sort of the new model that we're kind of trying out and experimenting with and that idea the idea of a community supported kitchens started in it came into to my brain when i was working with local foods and more and more experiencing the disconnect between all the wonderful local produce that our farms were producing and what people were actually eating for dinner i got sort of obsessed with the question of whether there's a way to produce and process food on a community scale something that's in between the home scale which i love i love home cooking and i think that home cooking is wonderful but i also think that in our society where we're very atomized and we live in very small households households of one maybe two maybe three four and five at the most people cooking three meals from scratch and processing all our food from scratch the way that many of our ancestors did is it doesn't quite fit because our ancestors mostly lived in either larger households extended families or in villages and communities where  that made sense and you could have just a few people cooking together for a large farmstead or something like that but to ask people who live by themselves or with one or two other people and work full time in our  capitalist economy to cook every meal from scratch is i think it's stretching it so we have to find something that bridges us even if we cook at home and do a lot of home cooking as i've always done and as i got more interested in traditional foods that added another piece to the committee sort of kitchen idea which is that many of the traditional foods that i'm interested in and that were in two or three stonehearth include sauerkraut and kim ch fermented foods but also long simmered bone broths things like that and those foods many of them are labor intensive a lot of them are really time consuming and so that's even another level on top of cooking from scratch it's like actually processing things yourself and there's a resurgence of that and i'm extremely excited about that and i think that's that's great too but i think the question of scale is really an interesting one and the community supported kitchen idea grabbed my imagination because i thought maybe there was a way to really explore this in between scale that wasn't the home scale which for all it's good things also can be quite isolating from people for people to cook by yourself can be an isolating experience and where we miss cooking in community and then there's the factory scale you know if you go and you buy a can of campbell's soup you have no idea where any of that food grew who made it where it was made you know nothing about it and so can there be some scale where a small community is preparing foods for a larger community and that was really sort of the theoretical philosophical origins of the community supported kitchen idea and i had been kind of playing around with this idea for a number of years talking to people about it and and then finally a group sort of started to coalesce around it and now we're really at the point where work spring how we can expand the ownership be on the co founders to some of piece is a huge piece that we hadn't fully figured out i don't think we had any idea that we were going to get to be as large as we were i think we fully expected that we would be the five of us basically being the only employees and we'd have a dishwasher here and there to help know it really depends on what people do with the food that we give we're not making like here's your meal here's your dinner what we do instead is we make courts of soups and stews and pints of more dense stews we make casseroles we make sauerkraut sui make granola come sweeps we do two sweets every week two desserts every week we do a side dish every week and how that actually becomes meals really is up to people we also make frozen meat patties and frozen meat loaf that are ready to cook that's that are you know sort of semi prepared that are ready to cook we do sauces which again is like here's your catch atory sauce you have to go get the chicken and put it together but that's all you have to do you don't have to prep all the ingredients so to preorder these things the vast majority are preordered we have  basically an online business so people are we have one menu a week our soups and stews change every week so we do one chicken soup or stew one other super stew one casserole weren't one what we call a needy pint so we have sort of a template and then what fits into those spots changes every week and we do so we so we do only one production cycle per week so we're we're working all week but we make everything for wednesday and people can pick up wednesday from five to seven p m or thursday from ten to four during the day and then we start again with the next week so the menu goes up right thursday evening at around seven o'clock and is up until wednesday morning at ten thirty and then there's no many available while we're just cooking and distributing the food and then the new menu goes up is once a week enough for people i think so i mean you know honestly one of my fears when we first started talking about doing the business and sort of started planning it because i really just came to the table with the sort of the idea and the inspiration but then the business plan was formed by the five of us who we met consistently over the course of a year and planned the business as a group so the business idea became you know ideas are easy what's hard is to figure out what you're actually going to do and find the kitchen and raise the startup capital and all that kind of stuff that we all did as a group s that when we first started one of my fears was that our business was going to sort of playing into the consumer culture and getting people off the hook for cooking like that it was going to just be more convenience food it was about convenience i'm really not interested actually in convenience i don't have to drive