Faces of Local Food

by Jonah Goldberg


St. Louis is an agricultural powerhouse. The roughly 12,000 farms in the metropolitan area form a $2 billion dollar industry, and nearly half of the United States’ agricultural productivity occurs within 500 miles of the city.

From an airplane window, this section of the country is a gorgeous patchwork of varied shades of green. But when you’re down here, hearing and smelling it, most of the industry does not take place on the idyllic pastures of yesteryear. These are factory operations. St. Louis is proudly the home of the Gates Ag One and the international agrochemical giant Monsanto, who have effectively monopolized and set the conditions for modern industrialized agriculture: coverups of the known risks of pesticides for worker and consumer health, apathy for environmental degradation and an ironic weakening of the soil by crops promised to generate increasingly higher yields, and the crushing of small farmers’ ability to earn a living. All of these issues are visible in Monsanto’s (now Bayer) own archives, and a clamor of growers, consumers, scientists, and activists are desperately trying to raise awareness. The data show that our entire food system is unsustainable, destroying livelihoods, ecosystems, and our health, treating not just animals but humans with cruelty. 

So where does that leave us?

There are sidewalks I pass every day where weeds and grass stubbornly emerge from cracks in the concrete. In one spot, the root of an old, adjacent tree has broken the surface entirely, folding the sidewalk up like paper and forcing me to dismount my bike to avoid an uneven jump. St. Louis is an agricultural monolith, but when I started to look, I quickly found more and more cracks—St. Louis is also home to one of the country’s most robust networks of independent farmers, community gardens, and specialized restaurants and markets that buy from them, all fostering an alternative system that better supports our health and environment.

Like with the plants, this didn’t start with an organized plan. The only way to understand the local food movement in St. Louis is to meet the individuals passionate and smart enough to break through a dominant system designed to bulldoze small operations and sustainability. Their combined efforts help us rediscover an ecosystem that can support everyone without destruction—the fertile soil that has always been beneath the pavement.







What a local food farm or seller looks like


“Some people think you have to have 200 or 1,000 acres to make an impact. No, you can make an impact in a very small space… Just start with one little thing. And as you’re comfortable, grow from there. It can cost you $0; I’ll teach you how to make it all out of trash.”


Danielle Meert lives in the only house on the street without grass. She mentions this as a guidepoint when she texts me her address, and it’s apparent the moment I arrive that the last house on the block forms an entirely different ecosystem from its neighbors. The front lawn is flat and mostly brown, and the land next to the driveway has a giant mound of wood chips obscuring an even larger pile of logs. The only green in front of the house is in the driveway itself; a variety of vegetables are growing in a couple dozen yellow plastic buckets, most of them starting as old food her compost pickup customers threw away. Wooden crates and pallets, as well as spiny sticks vertically stuck into the buckets, shield the crops from deer, rodents, and birds—the house’s location at the edge of the Klamberg Woods Conservation Area, also mostly brown at the beginning of April—mean animals frequently raid Danielle’s property. The wood border is less successful in protecting the tiny garden from her neighbors, who have complained about the rainbow stripes painted on one of its sides.

Danielle arrives just a couple minutes after me. She steps out of her pickup truck wearing a floppy sun hat, pink sunglasses, grey pants and work boots, and a shirt that reads “Protect Trans Rights,” a cause that I’ll quickly learn dominates the half of her time that isn’t taken up by farming. It isn’t until Danielle begins to show me around the property, her voice filled with an excited, slightly rushed energy that will hold strong for the whole three hours I’m with her, that I understand how much is actually going on in the wash of brown. We walk over a stone path across the front lawn, and she points out tiny violet flowers that she plans to distill into syrup, raspberry shoots, and a handful of other young crops. As she vocalizes for me the map of the garden in her head, I have the oddest sensation of putting on a pair of high-tech or magical goggles—the lawn transforms in front of me from a condemned mess of dead leaves to an edible landscape, just waiting for the St. Louis weather to commit to spring before it sprouts. Now, as Danielle leads me around to the backyard, I know what to look for, and the scattered oddities out front coalesce into the absurdly wonderful and ambitious terraforming/composting/gardening/education project that is MOShrooms Regenerative Microfarm.


