A Well Fed Community

By Nicole Noteboom, Marketing & Outreach Director

Well fed. When I first started at the Co-op nearly a decade ago and learned a local farmer had adopted the phrase as his farm’s name, I thought it was profound—like one of the messages Charlotte might spin in her web. Two words woven with deep meaning. Because, what does it mean to be well fed? (So. Many. Things.) It is the question I posed to our writers to ponder for this issue, and now, to you.

I’ve thought about it often in these last ten years, and late last fall I had the opportunity to attend Tahoma Peak Solutions’ Native Grown & Gathered Food Expo in Seattle—the expo brought together a diverse range of Native American businesses, Tribal enterprises, and nonprofits along with community development and financial institutions in one shared space for three days. Native Grown & Gathered is a grassroots initiative that was cultivated from a simple but profound truth: food sovereignty is at the heart of the health, culture, and economic well-being of Native peoples. Every seed planted, every plant, fish, or animal harvested, and every traditional meal shared is more than sustenance—it’s a connection to ancestral knowledge, land stewardship, and community resilience.

It's striking, yet not surprising, the similarity between that initiative and the cooperative movement: connection, stewardship, resilience, community. There was much talk about the human connection to food and nature, and the idea of being well fed—in mind, body, and spirit. One panel discussion asked: When was the first time you experienced the healing power of food—that you felt that food does more than feed you, it also sustains you, your people, and your values? 

Here again, another notion conveyed in the spider silk.

At the Co-op, we know food is more than food, and that’s part of what draws us together. Food has the power to feed, fuel, connect, heal, and restore. Real food keeps us well fed, in every sense. It’s how the Co-op began, as a place to gather large quantities of good food, enough to feed friends and neighbors while promoting wellbeing, not just of us eaters, but the other beings that feed us too: plants, people, and planet.

Half a century later, while the challenges of feeding our community are different, they are also largely the same—and so is the Co-op mission: to provide good food at a fair price. To provide the opportunity to be well fed. And so, we repeat, the Co-op is so much more than a store. It is a place to feel full, of sustenance, kinship, and of hope.

As we dig in for another year, the Co-op remains an anchor in the food system, striving to help ensure our community is well fed. In this issue, you’ll read some of the ways we have been and will continue working to feed our neighbors, including new efforts to fight food insecurity by funding food access projects, large and small, and how local farmers like Erik Olson of Well Fed Farms are connected to it all.