value we don't have a drive through but what's and so i was nervous about that and actually what we've seen is the opposite because people have these elements at home you know they've got their chicken broth or they've got their meat patties or they've got their sauce and we also retail a number of items too so in that sense we can take the place of you know a grocery store or something all of the items that we retail are sort of within our nutritional philosophy but it's actually it's helped people to cook at home because they just have a few elements they need you know that have started that are already done and you know some people won't  necessarily order the sauces because like even just opening a jar and combining that with a chicken is like overwhelming they'll just get the super stews that they just heat up but a lot of people use the elements to just enhance and enable them to cook at home and so that's been a relief to me and exciting to see that it's supporting home cooking rather than the opposite you have a lot of bone broths yeah we do a lot of bone broths and back to your question of the once a week i really think once a week is enough i mean it's not we're not pretending to feed you everything you're eating and that's it was never our intention it's more to helps support you in your life and a lot of the people who come to us are you know either busy professionals that's a lot of people but a lot of people parents with small children a lot of families that and especially right after babies are born people need a lot of help and just getting nutritious food on  institution yeah and they need a lot of nutrition so we help with both of those things and it really has ended up being a great support to people who just you know it's just the way that our society is structured that we need help eating well and we're going to we're going to need some convenience foods we're going to need some things that are started or prepared but it you know even just having a meat patty that's in the freezer that you can break off and i mean i use the food at home all the time myself and i know how to cook you know so it ends up supporting me and my family's well you know you're a former reagan but yeah i was only very briefly and i was mostly but i was a vegetarian for ten years or as i dabbled in vienna as him but it never dentist from cleveland ohio or in cleveland ohio in the one who in the one nine hundred twenty s and one nine hundred thirty s went on an extended series of trips around the world with the question with sort of one question in mind which was are there whole communities of healthy people out there and if so what are they doing differently from us and this was a time of tremendous change in the american diet and he and he had seen in his practice a great deal of decline from one generation to the next in dental health but he wasn't just concerned with teeth to him the teeth were a window into the health of the whole person which is true in anthropology and archaeology too you can tell it all yeah you can tell a huge amount by looking at the teeth about how many nutrients that person got both in utero and also throughout the course of their life so but he wasn't looking at skulls he was looking at living people but he was finding he started in in villages in the valley which is in switzerland and found whole villages full of brother who moved to a city and was getting a lot of processed foods in a very weak draw exactly yeah i mean he noticed i mean if he found cavities which he did find a few when he interviewed the people it turns out they had all gone to the city for a few years eating processed foods and then come back and gone back to their traditional foods and that really intrigued him and then he sort of set off on this whole series of journeys he went to the innuit in alaska islanders like islanders so off the coast of scotland he went through east africa the aboriginals in australia south pacific then he went to the andes in the amazon he looked for indigenous north american native peoples and the only people he was able to even begin to access were the seminal at that time there included in this book i wrote a book called nutrition and physical to john narration which really made a very strong argument for the idea that not only the changes that were happening in the facial structure which have to do with the jaws that you were talking about the wide jaws versus the narrow jaws the crowding of the teeth you know what we now sort of take for granted is sort of like oh yeah you know your kid's going to need braces and orthodontics because everybody does well traditionally they didn't you know that it's actually a sign of malnutrition but we just think oh it's a synesthetic thing we'll put in the braces and we can line him up or you know me i had all four of my wisdom teeth pulled when when they came in because there just wasn't room in my jaw for them all and that's fairly typical and we don't think too much about it but he was working right at a time where this was just starting and so those things were kind of shocking these changes were shocking and he was very very curious about them and he wasn't the only one a lot of people were talking about them and postulating what was happening and so this movement is really about what were the common denominators of these traditional diets because he profiles in his book fourteen different communities that he found still living on their ancestral diet with not only perfect teeth which means all thirty two of your teeth no crowding no cavities and no signs of dental decay but also long life resistance to diseases that they've been exposed to strength and hardiness one of the things he noted in the valley was the children's ability to be barefoot  very cold weather where he was all bundled up and was very cold and again you know some of that is certainly true but able to just familiarity but he really thought it something more