*

“Some people are coming at it with that savior stuff. Those of us that are doing it for our own life sake will always be doing it.”


Kirsten Detec is engrossed in her work pulling spinach when I arrive at Fresh Starts Community Garden. She cuts a small figure, her silver hair partially covered by a hat with the garden’s name on it and fading into her grey shirt and overalls.

She is tending to one of eighteen beds here rented by the non-profit Urban Harvest, about half of the community garden, which is a fenced-in rectangle adjacent to a park, two churches, and an unused plot of land that makes me wonder why the garden isn’t three times its current size. The produce grown here will feed the surrounding JeffVanderLou neighborhood, a food desert with many low-income families. Like at MOShrooms, there isn’t much to look at even in early April, and many of the beds are overgrown with weeds.

Today is one of Urban Harvest’s Community Days, the first of 2022, where no volunteer signup is required and the website encourages individuals to drop in and help out, “or just to take a moment to reconnect with nature. Bring a book or a cup of coffee and sit at our community table, take a stroll between the raised beds, or snap photos among the plants.” My unannounced arrival is thus completely expected. While at 9:00 a.m. this Saturday it is just me, my roommate Daniel, farm educator Kirsten, and volunteer coordinator Sam Mendoza; an hour later two other boys about my age also show up for their first time, telling Sam they saw Urban Harvest on Instagram. By the end of the 2.5-hour window formally marked as Community Days, there are nine of us.

Sam, who always wears bright colors on Community Days to help newcomers find it, is the one to get us situated and put us to work, but when I mention that I’m writing about local food systems in St. Louis, she directs me to Kirsten. Sam came into this role through a passion for teaching children, having previously worked at the Saint Louis Zoo, the City Museum, and the Missouri Botanical Garden. Kirsten, on the other hand, has been working at gardens across the country for 20 years, and her wide knowledge of food systems started with fighting for her own life, and a life-altering encounter with the same variety of spinach she’s working with today.


*

“I just literally, at one point in my life, thought, ‘Just eat better shit.’ All this commodity stuff is filled, FILLED, with antibiotics and unnecessary toxins that you can’t taste but you eat every time you eat it. It’s fucking bananas that someone thinks that this should be the plan.”


Like with most brand names, I didn’t think about whether there was a real “Mac” behind Mac’s Local Eats. I came to the burger joint just south of the St. Louis Zoo for the other two words in the name, and because my roommate had ordered in from here recently and they sold damn good burgers. The restaurant’s patties are made from locally-sourced, whole animal protein, a recipe that couldn’t be any further from factory-farmed fast food. 

The restaurant’s aesthetic reflects these values. Most of the tables are occupied by families, and the rustic wood interior includes a board game shelf that a few customers borrow from while I’m there and a large display of dry goods for purchase—seasonings, snacks, alpaca yarn products—all from local farmers.

I’m waiting in line with two friends to order at the counter when a tall, middle-aged, bearded man in a hoodie and shorts asks us if it’s our first time here. When we say yes, he welcomes us and lets us know we can also order food at the bar on the opposite wall if we want to sit there.

On a whim, I ask the restaurant employee, “Are you Mac?”

“I am!”

Chris “Mac” McKenzie works as front-of-house staff at Mac’s Local Eats, greeting customers and clearing dishes. He’ll tell me later that interacting with guests is his favorite part of the job, and an important one. “It’s what I’m good at. It also helps bridge the gap between their interaction with us, and us, if that makes sense. So I can get some feedback, whether it’s good or bad. I’ll take it. I want it all.”



