Connecting Consumers and Farmers
Reach out and touch your food while it’s still on the farm.
When people in agriculture decide to share their livelihood with the world, it can be a beautiful thing. They become important resources for regular people like me who wouldn’t normally experience the way food is produced. We can join farmers on the journey from planting to harvest or from birth to becoming meat or producing milk and eggs. We can also get some glimpses of what happens between the farm and the grocery store from people along the supply chain who also share, and even get advice on how to treat our food once we get it home.
These are two real examples of me connecting people to whom I thought was the best human resource they could get for their question. These occurred within a couple weeks of each other, three months after I had stopped live streaming about food and where it comes from. I had no idea that just talking about food could have such an impact on people that they would return with questions even after an expedient way to do so had stopped. First we have Kelly, a very nice lady who happened upon an article about wheat and gluten.
When I tweeted Sarah for a better answer than I could give, I linked the original article and gave a little bit of context so that she wouldn’t have to sift through the previous conversation and wonder why she was being tagged. This is important if you want to get effective answers from your network. Not everyone has time to go back and read what the convo was about, but Sarah already had a previous blog post that she gave us in response to the article.
I’m not entirely sure this was the exact right person to connect with Kelly, but Sarah was the first person I thought of because she has a very active blog and twitter presence. Being consistent with bulding credibility is an important part of being a resource. Kelly “liked” Sarah’s tweet, but there wasn’t a thank you or an ongoing conversation, so I don’t know whether her takeaway was positive.
A couple weeks later, another live streaming friend had some concerns, and luckily I had recently come across just the person for the answer. I learned something about my food too!
Lectins were something I didn’t know about! I used to think most canned food would be fine to eat cold or straight out of the can in an emergency, but now I know to be a little more careful with beans. I was so happy to help my friend out by pointing the both of us in the right direction to Leah, a dietitian whose career is dedicated to the science of food.
I hope to be able to keep on connecting people to farmers and other professionals who can answer their questions about food. In order to do that, I will keep on sharing about food with the world through my own channels. Let me know if you have a food question that a farmer or food professional could answer; there might be someone just waiting to be asked that question!
