Among the many wonderful things that my mountain town has to offer is a community supported agriculture co-op, right inside city limits. Just a short bike ride from the downtown strip of the largest city in Vermont (pop. ~210,000) is a beautiful organic farm. The Intervale Community Farm occupies 35 acres of the roughly 350 acres managed by the Intervale Center, all of it bordering the original farm and homestead of our state’s founder, Ethan Allen.

For a very modest annual fee the ICF feeds me and about 500 other households in town for five months of the year. Each week we gather to socialize and harvest a cornucopia of greens, roots, vegetables, fruits, herbs and flowers.

Unlike a farmers’ market, where farmers travel to town in order sell as many goods as possible, at the ICF we go to the farm right in our own neighborhood, where our farmers are our friends and neighbors. We walk the fields and get to know our food and the land on a much more intimate level. We invest up front in the harvest, and have a stake in its outcome.

In a time and culture where food and society have a major disconnect I consider it an enormous privilege to know so well where some of my food comes from, who grows it, and how it affects the land I literally live on. It was with this mindset that I read the following essay written by Becky Maden for one of the farm’s newsletters last winter, and I deeply appreciated her insight into our national agricultural situation. Becky is one of the farmers that works to feed me each week, toiling in the rows to provide me food. With this essay she also provided some perspective.

Where Eating Local Isn’t a Challenge

By Becky Maden

For the past several years in Vermont, the “Eat Local Challenge” has been a huge success in raising awareness of where our food comes from, calculating the average distance our food travels and understanding just how fractured our food system is. Even as someone who grasps the realities of growing food for a living, the eat local challenges have opened my eyes to the gaps in our local food system – staples such as grains, flours, oils, nuts, seeds and soy products have few producers. Come winter, being a localvore is particularly difficult in Vermont, where each trip to the store means passing by the mounds of imported fresh food in favor of locally produced storage crops.

But this winter, my definition of local has exploded in my face. Instead of remaining in Vermont for the winter months, I have taken a leave of absence from the farm I help manage to explore farms and farming communities out West with my partner, Adam. Our entry into California was enchanting: We stopped at the first farm stand we saw, just east of Santa Barbara, and a huge veil of guilt lifted off us. Suddenly citrus, avocados, figs, dates, strawberries and olives were local! I nearly fainted from my excitement – we had been camping in the desert for 10 days, subsisting on potatoes that I transported from Vermont, some canned goods, and dehydrated tomatoes, peppers and garlic. The juice of a fresh orange, the cream of a ripe avocado, the overpowering sweetness of a date – YUM! All the foods that have been off limits for years, all the foods that we force ourselves to blindly pass by in City Market – suddenly they were LOCAL.

We’ve been feasting for over a month now. Each farm we visit, we are gifted with some treat that I can’t believe actually was grown there. This isn’t farming, I keep telling myself, this is heaven. Figs that I can just pull off a tree? Pick-your-own kiwis? Persimmons that just hang there for the taking when all the leaves have fallen off? Artichokes in December? Oranges, tangerines and lemons in abundance? Strawberries that bear fruit all year long? Do these people even know how lucky they are?

Each night we cook our meal in one pot over our camping stove. We’ve kept a log of our farmers’ market purchases, our gifts and our finds. One vegetable farm we visited gets mushroom compost from a local mushroom farm. They quickly realized that massive, beautiful portabellas continued to emerge from the compost. We were told to help ourselves, and we ate big pots of portabellas for nights. Other nights, we cook broccoli or kale because much of our time has been spent in coastal areas, where brassicas grow all year long. Occasionally we indulge in fresh tomatoes with feta cheese and olives, or couscous with delicious local dried fruits and nuts mixed in.

Then there is the wine and the olive oil. Even here, these two foods are extravagant, but local, very local, and very, very delicious. We tasted olive oil at a beautiful organic farm that was so spicy, it resonated in our mouths long after we swallowed it. And of course, in the interests of understanding the whole picture of California agriculture, we have done a lot of wine tasting, taken tours of vineyards and asked tons of questions of the tasting room workers, who simply want to pour wine and get us to spend lots of money. Instead, we take a sip, and ask, “What is your water source? What is your fertility management? Do you plant cover crops? Which ones? What trellising system do you use?” and so on, until our server realizes that we are not going anywhere quickly and will humor us with a few answers.

Redefining local, or rather, relocating myself in relation to localness, has shaken up my sense of agriculture, climate and seasonality. Traveling in warmer regions for a winter has put my system in a sort of limbo – the farms we visit still have weeding, planting and harvesting to do. Local eating here is just as easy as buying pretty much any produce you want to at City Market in the winter; indeed, most of the fresh food on the East Coast in the winter comes from this other coast. Visiting a broad array of farms – from the tiny organic farms to massive, sterile, industrial farms – has reinforced for me the truth that it is as much about how your food is grown as about where it comes from. Even though Driscoll strawberries couldn’t be more local than when we are biking through Watsonville, witnessing their growing techniques has repelled me from ever consuming their produce.

Ultimately, journeying away from a Vermont winter, away from months of winter squash, cabbage and potatoes, has broadened and deepened my appreciation of the food system we are creating in Vermont. Our community has made a profound commitment to eating food that is not only locally grown but sustainably grown. Driving through Bakersfield, Calif., one of the most artificially contrived agricultural regions in the U.S., made me wish everyone could see these sterile fields, see how the workers are treated, see how water floods the desert to grow lush food, and see how chemicals are sprayed with abandon on the fields. Witnessing this gruesome but predominant aspect of our food system disheartens me as I realize what an uphill battle we are fighting. But then I think of the CSA I help manage, and how at every pickup people praise the produce, of the abundant and diverse life in our fields, of the broader agricultural community we are blessed to be a part of, and I see a different picture emerging. One that is not about choosing between local or industrial food; it is instead about choosing community, sustainability and the pure joy we can experience when we engage in our own local food system.

Peter Wadsworth is one of Cloudveil’s Inspired Mountain Ambassadors. In his words: I’m a backcountry skier earning my turns among the weather-worn mountains of New England. I also trail run, climb, race bikes and even show up fairly regularly to a day job. But really, these other things are just enablers for backcountry skiing adventures away from the lifts and crowds.