Before beginning my work with local foods I had traveled once around the globe, but had never stepped foot onto a working Iowa farm, never driven the streets of the Broadway neighborhoods and never eaten raw Kale out of the fresh soil-and now I’m never going back. As Local Food Connection’s summer intern I’ve had just a few short weeks to learn about the ins and outs of non-profit work and become involved in the numerous ways in which Local Foods functions in our community to support local food production and encourage healthy, organic, local eating. From my work in the office to the evenings with clients at the farmer’s market to working on one of our CSA farms, my experiences with local foods have been more educational and more varied than I ever expected. These experiences have also truly affected my entire outlook on our community and our greater world.

Having been born and lived most of my adult life in Iowa City, I came back this summer thinking I knew the place pretty well, traveling within my own small world of the Coralville/down town areas, buying my produce from grocery stores and thinking I was being pretty environmentally conscious riding my bike to work now and then and recycling my plastic. I now know that my practices, though helpful in decreasing waste production, did not go nearly as far as I had hoped in benefitting my local community. As a small part of Local Foods’ work, I now feel that I am directly involved in helping the community and the specific environment in which I exist to become more healthy, empowered and sustainable. Local Foods Connection really takes in and addresses all aspects of the bigger picture. In working toward our mission of donating regular, healthy meals to low-income families, LFC provides educational activities to help our clients learn not just the how but the why of the food they are eating. They, like myself, are given the opportunity to visit the very farms on which their produce is grown and are guided in methods of preparing the sometimes unfamiliar foods they are given-pairing experience with education to create a more complete understanding. In working toward this understanding, I have been fortunate enough to meet and spend time with the families and children that our organization serves and have witnessed many a bright eyed-smile upon their being handed a box of fresh produce that they can place upon their table that week. In connecting with the families we serve and the farms we help to support, I too have come to appreciate this greater understanding and the impact it has upon both the land we rely on and the people walking around on it every day.

As is obvious, it was not my expansive knowledge about local food that brought me to this organization. It was instead my human rights interests, which have not in any way been failed by this fundamentally human-based organization. I’ve heard executive director Laura Dowd called amazing, an Angel and the city superhero, and I have no claims to suggest that she is anything but all of these.  With Laura’s direction and the partnerships with community members and organizations, Local Foods goes far beyond facilitating the donation of fresh, healthy produce to families in need. It’s about educating our community on how to serve its most impoverished members, how to curtail our habit of eating food shipped over long distances through methods that harm our environment, how to support our local farms and figure out how the food we eat grows and travels from root to refrigerator. In my eyes, this small organization is tackling not one, but multiple issues our community and nation faces on many different levels, and doing it quite well. I’m both thankful to be a part of such an important project and excited to continue learning more about the community and world that I thought I’d known and been living in for my quick twenty-one years on this planet.

Sarah Minor, Summer Intern