What it literally means when you’re buying local


My task is to help Danielle take the logs overshadowing her driveway and move them behind her house, where she can then continue turning the steep, wild hill into a set of terraces for mushroom growing and rain collection. Ellisville doesn’t allow visitors to home-based businesses, let alone organized volunteer groups, but when I read this on the MOShrooms website and asked Danielle for a virtual tour, she said having just me wouldn’t be an issue, and I offered to help out while I was here in return for the favor. In that way, my visit is just like everything else on this property, repurposed for multiple functions. For example, the logs are from the neighbor’s oak tree, who was relieved to drop off the detritus instead of having it removed in a more expensive way. For a little over a half hour, we ferry half of the load from the front yard down a winding path largely built by Danielle’s Uncle Bob, who she keeps mentioning during my visit as he seems to have handled all of the stonework around the house. The terraces we pass each lap are stone stacks reinforced with concrete, wood, and packed soil (Danielle tells me that Uncle Bob sourced some of the rocks from Wet Willy’s, a janky but nostalgic and beloved waterpark that was open in St. Louis when Danielle was growing up). Depending on their thickness, I grab between one and six logs each time. Danielle tells me about an agricultural landscape designer she’s close with who estimated he would charge tens of thousands of dollars to build a terrace structure like this. Meanwhile she’s pulling it off with free materials and just her family’s labor. It may not be award-winning architecture, but it is still formidable and will be prettier once the plants grow.

Danielle’s truck never makes it into the garage; instead, she removes from the truck bed the food waste she collects from around 50 paid subscribers in the two nearest school districts and brings it into this room to begin its transformation into compost. Bins in the basement, which would house forgotten storage in anyone else’s home, are filled with fermenting compost (and worms), and the basement is lit by pink growing lights that tomato plants bask under. The concrete portion of the backyard features two larger compost piles, cubes with six foot sides, and another array of tubers and vegetables, growing in buckets that Danielle received from a nearby Dairy Queen, which if not given to her would have been given to the landfill.

In a couple weeks, Danielle will bring her four chickens back to this property from her husband’s house in St. Louis Hills (they had started farming on both properties by the time they were married, making it difficult to give up either property)—the birds normally pick at the food waste throughout the first legs of the year-long composting process, and the fermentation the piles undergo lead the animals to provide more nutritious eggs and fertilizer. Even the chickens are reused—retired commercial hens (past their “productive” age for industrial farms, though they still lay eggs) that Danielle acquired from local nonprofit Second Hen’d. Finally, when the crops benefiting from the compost have grown, Danielle sells the fresh produce to the compost pickup subscribers, who have the fun satisfaction of having contributed to growing the food on their plates. Hence the title of Regenerative Microfarm; MOShrooms is a closed loop, and almost a one-woman operation, save for the support of her husband, their son Miles, and Uncle Bob.


*

On April 2nd, at Fresh Starts Community Garden, and on April 9th, in the playground/garden amalgam behind Flance Early Learning Center, Urban Harvest tasks me with planting and pest control. At Fresh Starts, that means raking a couple beds free of the annoyingly firm and deep weeds that reclaimed them during the winter, and distributing sprouted potato chunks into holes Kirsten has dug. At Flance, it means digging holes and placing lettuce seeds in them, as well as moving a pile of unusable dirt with a shovel and wheelbarrow from the parking lot to a makeshift sandbox. The garden beds here are raised, meaning the only pest concern here is the 3-year-old students. All of the produce from this garden goes into the kids’ lunches and into portions they can take home to their families, and on Wednesdays the kids help with farming. Of course, knowing this hasn’t stopped the curious youngsters from digging in the garden, and Sam has reasoned it will be worth the investment to make them a separate dirt pit to play with.

At Fresh Starts, Daniel accompanied me and my assignment so that he could explore ideas for a final paper for an environmental justice course. At Flance, I’m trading off hoisting the wheelbarrow with Max, a first-time volunteer and a graduate student at Loyola University Chicago, also writing an ethnography, also for an environmental justice course. We are the only volunteers that day. Urban Harvest Community Days seem to draw in a very specific type of person.

