When I worked for the national leadership development nonprofit Coro Center for Civic Leadership, we used to conduct an annual activity where prospective Coro Fellows visualized an “ideal town.” I invite all of you to do that now, and specifically to imagine food access and the ideal ways people could access food in your ideal town that thrives in your mind. Take a moment to let your imagination wander. Wandering in our minds, imagining without structure or format, wandering with inclusion and love, can offer us opportunities to let go of stress, to seep in our power, into our knowledge that we may not often have an opportunity to do. For many of us, this imagination wandering can be an exciting way to break open a conversation with others during this subsumptive time called “the holiday season.” Expressing our ideal town and access to food in that ideal town can be a way to welcome in stories from the past, including our own, and provide pathways for exploration in ways that support us leaning toward one another.
For me, summoning up images of food access in my ideal town, specifically during Thanksgiving provides me with opportunity; the opportunity to bring what I know of Indigenous communities into my mind and to feel, maybe, how some in the diverse Indigenous community feel about this specific holiday in the past, and how they feel about it today. I can hold their varied perspectives and share some of what I’ve learned over the years from being a friendly person alongside, not necessarily within the community, by reading books, participating in workshops, and watching videos. I can share what I know with others around me and hold space for whether this is new information, uncomfortable information, or information to which they can contribute further perspectives.
I can take moments to understand what food access has meant and continues to mean to those multiple and diverse communities here in the United States whose ancestors inhabited this exact land long before my people arrived. What did they like the most about their food production that can be pulled into my ideal town, and in my actual town? What was the hardest? Who were the innovators of food production and how was that innovation received? I go in and out of applying knowledge to construct my ideal town, and actually wondering about our shared history here in the U.S., and about our present moment together.
I think about the act of drying out my bell peppers or my tomatoes as an act of seed saving, a practice across many cultures around the world. I imagine places of trade where items are exchanged based upon an agreed value of those items and think fondly of a barter session I helped host in Washington DC over a decade ago. I traded my kefir water grains for a pair of earrings made from old bicycle tires that I still have to this day. In my ideal town, what would I be able to produce to trade and barter for that consistently provided my family with items we needed and wanted? Would there be a space for bartering in my ideal town? How far away would people come, or would I have to leave my town to acquire the foods I could use? Would it be easy for people to come into my town, or easy for me to leave? I remember reading The Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, that many of the roads in the U.S. follow the same routes of the trade routes of Indigenous people well before railroads and highways were created, and I think…the genius of creating those specific routes lives on today.
What does your ideal town look like and access to food in your ideal town? What does the ideal town look like for those with whom you're spending Thanksgiving? What in your ideal town reflects the place in which you live now, or places where you have lived? If you feel comfortable, please share with us, we’d love to hear.