On Oct. 14 and 15, Sustainable South Sound hosted Come to the Table: A Food Summit. This event was an opportunity for members from all parts of the community to come together and network with other people who are invested in their local food system.
The summit kicked off on Friday with a potluck in the streets. Hundreds of people made their way downtown and packed several long tables with everything from kale salad to chocolate cake. Lately there’s been a lot of streets in many cities that have been filled sidewalk-to-sidewalk with people, but it’s not often that these people are there because they want to sit down and have a meal with each other. The mood was festive and the food kept coming up until volunteers from local food organization, GRuB started breaking down tables and the crowd filed into The Washington Center for the Performing Arts to listen to food activist Mark Winne speak about what a community can do to promote local, sustainable food.
Winne has been a voice in the local food movement since becoming executive director of the Hartford Food System in Connecticut in 1979. In the past few years he has turned to writing and speaking to help communities become closer and more sustainable through good food. He spoke mostly about the dangers of the industrial food system and urged the audience to distance itself from major corporations and develop food independence.
On Saturday, just about 200 people filled up the Heritage Hall at the Lacey Fair Grounds. The goal of this meeting was to get voices from all sections of the food system together to come up with a plan for a strong, local-food system. After opening speeches, people split into groups concerned with different aspects of food such as, Justice and Fairness - which was focused on the humane treatment of farm workers and livestock as well as the accessibility of food to all members of the community. Or Sustainable Ecosystems was the discussion centered around ways to protect the habitats in which our farms exist, and ways to distance ourselves from reliance on non-renewable resources.
The Summit lasted several hours, and hundreds of ideas ranging from the practical to the seemingly unattainable were thrown around. The next step is prioritizing these ideas and coming up with plans to achieve them; this will be spearheaded by the Ecological Agriculture program here at Evergreen. There’s a long way to go, so if you’re interested in helping out, contact Sustainable South Sound and ask how you can get involved!