Sharing Stories Through Montana Food Matters
As winter blankets Montana, who doesn’t love to curl up with a good book? Or a device (let’s be honest!). Today’s electronics provide access to tales, podcasts, videos, and distractions beyond our grandparents’ wildest dreams.
For Montanans, a new online library called Montana Food Matters is a fresh space to explore this winter. This searchable collection offers stories of food-system efforts from across the state. Like a brick-and-mortar library, this resource is designed as a clear, useful, welcoming space that connects community members with information, stories, and each other. In addition to articles and podcasts, Montana Food Matters features a glossary to define potentially unfamiliar words and acronyms.
The catalyst for Montana Food Matters grew from pandemic disruptions, when the fragility of our food system was plain to see. Headlines like “Spoiled Milk, Rotten Vegetables and a Very Broken Food System” drove the issue home: It’s time to rethink our food systems. Time to understand that bigger isn’t always better, and that progress doesn’t always mean more technology, more fertilizer, more production per acre, more consolidation. Time to accelerate efforts to build more resilient food systems.
What the founders of Montana Food Matters understood was this: Montanans are gritty, resilient, and innovative. Balancing COVID’s sad tales of food-system dysfunction was a steady flow of inspiring tales of local businesses pivoting, feeding neighbors, shifting how they do business. And not just that: People from across Montana have been working to grow food in healthier ways, increase access to local foods, and strengthen the infrastructure and relationships needed to make regional food systems viable for years. All these stories, not just tales from the pandemic, need to be easier to find.
It’s exciting to watch a new resource emerge, with project development overseen by staff from Alternative Energy Resources Organization, the Community Food and Agriculture Coalition, and Grow Montana. It’s also exciting to consider the ways this library will evolve. Most of all, it’s exciting that despite logistical and cultural barriers, there’s a strong and growing community of people working to get Montana foods to Montana families. People who understand that Montana food matters.
- To access the Montana Food Matters library, visit montanafoodmatters.org.
