“Our place of safety can only be the community, and not just one community, but many of them everywhere. Upon that depends all that we still claim to value: freedom, dignity, health, mutual help and affection, undestructive pleasure, and the rest. Human life, as most of us would still like to define it, is community life.”
Wendell Berry from The Art of the Commonplace
Luke and I during the last few months have made the decision to leave our respective professions and do Bloodroot full time. Our leaving had to do less with business and more to do with community. We see a vibrant, beautiful group of people who are attempting to live out a certain ethos of friendship, food, tools, earth, dignity, respect—the list can’t ever be exhaustive—these friends are in Manhattan apartments and rural South Georgia farms. They might be chefs, home gardeners and cooks, people just trying to live more simply in the middle of busy lives. What holds us together is the notion that the people we feed are important to us and the food that we serve is a gift.
The ‘business model’ would have Luke and me trying our damnedest to supply for all demand, to raise our prices to all the market would bear (or cheapen our product to flood said market), to exploit all our resources, and to scale Bloodroot to the point that we could retire having branded a concept and left it for dead. But we bought into Bloodroot because of the concept of community that Wendell Berry speaks of. We are buying into this ethos, not a business model.
Both of our lifelong earnings may be decidedly less than had we stayed on our respective beaten paths. Our real security, however, must lie in supporting the work of our families and friends. Our posture must be one of gratitude and not one of entitlement. Luke (and Helen, Wren, Nell and Muir) and I (and Katy) look forward to being in community with you in the coming years. We are already thankful for the ways that you have let us be part of your stories and look forward to continuing to support your work with quality work of our own.