Living close to the land provides profound daily lessons. The person who baked bread early this morning, who soaked beans last night, who made a fresh kraut a few days ago, who turned the compost last week, who planted the garden last month, who weeded and watered it regularly, who saved seeds last season, who made pickles and preserves last fall, who terraced and built the garden beds ten years ago, who planted the fruit trees a generation ago, is just as responsible for the food on the table as the cooks in the kitchen today.

Convening for the evening meal from our individual lives, or breaking for lunch in the middle of a laborious group project, the shared meal creates a sense of unity, weaving the unintegrated parts into a whole, facilitating discussion, connection, and exchange of ideas. Those who have been indoors reading alone, or outside working hard together, all come to the table to engage and be sustained. Cooking together and sharing food nourishes everything else.

With accelerating environmental, social, and political crisis on every front, Salmon Creek Farm asks: “how to live today?” and responds with a call to the communal table and kitchen, to put the shared meal (organic & vegetarian!) at the center of art and culture. SCF practices an intentional movement towards a daily life that is more artful, embodied, mindful, engaged and awake to all of the senses. These are intentions we may have in small fractured measures in our regular lives that may be enriched and realized more deeply in a place like SCF, combining a resistance to industrial complexes with a surrender to the land around us.

- Fritz Haeg, 2018