Join the Real Food Revival

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In Gibson’s case, customers soon realized that the high quality of his produce was ample reason to join. “Many of the people that I sold to said they looked forward to getting my food, and when the season was over, it was hard for them to go back to the regular stuff — that’s my testimonial for taste.”

Buying Clubs and Farm Visits

Another increasingly popular model for connecting farmers and consumers locally is the buying club. Joel Salatin, whose family raises meat and eggs on their diversified Polyface Farm in Swoope, Va., uses this technique.

“It’s really just a sophisticated name for a drop point,” Salatin says. All the buying clubs are in residential areas that Salatin visits on a six-week schedule. Customers pre-order meat and eggs, and they receive e-mail reminders a week before he arrives at the drop point. “The beauty is that there’s no speculation; it’s all pre-ordered,” he says. “It’s great from an efficiency standpoint because you come home with an empty vehicle.”

Salatin says that for livestock producers, another advantage buying clubs have over farmer’s markets is fewer regulations. Some farmer’s markets don’t allow meat sales, and many don’t allow live animals, such as the hens he likes to take along on his delivery trips because children enjoy seeing them. The buying club system has advantages for the consumer, too. “The customer gets full pick of everything we have in inventory, not just what we bring to market that day,” he says.

Salatin offers a discount to those who drive out to Polyface Farm to buy their meat and eggs because he says those visits build important relationships. “We try to position ourselves so that we have an informed customer,” he says. “You have to think, ‘What’s it worth to you to have your customers really “get it” and get on your team?’” Salatin says the increased awareness of today’s consumer makes it easier for small-scale farmers to make a living. “People like us have been in this for 40 years,” Salatin says. “Now customers understand that quality is worth paying for, and we can get a premium.”

At his Four Season Farm in Harborside, Maine, Eliot Coleman sells mainly to food co-ops and restaurants, but he’s also intrigued by the possibilities of on-farm sales. “This year we’re actually reopening our old farm stand, which we haven’t done since 1978.” Coleman says he’s looking forward to reviewing his sales records to see if direct sales increase his profits, but he adds that raising produce offers rewards far beyond potential profits. “There’s the fun of growing it,” he says, “and the fun of knowing that you’re feeding people. There’s a satisfaction in getting fresh food to little kids that makes it worthwhile.”

Putting Real Food on the Menu

In addition to the growing number of farmers selling directly to the public, local growers have been extending their reach into restaurants and cafeterias. For the last decade, Chez Panisse Restaurant’s founder Alice Waters has taken her message of fresh, nutritious foods into public schools through her Edible Schoolyard project. Last year, Waters convinced the Berkeley Calif., Unified School District to make food a part of the official districtwide academic curriculum, and she helped set up the Sustainable Food Project at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., too. Farm to School programs, which connect local farmers with schools in an effort to make school lunches more nutritious and to educate children about food, are gaining popularity across the United States — 17 states now have them.

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