, it is something I think about a great deal, as I truly feel that it's missing from our everyday lives.
It feels inevitable that I would eventually find my way to the Comunità Slow Food del Grano dell’Alto Appennino tra Bologna e Firenze (often shortened to the Comunità), a community that I’ve been fortunate to engage with over the past couple of years. The path from seed to beer, bread or pasta involves quite a significant network of people that we may assume are deeply interdependent, yet often have no connection to one another. It’s an elongated supply chain with few points of intersection among them.
The Comunità resists this conventional path. Instead, it is an interwoven network of seedspersons, farmers, millers, bakers, brewers, agronomists, researchers, as well as advocates and enthusiasts. Their mission? To foster a community dedicated to creating space for those who want to build a resilient, shorter, interconnected supply chain, to celebrate the value of regional grains and to attempt to break free from a conventional food system characterized by monocultures, chemicals, and faceless products.
It all began with Matteo Calzolari, who, after taking over his father’s bakery, Forno Calzolari, realized that he did not know the who or what behind the flour he baked with daily. Fast forward 20 years, and you see the depth of the relationships he has built with millers and farmers in the mountains between Bologna and Florence. Together, they have reconstructed their own short supply chain- eventually (and somewhat naturally) evolving into its own community of like-minded individuals. Inevitably at the Comunità’s core, they are ignited by a similar interest: reconnecting the dots from seed to product, a process that used to happen almost effortlessly, but now takes deliberate work and action. This is just the beginning of a few posts about this community (one that is very dear to me), as it has shown me the potential and tangible value of gathering together around food.
Each month, the Comunità hosts a “Veglia” - a revival of historic gatherings of farming families, with food, music, dancing and lots of conversations and stories. One member of the community will host - maybe in their home, in the barn or in the stables - wherever there is space to gather. During one of my visits, I sat around the table shucking dry corn from the cob, discussing the price of wheat and eating a freshly baked panettone made with local products and natural leavening. The beauty of this kind of gathering is the space for connection, building relationships with one another and one’s food, and bridging the past and the present. This way of being enables the community to draw from its history to create meaning in the present, without sacrificing growth and forward thinking.
Feed Your Community
While we may not all have the interest to gather around the table to discuss grains or the harvest, it is intriguing to think how this experience relates to Thanksgiving, tomorrow’s holiday in the United States. A holiday that has transformed significantly from its initial purpose of gathering to celebrate the harvest now finds us deep in the impersonal, sterile robotic aisles of the supermarket, fighting for the last can of jellied cranberry sauce (the kind that maintains its Slinky-form and lasts indefinitely) and debating over whether to buy a 20- or 24-pound Butterball turkey without any clue of its origin. We have become disconnected from our food, from our table and from each other. They say that in the United States are experiencing an epidemic of loneliness. I cannot help but wonder if it is not just that we feel isolated from friends and family, but also from the wider community and understanding how we all fit together.
So, how did we reach this point?
Similar to the way that we have stripped the nutrients from a refined white flour, we have stripped the community from our dinner table. We have stopped prioritizing gathering, because it is not per-se “productive” (unless it’s a work Zoom meeting).
However, the more I see pockets of gathering, whether at dinner parties, at the farmers market or in the barn for the monthly Veglia, I see the power in community, the opportunity for important and necessary conversations, and the real joy of connection.
So where do we go from here? What can we learn from the Comunità in how to approach community and food? Engage with each other around the table. A consistent, regular moment of connection. Thanksgiving may offer such a moment, but in my opinion, once a year is not enough.
Stay tuned for part 2 of this series, where we'll hear directly from community members. For now, we’d like to take a moment to encourage you to find (or think about creating) similar groups as you build or nourish your own community.