Growing up, my mom worked almost every job you could work at Nature’s Fresh Northwest, what I think of as the first for-profit natural foods store in Portland, Oregon. (Food Front Co-op, where she’d worked before, had voted on a no-growth policy, and away she went.) She was the wine buyer, the meat buyer, the grocery buyer, the store manager. She opened half a dozen new stores for the company. I was tiny, but I can picture her with a really short, get-it-done haircut (c. 1989), scribbling intently into the same black mottled composition notebooks she uses now.

Some of my earliest memories are going to the store on NE 24th and Fremont after school (or after preschool?) and getting a garlic bagel smothered in white fish salad. I loved the little cartons of Nancy’s kefir—sweet, tart, creamy like a sour milkshake. And sometimes Diane, the mysterious woman who worked in the supplements and natural body products section, a windowless cubby of the store (her: lots of scarves, strong odors, mountain of dark curly hair) would give me a tiny sample cup of gummy bear shaped vitamins.

My dad worked part-time on the store newsletter. At a time when everything came with sprouts, he sat in the basement next to the sprout incubation room, which smelled like a swamp. My mom probably sat down there too, for a while, but I remember her in an upstairs office behind a one-way mirror that looked down at the registers.

I can picture eating every kind of ice cream bar/popsicle, which were mostly variations on grainy rather than milky desserts, until miraculously one day you could buy a Cascadian Farms organic version of a Haagen-dazs bar. And I can feel the chill behind the plastic strip curtains of the produce walk-in, a forbidden zone littered in lettuce.

My mom would give me treats like dark chocolate Lindt balls (the blue ones) or Bulgarian feta on toasted Manna bread (made by a company that would later become Nature’s Path, the cereal maker), telling me that she was spoiling me so that when I was older, I wouldn’t be able to settle for anything but the best food. She was wrong in that from middle school through high school I traded my homemade lunches for such home run meals as Cup of Noodles and a Pizza Hut pepperoni slice. But right in that, by college, I was devoted to cooking.

I loved when Doc and Connie Hatfield of Country Natural Beef would come to the store to talk with people about their ranching practices. And more vividly, I recall visiting them in Brothers, wearing one of their kid’s cowboy boots and having Doc lead me around on a horse; sitting in a big pasture and then feeling an itch in my jeans, pulling off my pants in front of a small group and finding two nickel-sized ticks burrowing into my thighs.

Vacations. Every year my mom would go to Anaheim for the Natural Foods Expo, and I would come along. It is such an enormous gathering with so many food samples. I don’t think anyone could be happier in that environment than a child; no pressure to buy or sell, just a fantasy-like castle where every hall is full of free food (including dozens of brands of butter) and people are too busy with their business to notice if you take one or ten samples. I would also go to Disneyland on those trips, which honestly sucked in comparison. (Such long lines!)

The natural foods industry is the environment that I grew up in. From my childhood vantage, the natural and organic food movement—now often deemed elitist, then solidly anti-establishment—begins with the camaraderie and shared purpose within the first natural foods stores: the shoppers who would shoot the shit in the aisles, the workers joking around in the break room, all of us kids who were raised wearing hand-me-downs from each other.

Even now, while I know a lot of people who feel at home in grocery stores, I am keenly aware of how incredibly at home I feel there. (Acknowledging that the stores work very hard to make shoppers feel that way…) Wherever I go in the world, I visit the grocery stores. (This does not include any version of a store that is also part pharmacy — e.g. Walgreens, Rite Aid and other super depressing places like that.)

I think this sense of place is what inspired me to go on the road for almost two weeks this summer to visit rural Oregon grocery stores and hang out in them with the owners, seeing things happen, seeing who comes in and what they get. I was joined by exceptional photographer Eugénie Frerichs, who photo-documented our trip. I began to wonder if, as a kid, I was connected to Nature’s in a similar way that people in these rural communities are connected to their local store — the place where they regularly meet their neighbors.

Some of the photos that Eugénie took on that trip are in the current issue of Edible Portland, but a whole other bunch will come out in the spring with a bigger article in Ecotrust’s new digital magazine Commonplace, and I cannot wait to share them!

Listen to June Colony talk about the campaign to save M. Crow & Co. in the podcast Underground Airwaves — on itunes and edibleportland.com.