than that it's it's it's actually the nutrients that the food is providing to the people and so he took samples of the foods in all the places that he visited brought them back to a laboratory studied them and became very interested in  vitamins and minerals very neutral terms yes so that was one of his observations was that those many of these traditional peoples don't need as many calories as modern americans do i mean even at that time he was talking about the modern diet what was at that time the modern diet every calorie that they ate was so much more packed with positive nutrients i mean now i mean this was something price didn't even really see too much in his time but now so much of what we eat is actually toxic so it's not only that it's not giving us nutrients but it's actually pulling nutrients and you know more than just empty calories it's negative calories and our bodies are having to fight that and i'm fairly convinced that a lot of the you know health problems that we're seeing especially in children today are attributable to you know the lack of positive nutrients that we're getting and then the abundance of toxins that we're having to fight at all times which many of which actually pull right so that's the other pieces that's not just that it's hard to cook at home and you need some help but it's also that the foods that we are really lacking in our diet take some care and energy to  source and produce and process properly just for example in traditional cultures grains are not just ground into a quick flour and then baked into a yeast bread that you know these comes out of a package commercially east and you know a traditional sourdough is used or some kind of soaking or natural leavening process is used and and you see this pretty universally in cultures that eat a lot of sea seed foods which not all cultures do but if you rely on grains and legumes and other seeds you soak them first you often sour them first you sometimes ferment them first before cooking and all of that takes time and know how and even if people are cooking at home they're probably not doing that and so we do that part another big thing is that traditional cultures are not so focused on the muscle meat like we are you know hamburger and boneless skinless chicken breast and that's all muscle meat for traditional culture parts of the animal that were most valuable were the organ meats the fat and the bones and so at our kitchen we make many we have a very large piece of equipment not very large it's forty gallons like this as we say officially eat within a week or freeze we often find it keeps longer than that but yeah so you know things like that that really are very nutrient dense and very supportive of people's health we the organ meats you know in our culture we're just not used to eating organ meats we don't eat a lot of them i'm my mom when she was growing up had liver and onions once a week and we don't do that for the most part anymore most kids don't grow up eating any liver maybe a liberal worst but little else so we put liver in all of our meat patties in our meat loaf in our rag so then you know even if you're serving your kid center feast full moon feast yeah full moon feast so yeah i used the lunar traditional lunar names to kind of organize the structure of the book but the subtitle is food in the hunger for connection and really the book is about our relationship to food and trying to come back to a more satisfying more meaningful more nourishing on every level relationship to food so i  explore the thirteen different moons kind of give me a chance like there's a milkman and that gives me a chance to really talk about dairy and sort of get into some of the controversy that's around dairy and then my thoughts on dairy and how does dairy play out in traditional diets and  yeah i love that stuff i'm very interested in just traditional wisdom just like what have we forgotten what can be recovered by seeing how seeing what you know millions of people have done for thousands of years you know as opposed to what we're being told what's the latest greatest new thing that we have no idea how it's going to ultimately play out and affect us but there's a huge amount that can be learned from traditional cultures that stayed in one you know not necessarily a not a static but tended to work within one ecosystem or a large ecosystem that they you know with a few different smaller ecosystems within it and how to relate to that ecosystem sustainably and i mean not that all traditional cultures were successful at that they certainly weren't but that there wasn't really any other option like you're you're in a place on the planet and either it's a place where humans can survive or not and if it is then they need to figure out how and how to meet all of our nutritional needs and how to make the you know to interact with the ecology in a sustainable way which many traditional cultures found ways to do and many a lot of that knowledge has been you know pretty close to last corporate culture and reliance on large corporations to meet our everyday needs including food to how can we meet those needs ourselves as a community not not i'm not as an individual but as you know in community and so that's part of the community supported kitchen idea it's like you know we're holding a piece you know we're making the meat patties in the beef but you know other people are farming and we're supporting the farmers and  name for what they call that sort of semi urban they're sort of semi urban contra costa county but there's there's definitely a huge surge of interest right now in how can we organize to supply food in a real way and that is only sort of starting to open up now because some of the laws are starting to shift around being able to sell food that's grown  backyards and stuff where actually you know we can't legally buy backyard food and turn around and resell it just got passed and that's shifting some of it for