Eat the change you want see
On Friday an unknown customer warmed our spirits with this beautiful cardboard packaging feedback form that came to the warehouse at the end of a bitterly cold week.
It was also timely, Fair Food turns fourteen this week and this was as good as any birthday card.
This time of year I always look back to when we opened our doors in 2010, delivering a small range of fruit and veggie boxes once a week to about twenty volunteered verandas that two hundred customers came and picked up from.
Things have changed since those heady days and since that time we have delivered food in the fairest fashion we could finagle to over thirty-three thousand different front door steps.
And in that time so many of you have also sent us your “Thoughts and feedback” in recipes, in pictures, stories and poems (thanks Virginia), on cardboard boxes and inserts, on cards, on emails and social media.
We have shared your produce highs and lows, cooked your recipes, felt your frustrations with supermarket unfairness and your weekly support for farmers and makers that helps builds their and our faith to give this crazy-hard job another year.
Back when we started I proposed, “Eat the change you want to see in the world” as Fair Food’s tagline (it didn’t make the cut).
It was tongue-in-cheek, but there was ring of truth to it – if food was something everyone had to eat three times a day, every day, then here was an opportunity to make a difference three times a day, every day.
Fair Food wasn’t your direct action kind of activism; battling to save a forest or stop a new coal mine, instead it was a more circuitous and cumulative type of protest emanating from pantries and veggie crispers.
And as the years pass it’s added up; as of this birthday Fair Food will have paid our organic farmers and grocery makers $40 million and helped close to 2 million kids discover (you should whisper this bit) that they’re actually an intricate part of the nature they thought they were coming to CERES to study.
And once someone knows that, who knows where it leads to…
Thanks, happy birthday and have a great week
Chris