Urban Harvest has ten paid staff members, few of whom work full-time. The non-profit is funded entirely by grants, donates all of its produce to people in need, and currently supports farms at four partner locations in total. The newest is Rung for Women, a local nonprofit providing holistic support and educational, professional, and economic resources for women. The team is still recovering from the loss of the Food Roof, their best-known farm until the building that housed it closed down last year. Because all of Urban Harvest’s farming locations are owned by their partners, these changes are out of their control and always a risk. Kirsten expects the current set of partners to remain stable moving forward.


*

At Mac’s Local Eats, I’m just here to eat. 

The menu is lean, to use the same word Mac does. Burgers are the only entree, arranged into twelve items based on toppings and choice of beef, pork, or veggie patty. “I mean, we don’t even have salad on our menu,” Mac jokes when we talk about sourcing ingredients. “We’re probably the only restaurant in St. Louis that doesn’t have a salad on our goddamn menu.”

Currently the restaurant buys cows and pigs from ten different farms around St. Louis. To select them, Mac did exactly what I’m doing now: site visits and conversations with the farmers. “You know, I went to them,” he tells me in our phone interview. “I went to all of them. I went to the processors.” It’s that human connection that Mac seems most passionate about. Personal relationships have driven every step of this business.

The restaurant was an unexpected evolution of Mac’s Local Buys, which today Mac estimates is only around 10% of the business. Beyond the retail shelves in the restaurant selling local farm products, Mac operates a meat share system for around 60 customers, meaning he buys whole animals from processors and distributes the cuts.

The meat shares transition into a larger food subscription each summer when other crops are available, which Mac refers to as a Combined Community Supported Agriculture (CCSA). The acronym was coined by the founders of Fair Shares, a similar program operating in St. Louis. Fair Shares CCSA co-founder Sara Hale explained to me that she used to be a traditional CSA customer, having an investor-like membership in one farm, who gave her a portion of the harvest (MOShrooms has a CSA model, though Danielle didn’t use the label herself). That farmer told her that running a CSA as a single farm was challenging because they couldn’t offer diverse produce. So Sara and her sister Jamie invited all the farmers they knew to a meeting, recruited those farmers to talk to their friends, and created a bigger system that minimizes risk for consumers and ensures a larger, stable market for farmers.

I’d been walking by one of Fair Shares’ weekly pickup sites all the time without knowing it. Step into the basement of Trinity Presbytarian Church on a Wednesday afternoon, and you’ll find a small team handing out paper bags filled with food. The staff and volunteers know all the customers by name, and they rush around in an enthusiastic, no-stakes Bingo competition to check off the customer names on their clipboards first.

In the case of Mac’s Local Buys, the CCSA is a 13-week subscription, providing vegetables, eggs, 1-4 pounds of meat, bakery bread, and sometimes a shelf-stable treat to tie it all together. Mac describes the farms he partners with appreciative camaraderie, mentioning the farmers by name and enthusiastically telling me to reach out to them too. And he reveals that each basket is thoughtfully curated. “We try to make the items each week go together,” he says. “Our whole point was, we’re not gonna solve the grocery store problem, but let’s put a dent in it.”



Why normal people decided to revolutionize the food system


Danielle’s passion for environmental science first took her out of her hometown of St. Louis, then compelled her to return. She majored in Environmental Management at Ambrose University in Alberta, Canada. Her undergrad roommate, who was also from St. Louis, had a rare form of uterine cancer. Except rare cancers are hundreds of thousands of times more common in her neighborhood in Florissant and the 20-mile of Coldwater Creek that flows past it than in the general population. In 2019, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry confirmed that radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project, dumped by Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, created this higher risk. The lesson was clear: Contamination and environmental degradation aren’t restrained by geographical or temporal distance. 

