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I absolutely adore it, it inspired RootWise, I have been working there for years and it has been a huge part of my life: it connected me to food and agriculture as a form of justice, love, medicine, ohmygoodness I love it.
At the market, food is more than food. Food is people looking you in the eyes, it’s loving the dirt and the earth that yields abundant nutrition, it’s neighbors trading recipes, it’s kids eating strawberries with red-stained fingers. It’s the reminder that life begins here, with what we put in our bodies and how we choose to care for the earth that grows it. It’s the most primary, grounding life-force I know.
For a long time, I thought technology and places like this had to be worlds apart. I lived with the notion of ‘silicon vs. soil’, where one community doesn’t mix with the other. But being at the very start of my tech career, I’m still naïve enough to believe they can. And god damnit, I am a dreamer. What I’ve come to realize is that the role of technology isn’t to replace these spaces, it’s to amplify them. To use code and systems and screens not as walls but as bridges, to lift up the farmers, the organizers, the people making food justice real, and bring their work into the digital spaces that we all spend so much of our lives in.
So when I stand under the tent at the farmers market, with dirt clinging to carrots and a bustle of community all around me, I don’t feel like I’m choosing between two worlds. I feel like I’m standing at the intersection, with one foot in each, and I want to spend my life weaving them together.
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