What would happen if a whole town decided to take on the Eat Local Challenge? Although that is not the case for the May Challenge, our little community of Camptonville hosted one of an ongoing series of town meetings Monday night, and developing local food sources is right there on the top of the list of most important needs, along with activities for children, getting a biodiesel plant, and keeping track of our county's General Plan revisions in the next few years, as we are in the most rural portion of a rapidly urbanizing California county, Yuba County. Sponsored by the Camptonville Community Partnership, a non-profit that grew out of an Annenberg Rural Challenge grant a decade ago, our town has been hosting informal meetings for a dozen years ...
looking at how to improve daily life and revitalize what was once a resource extraction-based (logging) economy. Over the course of that process, the Partnership has distilled out three main goals:
A vital present and a promising future for our children
A healthy and sustainable rural environment
A locally-connected and earth-friendly economy.
Neighbors providing services to other neighbors is viewed as one of the more promising ways to bolster the local economy, as well as cut down on the necessary commute to find work, which is currently over one half hour each way for most people. Our sub-group working on economic issues to bring back to the larger town meeting Monday night spent considerable time brainstorming on how to get a bio-diesel plant located here, and assigned some tasks related to that, but we did manage to get around to talking about food resources before our alloted time was up.
One community member, Rita, was a prime organizer for Come Home to Eat, a food forum presented in our nearest larger (as in go-there-to-shop) town, Nevada City at the end of March. This event led to an ongoing work group to develop and keep track of local food resources, which meets monthly in Nevada City or adjacent Grass Valley. We appointed her our community link to what is going on there, as people in our local community are interested in the knowledge but not necessarily oriented towards driving over an hour to a meeting. Rita hopes that we will be able to source necessary food from a much smaller range than 100 miles, more like a 25-30 mile radius, and we do live in a rich area.
We also learned that we had a blueberry grower, Mimi, living in our community. Mimi's land had been developed as a five-acre Pinot Noir vineyard, but it is harder to maintain their health than that of blueberries, so they are in the process of converting over, and had 200 pounds of fruit to sell last year, most of which went outside of the community. We had a brief and lively discussion of ways to connect growers and eaters, and determined that, while starting a Farmers' Market three seasons ago was a positive move to get surplus produce to buyers, since it was only open in August and September, we needed to build awareness of other local food resources (after all, we can't just save eating for those two months out of the year!). There is another vineyard, Montagna Rossa, that is for sale, which may soon be a source of very local wine!
I volunteered to work together with Pam, who has produced a few editions of the Gold Pagesover the past six years, a directory of local goods and services, which she will update again this year. I will be compiling a food resources section to incorporate in the new version set to be published January 2007. I am hoping that next year, more of our community will have the knowledge and tools to join in the Challenge, as we all work together and share our knowledge. We each have a little piece of the puzzle and together we have a much better chance of making the Challenge a town reality.