That lesson crystallized when Danielle moved to New Orleans to pursue a Ph.D., studying nutrient pollution in the wetlands. Much of the pollution was coming from St. Louis. “At my very first grad school interview,” Danielle recalls, “my Ph.D. advisor, Mark Hester, told me, ‘Whatever you do, when you go back to the Midwest, tell them to stop it.’

“So that’s what I’m doing,” she laughs. “I’m here, I’m back in Missouri, I’m telling people to stop it. You don’t have to kill your grass, but could you stop fertilizing your grass? Or if you want something green, put in clover. You don’t have to do all edible landscaping. But you should, because it’s fun.” She goes on, bursting with knowledge, about the second and third order consequences of chemical fertilizer and factory farms, including how it worsens the wetlands’ ability to act as a storm buffer for the mainland. Though she doesn’t make the connection out loud, I wonder if she ever holds commercial agriculture responsible for Hurricane Katrina destroying her research site, forcing her to cut short her Ph.D. program in environmental science and finish with only a Master’s degree in biology.

“I just want people to care about other people,” she continues. “Some people only care about what happens in their own yard… I know some of my neighbors absolutely hate us. They would much rather me have grass, but I’d much rather they not have grass.” It’s not until then that I realize the rain collection apparatus Danielle is anxious to set up is not about free irrigation; it’s mostly making sure that her yard doesn’t contribute to flooding in Kiefer Creek below, which feeds into the Meramec River, then the Mississippi River, leading all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

Between Danielle’s undergraduate and graduate education were a few years spent teaching English in South Korea and serving with the Peace Corps in Gabon, where she learned about compost and cultivated her first garden, respectively. Back in St. Louis after school, her first foray into local food was as a courier for Perennial City, another residential compost pickup and CCSA service, whose green bin I set outside my back door every other Monday to be emptied and returned along with my weekly orders of Buttonwood Farm eggs and Ozark Forest Mushrooms shiitakes. Danielle combined her knowledge of Korean Bokashi composting with Perennial City’s model to make something all her own.


*

Kirsten began feeling the effects of the thyroid disorder Grave’s Disease at age nine, and the illness held her hostage through her teens and twenties. “By the time I got diagnosed, I was going blind,” she recalls. “I had to go through two years of medical treatment at Beth Israel that didn't really reverse the issue, and they told me if I didn't get my thyroid out that I would not survive. But I don't know, something in me was not having it. So I chose instead to take myself off all of the medication and try—I didn't know what another way was, but try another way.”

At age 27, living in Providence, Rhode Island with her sister and her brother-in-law, Kirsten’s illness “was at a point where leaving the house was not really a thing.” She hadn’t been able to work for over a year. She struggled to eat and weighed only 80 pounds. When her brother-in-law forced her to leave the house and accompany him to the Providence community garden, it was purely to improve her emotional health. But when he handed her a leaf of spinach to try, it was the first time in years that food sat right with her system.

“Some intuition in me woke up. The flavors translated into my mind as energy and nutrition. And in the simplest terms, I became addicted to that feeling of knowing that energy inside me was possible again, and so I just kept showing up and the more I showed up, the more energy I had and the further away from illness I got.” In the 20-odd years since then, she hasn’t stopped working on farms and community gardens, focused on providing herself with healthy food and educating others facing the chronic diseases of the Western diet.

Right. While Danielle’s eccentricity can fall back on academic credentials, it took longer for me to work through the way Kirsten speaks. Her voice is on the deeper side, and she is deliberate in articulation and in content. When Daniel asks what equity farming means to her, she begins her answer with, “So equity farming is, as all of language is, a generalization of something that shouldn't honestly be put under such a generalized hood. But I will just speak to the way that our operation deals with equity farming, and I'll just speak about it in tangible instead of esoteric ways.” Kirsten has this grounded presence, and she’s scientifically minded. She reads research papers on micronutrients and internal chemistry on her own time to better understand chronic diseases like hers. She follows other states’ experiments with hydroponics and alternative food systems, knowing more about California’s current struggle maintaining its almond farms than I do as a native Californian.

