The Boxcar Kitchen

What does an ideal community food system look like? Before I became involved with the Missoula Community Food Co-op and the up-and-coming Boxcar Kitchen, I hadn’t really considered this question. I never thought much about the history of farming or food distribution or its potential for change. Now, after 18 months of exposure to the neighborhood food project in Burns Street Square, a vision of what can be done to strengthen farming and the processing, distribution and marketing of regional foods has bloomed into a semi-obsession for me. The fact that every person needs food has never been up for debate, but I now realize how food issues deserve everyone’s serious attention. Food is an integral part of social and environmental justice. That hadn’t been so obvious to me before this past year.

If food systems are primarily designed to benefit whole communities rather than just large corporate interests, we have to ponder the following seemingly utopian considerations: a transparent food system in which there is no mystery regarding where food comes from or what it has been through prior to landing on our plates; a shared trust in farmers and food processors; local and healthy foods as givens rather than as more expensive exceptions; local and healthy foods as human rights rather than privileges; farmers making a living wage without having to overuse land and deplete soil nutrients for short-term profits to pay off revolving debt loads; and, a regional food system that is plentiful enough to withstand interruptions of the national food transportation system. Are these dreams realizable? In Missoula, we are fortunate enough to have organizations and people from all walks of life trying to figure out this great puzzle. I’ve come to believe that Burns Street Square could be one piece in the jig-sawed visions that make a completed picture of local and healthy food for all.

For the last 10 months, I have been working as an Americorps VISTA at the North- Missoula Community Development Corporation (NMCDC). I have been trying to weave together the many threads of a community food project intended to bring healthful food to an urban neighborhood and stimulate Montana’s agriculture at the same time. The warehouse remodel that will create the Burns Street Square Boxcar Kitchen begins this June, after over 10 years of grassroots community planning and striving.

The Kitchen will join the Missoula Community Food Co-op at 1500 Burns Street as part of a holistic approach to neighborhood revitalization and food democratization. Burns Street Square is a project of NMCDC’s Land Stewardship Program, a Community Land Trust working to keep land, housing, and healthy community resources accessible as a commonwealth for all people in perpetuity. Burns Street Square brings together 17 affordable homes for first time buyers and the long sought neighborhood food hub.

The Boxcar Kitchen will widen access to good food and strengthen local agricultural viability. The facility will house a café, a shared-use kitchen, a center for all-ages- workshops and after school programs, a training site for culinary college interns and a welcoming place for neighborhood kids to get subsidized breakfasts when school is out of session. Currently, we are planning a community gathering to collect additional ideas from the neighborhood residents. We consider them our primary consultants. From the beginning, the projects of the NMCDC have aligned themselves with a philosophy that can be explained in this traditional Chinese proverb:

Go to the people,

Live among them.

Learn from what they know.

Build on what they have.

But of the best of leaders,

When their task is accomplished,

Their work is done,

The people all remark,

“We have done it ourselves.”

The need for a healthy community food hub for Missoula’s North and Westside neighborhoods first became apparent in a 1997 comprehensive neighborhood plan survey. Since that time, at least three additional surveys and the 2004 Missoula County Community Food Assessment have indicated a consistent need for healthy food options and services. The following priorities have been repeatedly documented as the top three neighborhood and community needs: affordable home ownership, access to high quality and local foods, and further investments for neighborhood vitality.

A 2004 Missoula County food assessment demonstrated that 57 percent of respondents would prefer to buy local healthful or organic foods and that 77 percent of all respondents found the cost of these foods too high to be readily accessible. This assessment also found that 71 percent of local farmers perceive local agriculture to be struggling and would prefer to sell more goods locally. As a direct result of these findings, the North-Missoula Community Development Corporation began planning the Kitchen and the Co-op in 2000.

Designing such an ambitious community food hub requires a collection of people, ideas, information, money, and technical expertise. Steering committees and volunteer research have been integral parts of project formation, especially in the realms of fundraising, neighbor outreach and facility design. With the hope that this decade of work will lead to an end product that is truly designed by the community itself, the NMCDC and its partners have worked to get community input at every turn.

One of the biggest challenges in planning for the Boxcar Kitchen is to design in economic sustainability. No matter what our hopes are for the food projects at Burns Street Square, there is always the bottom line demanding enough revenue to stay in business. We have learned from experience and know that food prices at the Missoula Food Co-op are still too high for many of our neighborhood residents. The Co-op business model requires each member to work three hours per month to offset overhead costs and lower the mark-up price of foods. We believe that as more members join and add their labor, prices will drop. Recruiting new members while the prices are still out of some people’s reach has proven to be a challenge that can best be met with faith in the model’s future. It is after all, our Co-op. We own it and we will craft its future.

Helping to offset some of our challenges has been our continued development of relationships with other organizations. The NMCDC’s most recent steering committee consisted of 20 people from area non-profits and businesses. We met for 6 months throughout 2009-2010. From the steering committee meetings, we developed clear goals regarding self-sufficiency; partnerships and program ideas; a menu for the café; a UM student-created business plan for the café; commercial kitchen equipment choices and layout design; contact with potential users of the rental kitchen; funding application support; and strong relationship building for future programs.

The complexity of making more local foods accessible to more people demands creativity. Over the next few months, as the remodel progresses and the Boxcar Kitchen begins to show itself as a real-life physical entity, the hopes of the project will get closer to realization and both the potential and the limits of our vision will further reveal themselves. For now we are still striving for big dreams: creating a replicable approach to strengthening regional food systems through widened accessibility, transparency, education and participatory democracy. I have learned a lot so far. The most important lesson has been that there is a lot more to learn.

Hermina Harold

MTCC Americorps VISTA, Missoula, Montana

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