Locavore Joe Brown, reporting for duty

Food, for me, has always meant family, and community. All my earliest memories are set in my grandma's kitchen, where she produced (and is still producing, at 82) consistently amazing grub for the whole extended family. The picture of me there on the left is probably what I looked like right about the time that first whiff of biscuits hit my little nose.

I grew up out in the country - in Winston County, the Free State, a beautiful part of the world - with aunts and uncles and cousins all within a few hundred yards, all on land that was in the family for many years, land that we farmed. Although by the time I came into the world no one was actively farming as a means for making a living, there were huge (in my mind, at the time) gardens for all the vegetables and fruit we could eat, preserve, and give away, just because that was part of what we did. We had goats, chickens, peacocks, guinea fowl, a horse, an endless series of pets. There were always fresh vegetables in the summer, blueberries, grapes, muscadines, apples, garlic, tomatoes, corn.

At least once a week, Sunday afternoons after church, everyone came together at my grandparents' house for a big family meal. A big percentage of what we ate was local: fresh or frozen corn and peas, slicing tomatoes, blackberry cobbler, fresh eggs from a neighbor.

Of course, I didn't know what I had back on the farm. I just knew it tasted good and I was glad to eat a plate or two of it. But there was real love in that food, and a connection with our family and our little spot in the world.

There were a still a few folks around who grew for the Saturday market in town, and one – Jimmy, the old guy (he seemed at the time about 115 years old) who drove my school bus – who even took his produce to town in a horse-drawn wagon. But agriculture was in its inexorable decline, even then, and now when I go back to my old stomping ground I barely recognize the place: there are new subdivisions, the old blueberry patch is no longer there, more people and Things and less life and nature. A few of my relatives still grow a big garden down the road, but it's a totally different place. It's no longer an agricultural community: it's the suburbs, and country folks are now embarrassed to say they have a bunch of chickens in the back yard. You have to admit, popular culture has not been kind to the rural Southerner: think "Cleetus the slack-jawed yokel" from The Simpsons. This message has not been lost on my quasi-upwardly-mobile-in-their-own-way aspiring-to-be-more-middle-than-lower-middle-class family.

We're all a little more dispersed now, but we still gather, less often than before, and eat the same sorts of food, although all of it generally comes from Food World, or occasionally from the state farmers' market in Birmingham, which my grandma frequents now that she's in Irondale. Something has been lost with our exodus from the country, but it's hard to say what without being too sentimental about it. Part of that was the local food bounty we enjoyed.

Fast forward 12 years, 12 years in a culinary void for me personally: high school, college, graduate school, traveling, thinking of food as a physical necessity to be enjoyed when possible but largely unconnected with my values, my priorities, or my community. Think styrofoam trays, food service, processed garbage, easy cheese, hot pockets, frozen dinners, eating out constantly, drive-throughs, snacks that come in little plastic packages from machines, sterile pre-fabricated nonsense. I ate all of that and thought I enjoyed it. Or rather didn't think about it at all.

Then I met Sara. At the time I was in grad school in North Carolina, and she was working on her uncle Ken's farm in Cedar Grove, North Carolina: (Maple Spring Gardens). When we first met, she was tanned and very dirty, with hands that looked like they'd been buried in the dirt for 100 years and smelled strongly of tomatoes and worm castings. She was beautiful, of course, and I attribute my late (c. 2004) reconversion to real food entirely to her. It was she who first made me (MADE me) eat fresh roasted beets, and we fell in love eating thick slices of summer tomatoes on the cool grass with fresh mozzarella and basil.

A few years later, Sara and I have our own farm here in Alabama. We are both teachers - me at the University of Alabama, her with the Jefferson Co public schools - but we spend every possible moment on the farm with our hands in the dirt, and we love it. As recent transplants back to the state of my birth, we are and have been huge advocates of local food and local farms, and are chagrined with the lack of local food options here, since Alabama is one of the most fertile pieces of God's green earth.

So we're Eating Alabama to both prove to ourselves and others that we can and should reclaim local food, for a multitude of reasons we intend to ruminate upon in this blog. We hope you'll join with us as we return to our roots (for example, local sweet potatoes).