at least direct sales between somebody could grow something in their backyard and sell it directly to you still we can't buy it and then resell it there's there's there's restrictions around that stuff at the moment that are pretty strict and we try to be legal in our dealing with things but there's other ways we can sort of support that and one of the ways has just been by creating a community of people who are interested in similar things and have lots of points of cross pollination and conversation that happens in the kitchen and then organize and take things out and that's happened quite a lot which of course is probably not necessarily one of our stated over missions but it's certainly part of what's happened is just we're creating community around nutrient dense food and raising awareness we do lots and lots of education too and so as people learn more their consciousness shifts and as people's consciousness shifts then they look to some of these solutions to you know what's clearly a an economy in trouble how do you reach out to education we do lectures and talks i do a whole series on traditional diets that people can come and see where i go to facility at the kitchen so i start with someone weston price what i did this fall was eight mondays in a row and sort of started with western price and then the eleven characteristics of traditional diet and then had a whole class devoted to dairy a class devoted to lacto fermented vegetables a class devoted to the bone bras class devoted to grains etc so i can kind of go in and that was really wonderful to do so we do things like that we also bring in practitioners to speak you know health oriented as well bringing in health care practitioners to talk about a particular sort of interesting angle on our health and just connecting the dots all these things are connected you know food is cooked food connects to everything very much to stress to hormones to you know there's traditional chinese medicine there is i or veda there's so much to talk about when it comes to food and we're just interested in all these places where these different things intersect in and then we have the it where you know we're interested in the economic issues too and we've got a lecture coming up in a couple weeks on economics for transition and what are you familiar with  show yeah exactly so so expanding the ownership to more and more of the people who work there you know for the first few years it didn't really seem to matter that much because we weren't actually making a profit so it's hard to say come share the profit when there isn't any but we're finally profitable and so now it really makes sense that that should be shared among the people who produce it you know produce the food and so we're we're really excited about that and the more i learn about work or cooperate as i've been spending a lot of the last year learning about them and reading about them and you know reading our own byelaws understand what they say and we've updated our by laws to some extent but i'm just in love with the whole work cooperative concept and the money human community totally i mean the money already stays in the community already just because we're so you know it's just the four of us at the moment that are the worker owners and we're very locally based and have decent values and all of that but there is i think there's really something there's a key shift that happens when you're producing something and if the business does well everybody who helped to produce it or at least the majority of the people who helped to produce it get the return on that and it's going to be a higher level of people's investment in what they're doing and and it's you know it's not easy we're not really we're not raised in a society where we really think cooperatively and there's even a challenge i saw film recently shift change which i recommend which is about the worker cooperate of movement and they spend a lot of time in in the months are of spain where the cooperatives are you know are a big chunk of the economy i think it's twenty to thirty percent of the economy in that area and even they are challenged with how to get young people to understand the value of cooperate of ownership because we really were raised in a very individualistic society one of you need to read another book well there's a great there's also a great book about worker cooperate it's called companies we keep which i love with something about your experience specifically yes we do have dreams of writing a book about three stonehearth and i can see that happening in the next couple of years especially after we've figured out this the governance piece and the governance piece is two it's you know it's the part about the money and the profit and how that flows and then the other piece is how we actually run our company inside how decisions are made and who has a say into what and so we've been talking about that as well and they're not actually the same piece but they're they they overlap and so we're sort of making strides we make a stride here and make a strike here and we just keep sort of exploring and figuring more things out and it's an amazing opportunity really to be able to work on issues that to me are just so crucial and important and it's really nice to be in a position in life where i'm not sort of on the outside complaining about what somebody else is doing but i'm right in the middle and i show up at work and i try to figure out how to make it better and we don't you piece yeah and how to solve the problems that are in front of us and we are and we're all doing that and i just feel really lucky to be able to live that way and there's there's no enemies there's only friends that we have you know and we have tensions so we have things we have to work out but that's part of the gift of being in a cooperative is that you know we all want the same thing and we just have to figure out how to work together to get that