foodshare
EVOLUTION OF EXCHANGE
Our Foodshare represents the pillars of the work we do at RealRoots. The health of the soil. The quality of life for our team. Experimenting in alternative forms of exchange. And the empowerment of Black and Indigenous people of color to become farmers again.
When you support us, you support these pillars. If you are familiar with our work and are already interested in signing up, click the button below to get started. Otherwise read on to see the details and taste the veggies of our labor.
In exchange for the commitment of your time, you will accumulate credits that can be redeemed for for food from anywhere in the System.
Each of these foods will have a fixed value, based on the labor and time it takes to grow them, their seasonal availability and abundance, the price they demand in the open market (very loosely), and input from the farmer responsible for contributing them should they not be a direct product of our farm site.
Each week, you can use your credits to go home a share of food that fits your needs.
It would be ideal to us for this formula to be one where as many people contribute to its conception as possible. But we have had failed experiments with this before, and have learned from those experiences. If you are seeking a project where the main goal is to explore identity ideology, collective decision making, or shared decision making we would encourage you to seek out other farms to support. Our experiment is one of alternative exchange and economic collectivism. To create an option for those who seek to unplug from the markets, and use their time and skills to procure food for themselves directly, without the exchange of debased, fiat digital currency. We want a team of people who wish to secure the highest quality food they can while contributing to a diverse community of people who have an extra layer of resilience through what could be tough economic times coming.
our offering…
We know the feeling when you go to the grocery store nowadays. Our society’s food isn’t grown for nutrient density, taste, or with environmental stewardship in mind. It’s grown for maximum yield and storage capacity. For that reason, we’re forced to buy a low quality product or be subject to high prices and lack of availability for a lot of the staples that we use in our every day cooking.
We want to help change how people relate to their weekly food shopping. We are offering foods that you know and love, as well as food that you may have never tried or tasted before. Foods we have seen in US culture for decades, and foods from the Afro-Caribbean Diaspora that are less familiar to some, but very familiar to many people across the world. These will include:
US Staples
heirloom slicer tomatoes
cherry tomatoes
sweet potato
bell peppers
turnips
kale
snap peas
carrots
beets
radishes
Diasporic Staples
Scotch Bonnet Peppers
Callaloo (Jamaican, Tete Red, etc)
Sokoyokoto (West African summer green)
Gomen (Ethiopian Blue Kale)
Okra
Fish Peppers
Garden Egg (African Eggplant)
Collard Greens
Molohkheya (Egyptian Greens)
and much more!
Our hope is that you will be able to replace the shopping you do for these items with our produce — grown with taste, nutrition, and soil life in mind. You also be able to experiment with different ways of preparing these items to build a culture around eating seasonal foods.
what to anticipate…
Duration
The Spring, Summer and Autumn months of any given year. Winter exchange varies.
Pickup
Pick up information will be anchored at the farm. Pickup sites may be added in the future.
Can I Just Pay?
The short answer is no.
We are experiementing with a new form of exchange here at RealRoots, that we believe is genuine expression of mutual aid that can assist us all through the volatile realities of the US economy. So we take a hard stance that the only way you can access the food we grow, is to come help us grow it.
We do sell, to wholesale accounts…particularly small scale groceries stores and CSA’s that are looking to support local farmers. You can see our partners page for an exhaustive list of those clients.
However. The system we are trying to build consists of an interconnected group of people who understand that the US dollar, or any state issued currency for that matter, cannot and will not be the way we value ourselves from this point forward.
We have spent years developing a formula for how we intend to equitably distribute food based on time and have decided that if we are to really challenge a system, we need people who acknowledge the type of world we want to create. Money is a powerful tool, but it is not a way of life.
Questions?
Shoot us an email and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.