Yet Kirsten speaks with raw conviction about energy. Prefacing it accordingly by saying “This is off the record”—she then leans forward with a hand cupped over her mouth and a fake whisper, reassuring me—“it’s not though,” she mentions benefiting from the advice of an ethnobotanist in Costa Rica who taught her Ayurveda, a holistic medicine discipline originating in India that today’s Indian Medical Association calls pseudoscience. Of the many plants she keeps in her home, she only purchased one. “Everything else has just been because it sprouted in my kitchen, or it was left here and didn’t have a home. All the rest of it was literally just me not being able to let energy die.” 

There is nothing spiritual, not even yoga, attached to her outlook. She has worked her own miracle, going into remission with diet as her only medicine, but she makes clear that her results came from rigorous tracking of food sources and studying the enzymes in our bodies. One of her wishes is to create an app that lets you scan a supermarket barcode and see where the ingredients come from and what safety regulations those countries have on exported food. The simpler solution is to grow your own food.


*

Like Kirsten, Mac got into local food for health more so than environment, just deciding one day he wanted better proteins. The environmental concern is present though; he mentions Monsanto killing the soil with Roundup when I bring up speaking to composters. Mac switched from supermarkets to the local processors that farmers sold their animals to, and quickly learned that it was easier to buy the whole animal, which the processor could then package as the specific cuts you wanted.  “I thought that was fantastic,” he says. The hitch was that buying a whole animal meant paying for a lot more meat than his immediate family could eat. So he cast a wider net to split the cost. “For six years,” he continues, “every time I needed beef or pork I sent an email to friends and family. Well that list grew and grew and grew. And I began spending a whole lot of time on keeping these things organized.”

Around the five-year mark, Mac’s job as a Unix system admin at AT&T was relocated to India. The company offered to keep him if he moved there. As Mac pondered finding a new job, his wife encouraged him to incorporate his side project and make money off of it, seeing that he was passionate about it and that other people liked it. Until then, the meat shares had been informal—“We were able to do that out of Civil Life Brewing Company [owned by a friend’s brother], use their fridges and the freezers in my house. I didn't tell the city about those… it was kind of under the radar-ish, or maybe not as legitimate as it needed to be.”

The operation was growing unwieldy. Mac tells me that the last sale before he incorporated—“Watch this,” he begins, though he’s telling me this over the phone—“if you were part of the buy, you needed to drop off a cooler at my house. And you know, it’s not a tiny little 12-pack cooler, you need a cooler, man, and so there would be coolers stacked on my porch in my house in the city, like 20 deep and tall.” On that last buy, he hefted 12 whole pigs to 48 customers. I could hear the splayed hand gestures in his voice.

This weekly tower of meat coolers feeding a village from a residential property and not a full business began to concern his wife. She finally told him, “You’ve got to stop selling pork shoulders in dark alleys.”

Soon after, Mac incorporated Mac’s Local Buys and went searching for a retail location. When he found a place for sale next to a dive bar, the bar owner asked Mac if he would also be willing to take over the kitchen. Worst case, Mac thought, he’d try it, it wouldn’t work out, and Mac’s Local Buys would still be going strong. So he took the risk that the public would like the smash burgers he’d been making in his own home for years, and Mac’s Local Eats took off.



Practitioners’ hopes for the future


Danielle drives me from her Ellisville property to her husband’s house in St. Louis Hills. I’m not surprised when again the truck stops at the only house on the block with a brown lawn. Their four chickens and two ducks gaily jump between compost piles and waddle around the in-progress garden. As Danielle is giving me another tour, a woman with two elementary school-aged girls holding white paper bags walk by and stop at the side of the house.

