Food at the root

People are talking about food in several ways these days in Cottage Grove. Conversations are happening at the farmers’ market, at community meetings, even at a commercial kitchen, where the dream of succeeding with a food business is front and center.

Sustainability builds community

Sustainable Cottage Grove, for one, is facilitating engagement about the local food system and is providing workshops and education about food preparation, food preservation and healthy meals as part of its greater mission to promote sustainable living practices, enhance mental and physical health, and foster interdependence among community members. The project, formed in 2011, operates beneath the nonprofit umbrella Another Way Enterprises, and Rob Dickinson, Beth Pool and Richard Sedlock are among Sustainable Cottage Grove’s core organizers.

They host a monthly potluck on the first Friday of every month at the Rural Organizing Project building. “It’s really more of a social gathering than a meeting,” Dickinson says. “We welcome anyone.” Ideas are shared and plans are made to fill in the gaps where the community food system is concerned.

Sustainable Cottage Grove sponsored the “Southern Willamette Valley Community Food Assessment” in 2016, together with the Oregon Food Bank, Resource Assistance for Rural Environments, and Americorps. The numbers within the published report reveal the need for ongoing community engagement regarding food: 19.2% of the population in Cottage Grove and Dorena live below the poverty level, with 29% of children living below the poverty level and 65.3% participating in Oregon’s Free and Reduced Lunch program. The assessment also looked at the communities of Drain, Curtin, Elkton, Creswell, Lorane, and Yoncalla. Its findings helped to galvanize community efforts toward organizing the weekly outdoor South Valley Farmers’ Market, which has since expanded to include fall hours indoors at the Cottage Grove Armory.

“Certainly, the farmers’ market and farmer cooperatives have been success stories,” Sedlock reflects. Providing ongoing adult education about nutrition and healthy habits also has been at the top of the list.

“I’ve always been passionate about food,” admits Pool, who taught home economics in the Bay Area before retiring and moving to Cottage Grove with her husband, Richard Sedlock.

A certified Master Food Preserver, Pool teaches a series of classes about canning fruits and vegetables, smoking and drying meat, pickling and fermenting, and making food gifts for the holidays.

The other way Sustainable Cottage Grove has had an impact in its community of more than 10,000 people, has been to encourage food production via backyard gardening. They’ve also worked to improve healthy nutrition in local schools, which has included installing gardens and greenhouses. In fact, a greenhouse kit currently awaits assembly at the Al Kennedy Alternative High School, where Sedlock serves on the school’s Gardens/Orchard/Greenhouse advisory board and tends to the school’s 53-acre orchard.

There are long-range plans, too.

“In addition to our food system efforts, we see ourselves as much more in the community-building business than anything else,” Dickinson says.

For example, Sustainable Cottage Grove is one of several community partners that has been involved in helping to secure economic development planning assistance for the city of Cottage Grove from the USDA through the national Rural Economic Development Innovation (REDI) Initiative. The initiative draws on four national partners to deliver the assistance to communities who applied through a competitive process: One of those partners, the Rural Community Assistance Partnership, will be providing Cottage Grove with technical assistance for up to two years using Wealth Works, a model by which communities identify and market their local assets rather than focus on an individual business.

This is where Kim Johnson and the Bohemia Food Hub – a main benefactor of the REDI Initiative’s assistance – come into the bigger picture.

Hub with heart

Community building is at the center of Johnson’s goals, too. She has created a line of food-related businesses along 10th Street that includes the Bohemia Food Hub, the Coast Fork Farm Stand and the Food Truck Hub, just next door to the farm stand.

“This is my dream,” says Johnson, a well-connected and experienced food entrepreneur, who has been developing her food hub idea for the past six years as owner of the long-neglected warehouse space that now serves as a 3,500-squarefoot commercial kitchen for several food businesses. (You won’t see a sign at the food hub yet, but you can’t miss the building with Roger Pete’s resplendent mural of the Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly.)

“When I bought this place it had been empty for years and years,” Johnson says.

At the time of the purchase, she had owned Tsunami Sushi with a friend and wanted to grow the business. She sought advice and mentorship from RAIN Eugene, now The Eugene Accelerator. When her friend decided to move on, Johnson renamed the business Real Live Food, installed a small kitchen in the warehouse to start, added fresh collard wraps to the menu, and then expanded her product reach into the Portland market. That’s when things really scaled up quickly.

“I kept growing the kitchen to accommodate the growth of the business,” Johnson says.

Since then, Johnson has sold Real Live Food to a fellow tenant at the food hub, Sohr Foods, and is focusing on developing the food hub concept. Based on a Lane County public market and food hub analysis completed in 2014, elements of a food hub conceptually include a wholesaling outlet, a food lab and demo kitchen, cold and dry storage, food prep space, a meat processing space, along with technical assistance and office space. Some of these elements are already in place.

Johnson’s vision, however, is even more deliberate, encompassing local entrepreneurial efforts to produce food and helping to foster her community’s food-centric economic development.

Her Coast Fork Farm Stand provides a critical retail link for the community and the food hub, not only stocking local produce and products, but also selling everything that’s made inside the commercial kitchen: Real Live Food’s collard wraps and sushi rolls; Hot Winter Hot Sauce; Lola’s Fruit Shrubs; herbally infused Wildfire Elixirs; Dirtballs snack balls; Ketovore Life, foods to fit a Keto diet; and Boho Boto organic and herbal tinctures. Looking ahead, Johnson says, she’d love to have a baker join the food hub.

At the front end of her warehouse space, she envisions at least two restaurants, where customers can enjoy locally made fare, as well as what she calls “pilot pods,” or trial spaces, for budding restaurants or food trucks not quite ready to go it alone. Three food trucks are already in place at the Food Truck Hub, with developed space for four more.

The kitchen still needs work, admits Johnson, who is in the process of trying to secure funding from Oregon Business out of its Strategic Reserve Fund. Johnson believes that more kitchen equipment will diversify the type of tenants the food hub could support, including food producers in the local Guatemalan and Latino communities.

Only connect
Other elements integral to her food hub,Johnson says, are maintaining strong ties to the community’s farmers and growers, and including value-added events and opportunities, such as pop-up restaurants, or a mentorship program for high school and college students with food business ideas – or food preservation workshops.

Beth Pool of Sustainable Cottage Grove is 100% committed to that food preservation education.

“Making people aware that food is fundamental to everyone’s functioning – physically, mentally, spiritually – is critical for me,” Pool says.

“Beth is a dear friend of mine,” Johnson says. “We’re trying to figure out how does Sustainable Cottage Grove connect more at the hub; and when we build office space, is this maybe a home for Sustainable? Could Sustainable become the nonprofit umbrella of those sorts of activities at the food hub?”

No doubt these many ideas are fodder for more community building within Cottage Grove’s growing alignment around food.

”I’m really proud of my community here and the way people rally to work together. Those partnerships are really important,” Johnson says.

Originally published in the Register Guard