The Life Cycle of Food: How food nourishes relationships and builds community

A cow eats grass, transforming it into beef. A person eats a hamburger and composts the food scraps. The food scraps are returned to the earth to fertilize dirt used for growing.

A carrot is grown in that ground. It’s pulled up by a farmer who delivers it to a local market, selling it directly to consumers or to a local grocer who sells it to consumers. The people throw the scraps from the carrot back outside after they’ve eaten what they can, so it can decompose and nourish the ground. The next season, they plant a tomato plant there and grow their own vegetables, composting that waste. It keeps going on and on.

It’s the full, natural life cycle of food, and something groups in Cape Girardeau are working to promote. With the establishment of this full life cycle, advocates believe, comes a revitalization of the physical as well as mental and emotional health of a community.

Education about the life cycle of food was a need co-owner of Spanish Street Farmacy and president of Slow Food SEMO Lance Green recognized within the community. He saw the anonymity of food as a problem — he says shoppers at larger grocery stores don’t know where their food comes from or who has grown it and often don’t even have to talk to anyone to purchase it. And because of the transport time of food to the store, it doesn’t contain the entire nutrient value, he says; therefore, consumers aren’t receiving the full benefit of what food can do for them. To respond to this need, he and his wife, Sharla Green, established a local market at their restaurant, where they build relationships with local farmers whose produce they sell. Rather than having a “nondescript truck” drive up and wheel out the food, it has been fun, he says, to “celebrate” the different people throughout the region and their passions for what they grow.

“Food has the power to change your thinking on a lot of different things. So when food gets anonymous or it’s imported and there’s not really any story behind it, it really begins to change your mind about so many things in life,” Green says. “When you remove reality more and more out of our lives, it produces certain problems in our society.”

To help educate others about the process of food, Green brought a chapter of Slow Food International to Southeast Missouri on Earth Day in 2021. The organization, which was founded in Italy in 1986, advocates for “good, clean and fair” food, recognizing food should have great flavor and be a “pleasure” to eat, Green says, as well as be grown or raised with an absence of chemicals, building the soil and minimizing environmental pollution and degradation, and paying the farmer a good wage while the consumer gets a quality product for a fair price. Green boils it down to three words: cooking, growing and economics.

Aaron Arnzen, co-founder of the Compost Initiative in Cape Girardeau, collects a compost bucket from the front porch of one of the Slow Food SEMO members. After the food scraps are composted, they will make a fertilizer high in nutrients and beneficial to plant growth and health, according to the Slow Food SEMO website.Photo by Aaron Eisenhauer

__Growing food__

It’s a cause vice chairman of the Slow Food SEMO board and Southeast Missouri State University assistant professor of entrepreneurship Ed Crowley can get behind, too. As a farmer who raises sheep, chickens, ducks and Scottish highland cows organically, he sees the disconnect between the consumer and farmer as a struggle; even if people have the desire to buy food from local farmers, he says it’s often difficult for them to know where or how to get in contact with them. On the flip side, it can also be a struggle for farmers to connect directly with consumers, he says. He hopes to bridge this gap in knowledge through educational opportunities such as Slow Food SEMO farm tours and farm-to-table dinners.

Currently, Crowley says most agricultural policies are set up for commodity agriculture, which places an emphasis on inexpensive food and wide food availability, which he considers benefits of the system. He says a direct farm-to-table model has a different set of benefits, however, including consumer education, connecting people within the community and being the best way to raise animals.

“It’s really the healthiest way to grow food,” Crowley says. “All the livestock we work with, they are genetically designed to turn grass into meat. That’s what they do. That’s their chemistry, that’s what they like doing, and in fact, you can tell a cow’s happy when she’s sitting out in the field just laying down chewing her cud. That’s a great day for a cow. … I think happy animals make happy food. They’re naturally going to do better.”

Compost Initiative volunteer Selah Green empties a bucket of compost onto the pile at the Slow Food SEMO compost shed. The compost pile includes layers of dried plant material with layers of food waste in a ratio of 4:1, according to the Slow Food SEMO website.Photo by Aaron Eisenhauer

__Recycling food__

Not only does food have the potential to connect consumers and farmers, it also can help connect community members. That’s something Monica Foltz and Aaron Arnzen have discovered as spearheads of the Compost Initiative, a Slow Food SEMO project in which they and other Slow Food SEMO volunteers go door-to-door on foot and by bicycle to collect food scraps for composting from their neighbors in downtown Cape Girardeau. They then take the food waste to be recycled through composting at the downtown community garden. The practice, they say, allows them to talk with their neighbors, sharing with them about how to compost, as well as hearing about their lives.

“You get to weekly go walk and pick up compost from people’s porches, and so it’s fun — you just get to see more of the neighborhood and the people outside and talk to them every week and check in with them,” Foltz says. “It just makes it more of this intentional ‘I get to go see my neighbors every week.’ And you have this shared passion and now this shared space [in the community garden], which creates a shared product, so it’s definitely just this huge community thing.”

Beyond nurturing relationships within the community, Foltz and Arnzen say the practice of throwing food waste back into the earth can transform people’s relationship with food: When people realize they don’t have very much to compost, it can help them become aware of the need for more fresh foods in their diets. When people throw their food waste in the garbage for the trash service to take to a landfill, however, it can be more difficult for people to have that awareness.

