I’m taking a trip down memory lane this week to a time when life seemed simple, and we discussed politics at someone’s kitchen table. Young offspring would be in another room sprawled on the floor playing with cards, board games, Barbie dolls, and plastic horses with all of their paraphernalia.
The town where I grew up was simple. A couple of fires over the decades burned parts of the center of the quaint village, but the fires didn’t squelch its spirit. The second major fire took out most of the small businesses but left standing was the market on the north end.
This particular building had housed a clothing store and a meat and produce market with a projector on the porch roof when movies played in the upstairs meeting room. I particularly remember the last owners of the market as June and Clifford Durrell.
They were super friendly people. Mom would chat while I wandered around on the wide-planked, uneven, rickety wooden floors. The meat display was in the back in an oversized glassed-in case. The produce, I think, was on rustic shelves on the right-hand side wall and canned goods and such were on the left. Maine’s Strong Historical Society has a photo as well as mainememory.net.
The store closed when public roads improved and encouraged folks to drive to the nearby larger town that sported an IGA and A&P. As a side note, I grew up and married the IGA’s butcher’s son. As a child sitting in a shopping cart, I was terrified of him when he’d come out from the meat cutting room to see what particular cut my mom wanted. He was an imposingly large man with a blood-stained white apron on which he wiped his hands. Someone a four-year-old would fear.
As the years went by, stores came and went in the larger town. A large chain store moved in and forced out the smaller stores. Fresh local meats and vegetables became a thing of the past. Many people still had gardens and canned what they grew, but that, too, became rare as time went on, and it was easier to buy at the store.
In the 1990s, interest in buying local and growing and sharing or selling your food gathered momentum. Many of us fought for decades to secure that right. Fast forward to the COVID years. Shuttered stores and supply chain interruptions caused people to search local farmers and artisans.
The old food system unraveled while smaller producing entrepreneurs toiled away, creating food products to sell to markets, small town-centered grocery stores, and even home. Today empty store shelves persist and signal a time for positive change, but justifying the old system and bringing it forward won’t help the kind of change we need.
People may fear this change, but this is an opportunity for our country to reimagine how and from whom we buy our food. We can build something that feels familiar but is constructively different and strengthens our communities.
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