The Mission

How did a Jersey girl end up elbow-deep in manure?

The journey to Fig Vine Springs started in 2010 at the intersection of two ideas. The first was a New Year’s resolution to make less trash. The second was a colleague researching the root cause of obesity in inner-city youth.

Enviornmentalism and conservation had been in me since childhood. When I became a mother and thought about the world I am leaving behind for my children, the vision of mounds of trash growing bigger and bigger got stuck in my head. I became committed to reducing the trash which our household makes. I attempted to replace store bought bread, sold in plastic bags, with home made bread, produced from flour sold in compostable paper. I was gifted a fancy yogurt making machine which created visions of parfaits in reusable glass jars. The bread turned out hard as a rock, and the machine was used once before ending up in a donation pile. But that New Year’s resolution, to reduce what my family sends to the landfill, sewed the seed.

At the same time as I was experimenting with homemade bread and yogurt, a colleague shared some of her ideas on a root cause of childhood obesity: We had lost the cultural traditions of cooking from scratch. She believed that, since the 1950’s, we had forgotten how to make our own food. We relied on food elements that came from boxes, cans, and bags mass produced in factories and shipped to our local supermarkets. These foods had worse nutritional profiles and were less satisfying to eat leading to an epidemic of under-nourished, and yet overfed, youth.

Committed to not allow my children to walk down this path turned me toward from-scratch cooking. I found myself at the intersection of two ideas: from-scratch cooking leads to better health but also allows for less waste going to landfills. This became a journey, a cycle of improvement, with every step taking us closer to less reliance on mass produced food. In 2017, I started trying to grow some of our own ingredients to reduce what we bought at stores. Again, the overlap of the two ideas was clear: Food closer from the source is healthier, but it also means less waste.

Today, this journey continues. Sometimes in baby steps and sometimes in big leaps. We are still quite reliant on the industrial food grid, but every small change we make gets us closer to the goal, better health and less waste. The journey had many unforeseen benefits (more to come on that in another post). Today, I feel responsible for sharing what I’ve learned with others, and this has become our founding mission.