“They really love chickens,” the mother says apologetically.

Danielle doesn’t mind, and launches into another enthusiastic spiel, telling the mother that any St. Louis household can legally own up to eight chickens and how they make great pets. The mother’s next question is of course about the compost piles, and I enjoy getting to hear as a third party the same start of the conversation Danielle had with me, with Danielle noting that she’s going to start teaching classes on gardening and composting at the library across the street soon if they want to learn more.

Danielle had inadvertently warned me about this an hour before. 

“I think one great way to talk to people is through gardening. Like I have met more neighbors—my husband has been at his house for 18 years—I’ve met more people in the last year since I started the project than he met in the first 17 years. Because I’m just out there turning compost piles, and people are like ‘what are you doing?’ And then I talk about climate change and composting and the coordinated nationwide attack on transgender kids and they’re like ‘Oh, I had no idea!’ And I’m like, ‘You’re welcome!’”

Danielle brings up “composting and the coordinated nationwide attack on transgender kids” in the same breath at least three times when I’m with her, as if the connection between the two is more obvious than the link between peanut butter and jelly. She has a justification when I directly ask for that connection—if trans people are going to have a harder time getting jobs and healthcare, she can teach them how to start their own microfarm businesses—but the two causes she fights for really only seem to fit together because she makes them so.

Despite the way she talks about her yard projects as unfinished, Danielle also acknowledged that she’s nearing the limit of what she as an individual can do. She outlined the next move for me early on at her house, as we crossed a little wooden bridge over the creek, to a spot where plastic gems littered the ground from some fantasy game the neighbors’ kids must have been playing. With that same energetic passion, she told me her fantasy: this property will become a retreat center. She plans to apply to establish a non-profit soon. Families with trans kids will fly in from around the country. Danielle will provide a shared outlet for everyone to share their anger and problems, then she’ll lead workshops on how to testify at their state capital, as she’s been doing with intense dedication for the last two years, and finally teach everyone her gardening practices, so that they can expand the impact of her environmental solutions in their own communities.

The trees around Danielle’s property make the place feel like a secluded nature reserve in the summer. But I don’t know if they’d provide enough cover for her to run what she half-jokingly calls a “leftist agenda training ground” in a residential space, next to Missourian neighbors who already don’t love her Black Lives Matter sign and constantly hound her and local authorities to move the visible side of her operation, like the pile of logs, somewhere they don’t have to see it.

Depending on the political wind, Danielle will be a hero or an outlaw. She’s currently fighting a bill in Missouri that would classify gender-affirming surgery in minors as child abuse. She regularly has to drop everything to drive to Jefferson City and testify on short notice, and it’s clear this is incredibly emotionally draining work. For respecting the identity of her son, who first stated at two years old that he didn’t feel like a girl and hasn’t gone back since, she could theoretically be convicted of a felony.

It’s hard to picture the retreat center coming to fruition. But I imagine that she faced similar doubt when she first dreamed up MOShrooms. I walk away from our time together only able to say that Danielle Meert is indisputably part of the solution, not complicit in the problem, and if she did manage to get all of us to adopt similar practices, we’d save the world.


*

As we sit on the slightly lopsided picnic table in the middle of Fresh Starts Community Garden, I ask Kirsten point-blank if the work she and other small farmers are doing is contributing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. With her practical mindset and sense of humor, my question doesn’t offend her, and she says that absolutely they’ve made a difference in St. Louis, though St. Louis organizations can’t fix the rest of the country.

Scholarship like that of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future pushes for resilient food systems, which are always described as needing to be implemented at the local level. Urban Harvest is a microcosm of resiliency, still providing food despite losing their best farm. But Kirsten is mainly describing a bigger picture.

