GAZETTE COLUMN: FOOD FOR THOUGHT – CLOSE TO HOME by John P. Flannery

Loudoun Grapes

Photo by John Flannery

When I was a kid in the South Bronx, my Mom bought a freezer and had meat sent in bulk from upstate New York farms to feed our family.

For a time we lived near a place called West Farms but it had long since become a busy traffic intersection with a movie house where I saw Ernest Borgnine play “Marty,” next to the elevated IRT train station, one stop away from the Bronx Zoo.  That was as country as the old neighborhood got when I was a kid.

But here we live in Loudoun County with all these small meat and vegetable farmers with fresh produce in rich variety and we are going to big box grocery stores to buy food stuffs from across the nation and offshore, rather than from our own local farms.

We’ve got lots of great fresh food here in these “thar” hills, and the more food that we buy close to home from our neighboring farmers, the larger their profit, the longer they may survive to farm, and the longer we may preserve the rolling green hills that makes this place country beautiful.

Laura Davimes founded “Loudoun Flavor,” a virtual on-line fresh fare farmers market, that you can examine for yourself at  www.loudounflavor.com , so you can do what my Mom did, order from home weekly to get fresh produce straight from nearby farms and delivered to a physical pick up location near you in Ashburn, Leesburg, Aldie, Middleburg, Purcellville, Waterford or Lovettsville.

Of course, my Mom didn’t have a desktop computer, or Ipad or cell phone to place her order but we do.

“Our network may be virtual,” Laura said, “but, trust me, the good food you get is super fresh and real.”

“I went to physical markets for years,” Laura said, “and I saw how farmers lost time in an unpredictable market, and left with unsold produce too tired to farm afterwards.”

“This was part of the reason,” Laura said, “I founded this market on-line where you can pick out what you want at the price you agree is fair from farms in Loudoun and Fauquier Counties we represent that cover about 5,000 acres of land when all the land is active.”

The “farmers and producers” are all found on line including the cattle and corn producing Meadow Hill Farm in Hillsboro. Obergood’s artisan goat cheese, Wegmeyer Farms’ pumpkins and gourds, Dayspring Farm Turkeys, salad greens and specialty vegetables from the Quarter Branch Farm in Lovettsville, and there are plenty more that supply this network market.

Laura left advertising, she said, because it was about “constantly manipulating people to buy things they don’t need.”  Her herb gardening opened her up to this other way to live, also a 90 year old farmer that she got to know, and now, Laura says, “everything that I represent is really healthy and good for people.” 

She shares John Muir’s view that nature is a “fountain of life” and, if we’re not careful, “we’ll have men in white lab coats in a sterile environment re-creating what we once had naturally from the earth beneath our feet.”

Laura says we have to respect nature, quoting Wendell Perry, “Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”