“In the process [of creating a modern trash system], we lost touch with [where food goes], which really comes back to losing touch with food in general,” Arnzen says. “I think if you treasured compost, if you have some kind of value to composting, you’re automatically going to have a better relationship with food, even the consumption part of it. And of course, just sourcing [foods] that are loaded with more minerals and things like that.”

In addition to helping people choose foods that are healthier for the body, recycling food to keep it out of landfills is also healthier for the environment.

“When food breaks down with plastics and trash, it creates methane, and that methane goes into the atmosphere and doesn’t mix well with all the carbon that’s in the atmosphere, and that’s where you start to see bigger issues of weather cycles and things like that,” Arnzen says. “And it’s not a black and white thing — those things can still be present with everyone composting — but we know that, that creates methane, and so [composting helps us] do our part [to prevent it].”

Foltz points out food comes from the earth, so it makes sense it should go back into it.

“Whenever you throw your food waste into a landfill, you’re essentially ending that life cycle. It doesn’t get to continue on like it’s purposed to do, so you also have all these issues with people not having enough minerals or missing some major electrolytes [in their diets], and it’s like, well, that has to do with how we grow our food and the soil that we grow it in. So, if the soil is lacking minerals, then the food lacks minerals. And so, [when we compost], it’s like, well, we have all this food waste that breaks down and renourishes the soil that we can then grow nourishing food and feed the people who have all these deficiencies,” Foltz says. “Every step makes sense — it’s beautiful how it was designed. So, one simple change of whether you throw your food in the trash can or throw it back into the soil, it makes such a big difference.”

Monica Foltz and Aaron Arnzen, spearheads of the Compost Initiative in Cape Girardeau, stand by the Slow Food SEMO Compost Shed in downtown Cape Girardeau. The two launched the project on Earth Day in 2021.Photo by Aaron Eisenhauer

__Building community through food__

When this life cycle of food gets interrupted, it can damage an entire community. It’s something Pastor William Bird, Jr., pastor of Greater Dimension Church in Cape Girardeau, saw when Highway 74 was built and caused the South Side of Cape Girardeau to be designated as a federal food desert, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture defines as a “low-income tract where a substantial number or substantial share of residents does not have easy access to a supermarket or large grocery store.” Beyond a gas station that makes a limited number of commodities such as milk available, the closest grocery store with fresh food, Bird says, is approximately four to five miles away from the South Cape neighborhood, on the other side of Highway 74. A lack of transportation causes accessing this store to be difficult for many residents who live in South Cape, helping to sustain a generational cycle of poverty, according to Jimmy Wilferth, vice president — Foundation and Marketing of Saint Francis Healthcare System.

But the addition of an urban farm in South Cape could change that. Wilferth has collaborated with residents and community leaders from South Cape to create South Side Farms, an urban farm modeled after Bonton Farms in Dallas that will be housed on 16 acres of land near the Shawnee Sports Complex in Cape Girardeau. Six acres of the property will be dedicated to growing produce through hydroponics, aquaculture and greenhouse methods, as well as raising animals such as goats, chickens and bees. There will be a farmers market on-site where the farm will sell the produce, as well as a restaurant that will serve food fresh from the gardens. As a nonprofit, Wilferth estimates the operation will provide 30 to 35 jobs, along with training in growing nutritious food and opportunities for the rest of the community to experience the “soul food” recipes of South Cape. He envisions it will eventually be run by residents who live in the neighborhood.

Farming and food will become the springboard for the remaining 10 acres to include 42 single-, multifamily and homeless transitional housing units residents can rent to own; childcare facilities run by the East Missouri Action Agency; technical skills and financial literacy training programs; a police substation and a health care clinic. Wilferth sees it as potentially transformative for the entire community.

“This is truly something that could change the dynamic of a generation and generations to come,” Wilferth says. “Businesses going into South Cape and benefiting from the opportunities on tax advantages aren’t happening. Something has to spur that. We believe that this [urban farm] could be a catalyst to that.”

Bird agrees.

“It can bring economic development, it could bring jobs, it could bring better homes. It could bring a bunch of things that haven’t been on the South Side in a while,” Bird says. “I’m hoping it’s going to be an incubator for businesses — Black-owned businesses — some more better housing for the community, better outreach opportunity for those to come together and to help bring up the South Side of Cape.”

This type of connection is the main potential Green sees fresh food options as providing to people — connection to a stable future through connection with the past.

“Food is the best thing for you,” Green says. “It is medicine. Food is it. So that’s big. And then from an economic side, how much money actually stays in the community when you buy one dollar locally. And so that’s huge in a lot of ways. When you’re keeping people here and you’re keeping people on the farm, you’re holding onto your history, you’re holding onto things that are important to our community.”

Aaron Arnzen, co-founder of the Compost Initiative, stomps on the compost pile as he stirs the compost at the Slow Food SEMO Compost Shed in downtown Cape Girardeau. Compost is the finished product of the natural process of heating up and breaking down plant and animal materials, according to the Slow Food SEMO website.Photo by Aaron Eisenhauer

__Want to get involved?__

Slow Food SEMO meets once a month; memberships start at $25 and include discounted prices for events, as well as the ability to acquire funding for proposed community projects. Compost pickup in the downtown area is also available for a separate fee. For more information, visit slowfoodsemo.org, and head over to the Slow Food SEMO Facebook page to stay up-to-date on upcoming events.