Food and Community

Our Summer issue, #167, offers a feast of articles on “Food and Community” for readers of every dietary preference. Food and community are both at the core of our experience as human beings. Food brings us together and helps us understand and define who we are in groups. It highlights our interdependence and brings up core issues such as how we make decisions, how we relate to one another and the earth, and how we balance individual and collective needs and preferences. Our authors share stories and explore issues from locavoracity to global consciousness. Get a taste of this issue on our website, and consider ordering your copy today!

To purchase a print copy of this issue, contact Communities’ new home at GEN-US.

Articles in “Food and Community”

• Publisher’s Note: We’re Floating (Almost)! by Laird Schaub
• Notes from the Editor: Recipe for Community by Chris Roth
• How the Kitchen Is the Heart of a Community by Devon Bonady
  A shared kitchen provides not just physical sustenance, but emotional benefits and greater connection to our food and one another.
• Cookin’ Dinner for the Revolution by Jesika Feather
  A vibrant, reliable, and nourishing home-base can provide activists with a much-needed feeling of sustainability.
• We Got An Egg! A Study in Scarcity by Heather Barnes
  At the Global Village, schoolchildren get a taste of impoverished peoples’ struggles to feed themselves.
• Why I’m a Locavore by Megan Kemple
  By eating food grown locally by farmers we know, we can create a strong and resilient local food system and a healthier community.
• Hot Topic, Raw Emotion, and the Spice of Life: Chewing over Food Choice in Community by Tracy Matfin
  At La’akea, members’ various approaches to food reflect the quest for emotional as well as physical sustainability.
• My Journey with Food in Community: A Banquet, in Five Courses by Gigi Wahba
  Whether among families, friends, communitarians, or neighbors, food has many roles and provides critical context for community functioning.
• Make Food, Make Hygge, Make Happy by Jane Moran
  The art of creating intimacy, conviviality, and contentment is an essential ingredient in vibrant community.
• Discovering the Joy of Communal Food: Camaraderie and Work at Maitreya Mountain Village by Dan Schultz
  A community pioneer finds greater satisfaction in becoming less independent.
• Feeding Each Other by Iris Sullivan
  Food is love, social glue, and perhaps our best opportunity for kinwork.
• The Community’s Garden Orchestra by Chris Roth
  Engaging in collective food-production is like making our own music together: it’s both difficult and rewarding, especially with diverse players involved.
• How Do We Eat As If We Plan to Be Here for Another 10,000 Years? Cultivating Food Culture in Stewardship of Place by Olivia Rathbone
  The Occidental Arts and Ecology Center suggests that in addressing the eco-crisis (or “crisis of home”), the best place to start may be around the dinner table.
• Fours Ways to Grow at Heartwood by Sandy Thomson
  Small to large in scale, and solo to collective in orientation, a palette of gardening and farming options helps feed this cohousing community.
• Urban Flex Farms: Farming on a Bicycle by Sylvan Bonin
  In the face of structural challenges, some urban farmers are finding innovative ways to serve their neighborhoods.
• Belfast Ecovillage Produces Farm by Sarah Lozanova
  In the face of structural challenges, some urban farmers are finding innovative ways to serve their neighborhoods.
• The Balancing Act of Farming in Community by Coleen O’Connell
  Is Cobb Hill a model of how to do community and farming cooperatively, or a case study in their challenges?
• Cardboard, Control, and Catch-22s: Community and the Food Production Dilemma by Moss Mulligan
  Even our best-intentioned gardening and farming methods may be more a part of the problem than the solution.
• Glimpsing the Wild Within: the Sacred Violence of Eating by Lindsay Hagamen
  Embracing the eternal dance of Life transforming itself from one form to another also means accepting our own sometimes-bloody struggle to survive.
• Re-Imagining the Hunting Camp: Feminism, Huntresses, and Community by Mary Murphy
  The practical and spiritual work of hunting can bring together a new kind of huntress community with space for emotion, reflection, and feminist spunk.
• Cool Pickles by Albert Bates
  Good for the soil, the climate, and our digestive tracts, biochar often finds itself in a pickle at The Farm.
• Small and Large Miracles: Food, Land, and Community at Kibbutz Lotan by Alex Cicelsky
  Food production, permaculture, and communal meals are at the heart and economic center of this group’s life.
• Celebrating the Local, Shared Bounty at Groundswell Cohousing by Julia Jongkind
  The love of food—growing it, eating it, sharing and preserving it—has been what holds these cohousers together through thick and thin.
• Tribal Potlucks with a Mindful Twist by Bill Kauth and Zoe Alowan
  Potluck meals become an art form, and Thanksgiving dinner an opportunity to eat slowly, silently, and attentively.
• Creating Cooperative Culture—Misconceptions about Sociocracy by Diana Leafe Christian