Your Kids Inherit The World Behind Their Plate

Ask most kids where their food comes from and they'll say the store. Not wrong. Just missing the bigger picture.

That's not their fault. It's the arrangement we've built. Almost everything arrives already finished–food, comfort, even the version of life we're sold–the product or service at the end of a chain. So the story gets skipped, the emotional connection gets lost, and the end product is what we get.

This isn't just about food. It's about what happens to a person when almost nothing in their life requires them to be part of the process that creates it.

What gets lost when everything is a transaction

Business does one thing well: it takes a long chain of effort–thinking, serving, building, production, years of learning–and compresses it into something you can buy in a short amount of time. That's not a bad thing necessarily. It's supported more people and bought more people more time than any system before it.

But somewhere in that system, we started measuring survival by a number in a bank account instead of the tangible things that are related to everyday survival. Dollars only work because it currently holds value. But what if it loses its value? Food, water, and shelter hold value by default and will never lose it–you need them or you won't survive.

The practical effect: most of us go years without doing anything related directly to our survival. We manage life from an opt-out position instead of participating in it. And that position has a hidden price tag.

How communities used to survive without dollars

If you go back far enough you'll find groups of people who didn't have dollars the way we think of it. They survived because everybody had a hand in the chain–the one who carried the water, the one who kept the fire, the one who knew which plants would heal and which would kill.

Nobody was disconnected from their own survival. Worth wasn't abstract. It was how you could participate. That's a different kind of security than dollars. Dollars can fluctuate. What you know how to do practically can't, your knowledge base is yours forever.

What this has to do with employment

Trading your hours for dollars isn't necessarily bad, but it is a trade–your time and effort for access to survival, mediated by someone else's idea about who your allowed to be, or become in exchange for it. That's part of why some work can feel like a cage. When your ability to survive depends on performing in a role someone else put you in, your really just an emotional slave.

The solution is participating in something that puts you back in direct contact with the chain affect–producing something, fixing something, making something, creating value so you feel like a participant instead of a spectator.

Our approach

What we want is for you to understand the chain itself, to experience the emotional connection or emotional equity if you will–the bigger picture that usually never gets experienced by the end consumer.

Practically, that looks like:

Knowing where it comes from. You can ask us any questions directly, how something was produced, our process, etc.

Hearing the stories. The actual reasons something is done a certain way and not another.

Building a relationship. We want to know you, and we want you to know us. Tell us what your kids thought. We hope to see you enough times that it starts feeling personal.

Buying. Every purchase you make from us is a chain linked together from every step in the process. An interconnection where one is interdependent upon the other. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

What we're building

Abundance is tied together by participation instead of isolation. We want to hand you a piece of it. You're not just a consumer at the end of a supply chain, but a participant in it.

That's the vision we're building. Real food. The knowing. The being in it. One meal at a time.

Feel free to check out the farm store here.