As we’ve entered the winter season of feasting and fellowship, we are thinking again about the abundance that is gathered and shared through the BAFM. As you read on in the spirit of abundance, please consider donating goods (canned tomatoes and shelf stable 100% fruit juice are most needed) to the Gregory Food Pantry or leave money on their account at Bruns Market. Many people right here are hungry— a reality that may seem hard to believe because of its silence and invisibility. We hope you’ll support anti-hunger work right here at home.
This year, the Market used a grant from the SD Specialty Producers Association to go for the once-in-a-lifetime shot at hosting Chef Brave Heart at the market. We loved spending the day with her and listening to her talk about her values and vision for her craft. You can learn more about her on the Place Well Tended podcast she joined recently as a guest. We hope her menu at BAFM was an experience in local food that everyone remembers for many years.
Pilamayaye, Chef.
We thought a lot about culture and food this year. Like the gifts we make through a meal of roast and roots and buns from scratch AND the ones we make from a box of macaroni and cheese with hotdogs. They are both offerings of love, of sharing, and of satisfying hunger. Those meals are our culture here and now – carried from generations of love and of suffering, of connection but also disruption. They nourish our families and community. They tell a story about who we are together and also how we might sometimes try to explain our differences.
As you might imagine, food storytelling is our favorite. Recently, we enjoyed thinking about the oldness of frying onions and ancestors through Meg Conley’s Dancing with Ghosts in my Kitchen:
“Onions have been cultivated for over five thousand years. So the smell of cooking onions is older than currency. I sang along to the music streaming from my AirPods. The song was new, but the moment felt old. Dancing is more ancient than money too. I stirred and swayed, moving with the women who came before me.
A woman in Ireland, with green eyes like me, stokes a cooking fire. She hums. Nettles, parsnips, onions. There are some worries. The baby has a cough. She saves one fleshy onion leaf from the heat and dips it into butter sweetened by the bog. She bites down, hard. And then twirls and spins me around. …”
And don’t miss joining us in journeying through Lyz Lenz’s The Eternal Comfort of the Casserole, a dish she (correctly, we think) describes as “[t]he food of grief and the food of survival. The food of holding together.” We were pleased Lenz could give language to that casserole food + feeling we’ve all experienced in both deaths and births here in our rural Midwestern lives.
All this to say we are excited by the possibility that awaits as we continue to explore food together as a community. In 2023, we hope to highlight and celebrate unique cultures, to understand each other a little more, and to create something beautiful together.
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