Good Food for the Common Good

Posted on June 29, 2018

Lily Rolader ’15 faced a classic chicken-or-egg conundrum.

The grocery store in the low-income Westside neighborhood in her hometown of Atlanta stocked few fresh fruits and vegetables; the owner said there wasn’t demand for them. But no supply, no demand.

Rolader set out to change that equation as an intern with a local foundation. Right before the July Fourth holiday, the store stocked up on strawberries and blueberries, and she served samples of a grilled watermelon, strawberry and blueberry salad. The berries sold out, and the store started carrying them on a regular basis.

As Rolader enticed customers with the fresh produce, she heard stories about family recipes, farms where they grew up and how they had come to feel disconnected from where their food was grown. That led to discussions about access to food, the environment and politics. “We used food as a central conversation starter to get at these complex issues,” she said.

Rolader delved into such issues majoring in public policy — with minors in social entrepreneurship, environmental studies and science — at UNC, where she also participated in campus dining services’ Real Food Challenge. She spent a semester calculating the amount of fresh food served in the dining halls based on purchasing invoices. That effort led UNC to commit to serving 20 percent fair-trade, local and organic food in dining halls by 2020.

“That experience is what first got me thinking about the huge impact large institutions like universities can have on local food access and small farmers’ businesses,” she said.

She also has a family background in the food industry. Her great-grandfather Ivon Rolader owned the Red Ridge Dairy in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood as well as a general store and spring-water businesses bearing the family name. Lily Rolader now lives on the property where those businesses once stood.

She returned to Atlanta after graduation to intern with Common Market Georgia, helping small-scale farmers connect with wholesale clients. “We are trying to help them compete within the modern supply chain and make the connection for our customers on where our food comes from,” Rolader said.

The nonprofit was just getting off the ground when Rolader started, and she saw an opportunity to help it grow. She rose to operations coordinator, then manager, and in 2017 was named director. In that time, Common Market Georgia expanded from working with one farm co-op to about 35 producers within 250 miles of Atlanta. It now operates out of a 60,000-square-foot warehouse with a 6,500-square-foot cold-storage facility, with seven full-time and two part-time employees.

Common Market Georgia was one of four nonprofits recently awarded a $1.45 million grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to offer education about and promote local, fresh foods in early child-care and learning programs throughout the state. It also has received a Safe Quality Food certification, an internationally recognized food-safety audit, the first local food hub in the Southeast to do so.

Rolader says Common Market is trying to build a regional food system that develops more personal connections between producers and consumers by “giving farmers a chance to tell their story. The SYSCOs of the world are too big for that.”

— Andrea Weigl

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Strawberry Rhubarb Breakfast Crisp

Filling:

1 ½ cups chopped rhubarb

3 cups strawberries

Juice of ½ lemon

1 tablespoon buckwheat or white flour

1 tablespoon brown sugar

Topping:

1 cup oats

½ cup buckwheat or white flour

½ cup almonds, toasted and chopped

2 teaspoons brown sugar

Large pinch of salt

¹⁄₃ cup coconut oil or butter

Yogurt, for serving

▶  Preheat oven to 375 F.

▶  In a large baking dish, combine rhubarb and strawberries with lemon juice, buckwheat flour and sugar.

▶  In a medium bowl, mix oats, flour, almonds, sugar and salt.

▶  Mix in coconut oil or butter with fingers or a fork until mixture sticks together.

▶  Crumble over the top of the fruit and place in the oven.

▶  Bake for 40 to 45 minutes or until golden.

▶  Serve with yogurt.

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