Vermont's Local Banquet

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A strong regional food system —one in which the people of a region are participating in their own food production in both sustaining and sustainable ways—is community based. As much as this system grows food, it grows people, encouraging relationships of collaboration and mutual aid, respect and care. No longer at war with nature and each other, unburdened by that ancient power relationship of us over them, and having given up the self-destructive effort to control life, people actively work with life in a community-based food system. In this way, they practice “relational agriculture,” building the social fabric that leads to a truly sustainable food system for all. In order to build this necessary social infrastructure, however, we must be empowered to take charge of our diet. We must increasingly remove ourselves from the dangerous dependency we currently have on a government-subsidized, industrially run, petroleum-based, profit-driven food system that provides our sustenance through cellophane-wrapped packages that magically appear on grocery chain shelves from who knows where. But the removal of ourselves from this system necessitates that we accept responsibility for feeding ourselves, growing our own food, practicing root cellaring and putting food by, extending the growing season, and sharing resources and labor as neighbors, while at the same time supporting our local and regional farmers through CSAs, farmers’ markets, and farm stands. Post Oil Solutions , a citizens’ group serving southeastern Vermont, was founded in 2005 to assist and empower people in their efforts to re-localize. During the past five years, the group has launched a number of high-impact projects related to local food. The core organizing group of a dozen citizens, our AmeriCorps VISTA volunteers, and the countless number of local residents who have worked on individual Post Oil projects from Brattleboro to Bellows Falls are truly building a regional food system that has the potential to sustain people, animals, and land seven generations from now. Re-localization, Resiliency, and Redundancy As its name suggests, Post Oil Solutions is informed by a vision in which we recognize both the end of our petroleum-fueled civilization and the need to transition to the new world we’ve already entered. In this way, we are part of a larger movement, both in Vermont and elsewhere, that believes this transition can only be successfully accomplished through re-localization. The process of re-localization happens when communities increasingly come together in collaborative ways to meet their needs around food, energy, transportation, education, the local economy, wellness and health care, and everything else in our lives that is now dependent upon black gold. Post Oil Solutions’ initial efforts were aimed at helping people re-localize around food: organizing community gardens, a winter farmers’ market in Brattleboro, CSAs, an Eat More Local pledge campaign, workshops on how to eat out of a garden 12 months of the year.

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