Sticking People Together, Making People “Stick” Out: Oh, Honey

Almost everyone around the world eventually discovers that food brings people together and apart. Bread and rice start medieval peasant riots, GMO’s strain or heal international relations, family business for many people happens around the table, and in some countries chocolate may win a girl’s affections for any day. In Charlottesville, VA, the ‘life was imple’ City Market clearly brings people together, but a job interview having a local honey merchant implies that homegrown food can form communal relationships while also setting people apart from each other within that community.

The Hungry Hill Farms booth sits near the popsicle stand, the very first booth inside a long row of organic and homemade stalls. The pair working the booth first caught my attention when the friendly man complimented my friend’s “I’m no rocket-surgeon” shirt. Individuals that stopped by to check out the honey often just stopped by to chat; two ladies paused because, because they said, “I buy your honey in the Cville Market.” The honey they had purchased in the local store had be a way to open up alliance in conversation; it had made a social “debt”, albeit an extremely small one, between the person at the booth and the customer, and while the customer and the vendor would never know one another, they both acknowledged a small friendly bond. Colin Johnson, the friendly man watching the booth, said that often regular customers will come solely for conversation, not to buy honey.

Conversation and social bonds actually started the Hungry Hill Farms business back in 1968 when Glenn Clayton Sr. were built with a conversation with a friend in the fire department. The fireman had kept two bee hives as a hobby, but became allergic and gave them to Clayton Sr. like a gift. The two beehives expanded to the present 500, and the hobby became a company because the honey shot to popularity among friends and family, who received it from the Claytons on holidays so that as gifts. Honey, then, drew people together, and also the drawing of people together produced surplus honey. The Claytons soon found that they had too much honey for use year after year, and started to market it. As they sold honey, they expanded their hives and social linkages, so the cycle continues. Colin Johnson, who explained the story about “her grandfather,” actually joined the business himself through social bonds: he’s in a relationship with Mr. Clayton’s granddaughter, the confident-looking lady who sold us honey sticks.

The basic needs of food-provision are still an extremely real a part of why Happy Hill Farms exists. Along with honey, the farm has ten acres of garden which supplies much of the produce the Clayton family consumes. The farm also grows shiitake mushrooms to market. Nevertheless, it is obvious that social and communal connections form an excellent part, otherwise most, from the push and pull of Hungry Hill Farms.

While honey brings people together, it also establishes distinctions between people. When asked what type of people bought Hungry Hill Honey, Johnson told us that “a smattering of people”, in the “crunchy hippie types” to people who looked like they “just came off their yacht.” As the acquisition of exactly the same product seems to begin a kind of unified identity between most of these people, Johnson’s division of the customer group along sociopolitical lines–rather than racial, ethnic, or otherwise–mirrors an over-all mental division from our food conversation. A largely false stereotype does exist to create local and sustainable food a liberal “hippie” issue; an additional stereotype, that conservatives have all the money for overpriced goods, breaks down as in Charlottesville, where this is an upper-middle class liberal bourgeois providing you with the purchasing power for farm products. Elsewhere, in additional stereotypically “conservative” rural areas, the price of sustainable and native food goes down. Generalizations may not provide true pictures of a society on the exterior, but in the local food conversation, they do show glimpses of the stark mental and social attitudes that surround food consumption within the minds of the consumers, vendors, and also the rest of the society. People in Cville set themselves aside from one another with the food they eat.

A conversation and among Hungry Hill’s customers further illuminated the way that food purchasing establishes uniqueness. She buys Hungry Hill, she says, since it is a very close to her house to the Cville Market that sells it “and besides it’s local,” but she goes to the Farmer’s Market because “everyone’s here.” It’s where the politicians campaign, the people spend time, and you will buy sustainable and local food, she says. She described a communal event which brings people together. As she went on, she explained how sustainable and local food would be a lifestyle for her, not “the latest social trend”, because she grew up on a farm. The conversation, while demonstrating how food became a unifying event, succinctly demonstrated that my interviewee’s identity became set apart by her history with sustainable food. She distinguished herself not just from people who do not buy local, but from those who have another purchasing history with local food. She wanted that distinction.

Quite obviously, the food that people sell also sets them apart. Watch strives to point out why its meals are different or better than everyone else’s: that’s just a factor of economic. Hungry Hill Honey comes with an additional level of vendor separation on top of that which comes naturally with business products. Vegetable and meat farmers work directly with the crop they sell: bee farmers use it second-hand using their company living creatures.

This distinction creates interesting environmental and political consequences for farmers. Johnson explains that large companies truck their bees across the country to try and hit all the different blooms. The first, the almond blooms, come in very springtime, so when the bees have gathered whenever possible, the companies truck them elsewhere, hitting cotton blooms down south, cherry blooms, and everything else. This travel weakens the bees’ natureal defenses, and understandably results in disorientation of the internal compasses. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a phenomenon rocking the bee industry over the past 5 years or so, is the place bees simply stop finding their way around, or fly away and then leave the colony permanently. Bees without a colony die, and the suicide of the colony turns into a suicide for that bees. Annually or two ago Hungry Hill Farms also lost several colonies, despite the fact that the majority of their colonies remain stationary constantly. Johnson and Ms. Clayton attribute CCD primarily to bee diseases spread through the large bee businesses.