Autumn is perhaps my favorite season of the year. Late Autumn is the time of harvest, the frenzied growing, blooming, and efflorescence of life coming to a close. This natural process is a necessary fact of life that is true of plants in the garden as well as animals in the field.
Thanksgiving, not a Thursday in November but a way of living, is intimately tied to this season of harvest because our food is intimately intertwined with our lives. Currently, we are awakening to the shortchanging of the layered stories of our food and where it comes from for the convenience of modern industrialization. We have been separated from our food, separated from the land, separated from our customs. We are confounded by it, confused. As a solution, we have been furnished with food labels. We are provided certifications and stamps that assure us that someone, somewhere, has determined that our food meets the requirements of their requirement table. The food is good to eat because it is “organic” or “grass fed” or “antibiotic free” or “hormone free” or “rBHT free” or “GMO free” or whatever other chemical free thing they need to tell us is missing so we can feel better about the food. The lies of the agile and slicked-up labels are being exposed. To say nothing of those who would have us believe that “meat” created in a lab will somehow fulfill our human nutritional needs. Labels will never substitute for what we really need.
What we really need is connection. Connection to our food, to each other, to the land that gives us life. Connection to our Creator who is the entirety and the abundance we hunger for. Connection to our understanding of the meaning of this beautiful, wild existence we call life. That connection is story. The whole story and our place in it. The very food that allows us to participate in the gift of life, strong in body and mind, must be honored and esteemed and even fought for when necessary. We need our food to carry with it information of health, beauty, and goodness, deep into our every cell. Those messages come not just as macros and nutrients, but in the stories we can share with each other. Stories so we can know how our food was grown or raised. Stories so we can be accountable and responsible.
The process of my own waking up caused me to go searching for local farmers, local growers, local markets that understand this need for connection. So, when I stumbled across Mark and Anna Austin of True Blue Farm, their vision and mission statement resonated with me. ‘Real + Honest Food for Your Family’ is this farm family’s tagline. “We believe food should be grown with integrity, and families should be fed from local farms.” Well, yes, so do I.
The day they announced that they were raising thirty turkeys for Thanksgiving was the day that I threw my name in the hat and claimed one of them for my own family Thanksgiving table. Much to my delight, I have been able to follow along the journey as the turkeys grew and matured via updates on their @truebluefarmtn instagram account.
Knowing the story of my turkey’s life, that it was a good and pleasant life, makes me ever so grateful for the gift of nourishment the turkey will give to our family this year. We will stop and pray and give thanks for this beautiful creature. We will give thanks to our God for the provision of such a wildly beautiful ecosystem he created and thought us worthy to be a part of. And we will give thanks for Mark and Anna and their four children for stepping into the in-between space as reclaimants of food sovereignty as the dying gasps of the august experiment of industrialization expires before our watching eyes.
Since creating space for friendship and community is what 1819 Coffee in Thompson Station is all about, it was the perfect meet-up place for me to pick up my (frozen) turkey from Mark and Anna. Good conversation, developing friendships, and the absolute best cup of coffee (the signature Thompson) I have had in a long time, just as dusk was settling in made for an altogether enjoyable experience.
If you are in the Thompson Station, Spring Hill, or Columbia area, keep an eye out for this family and their community offerings. They are grounded folks and I expect we will see some developments from them that will be of great benefit to the local community and its farm economy in the days ahead.