“A resilient system has many players all specializing in different stuff, so that if something goes wrong and one player has to drop out of the system, it doesn't crash the system and there are other people to be there for the catch of whoever is now not served through that player disappearing. St. Louis is kind of a perfect model of what they’re talking about, because there are so many urban farmers here right now, so many gifted farmers, so many people serving their community that yes, not only are we making a difference, we're making it unnecessary for everyone to go to Dollar General and get the groceries they're offering now. If you feed into that world, then you just keep it going.”

She clarifies, “As grateful as I may be that Dollar General—which is often what people have in neighborhoods where they don't have access to fresh food—is selling produce now, that just keeps us reliant on their big homogenized bullshit. So yes, for everyone instead to have all of these small projects where more of us are feeding each other in smaller ways, it does end up working.”

Urban Harvest itself has no current expansion plans. Like Danielle, Kirsten is already doing everything she can for this cause with the resources Urban Harvest has. “We're not the kind of farm that raises our poundage goals 200 or 300 or 2000 or 4000 pounds each time; we can't right now,” she explains. “We just stick to what's working, and then as we get more sites, that's when we go look for more partners. But there's not even a reason to do that, because at this point all the partners we have are able to take even more pounds than we’re giving. So for us, that forward momentum would still be that, even as we grow more, we'd just be able to give more to the same partners.”

The only organization I speak to that has expansion plans is Known & Grown STL, a project run within the Missouri Coalition for the Environment. Known & Grown provides a formal network for farmers within 150 miles of St. Louis that meet their criteria for environmental stewardship and ethical livestock treatment, to share resources and advice, including organizing bulk orders on equipment to bring everyone’s costs down, connecting farmers with buyers, and curating a Local Food Locator for consumers like me. MOShrooms, Urban Harvest, and Mac’s Local Buys are all part of the network.

Rae Miller, one of a team of two that runs the program, has brought together farmers to discuss what they needed most at every step of Known & Grown’s development. She believes in the model, and, with more funding, she hopes to expand the program across Missouri. Of course, Known & Grown is not itself a farm. Expanding means supporting more existing farmers, which means it is still incumbent on new people to take up this work.

Neither Kirsten nor Rae has an easy answer to getting newcomers involved. “I think a lot of people are always going to want convenience, and this is not that,” Kirsten says. “So it will always just be for the people who are seeking it. Other people will choose their own way, but at least it gives an alternative to the way that is absolutely directed by capitalism and the people who have money.”


*

A couple months after Mac opened his own shop, he approached the nearby Civil Life Brewing Company to ask about promoting his business there.

“I went down there and I said, ‘Hey man, I want to cook a pig on your parking lot, and I want to give it away to all your guests. I just want to give it away and tell them I’m selling high-quality pork, and maybe they’ll buy some too.’ And he goes, ‘Fuck, Mac, I’ll do you one better. How about we throw a house party? We're new. We want to do a house party every year. Why don't we just create an event together?’”

That event ran for five years as Pigs and Pints. Its success led Mac to star on national TV, in an episode of the Travel Channel’s show Underground BBQ Challenge.

It’s the community feeling at events like this that drives Mac. He often wouldn’t sell anything when he tabled at markets—he just gave meat away and talked to people. So it’s no wonder that Mac has turned down offers to franchise his restaurant or open up a second location himself. It wouldn’t sit right with him not to be present at both places, not to mention he’d be taking more time away from his family. Like Danielle and Kirsten, Mac is extending his arms as far as he can reach, without straining the personal relationships that ground his work. He’d love to see more local meat processors to meet the pandemic-stretched demand at his operation and others, but it’s not his place to build and run one. He’s got his hands full continuing to provide healthy local food for the people looking for it.



There are heroes in the St. Louis local food system. Their work shows that grassroots buyers, sellers, and networks can have a meaningful impact on the health and environment of a region, but also that their work alone can’t cover the whole country. We have to keep sending up small shoots through cracks in the sidewalk. More of us need to seek out, if not actively create, these alternative systems, if we want to protect the planet and see everyone in our hometowns healthy and fed.