Columbia (Missouri) Center for Urban Agriculture

The Road House: The home-grown food gurus

Urban agriculture activists

BY JORDAN NOVET
The Missourian
NOVEMBER 12, 2009

On a Monday evening, the scent of warm tomatoes permeates the kitchen of the Road House, a green-and-red building on St. Joseph Street. Bobby Johnson, Daniel Soetaert and Billy Polansky, half of the six housemates, are making and canning tomato paste with tomatoes they bought from Amish farmers. Johnson pushes one sliced tomato after another through a juicer. Polansky oversees two vats cooking the juice on a stove.

“This is not special,” Johnson says. “This is what people did for thousands of years.”

For many people in Columbia, especially recent college graduates such as these, regular trips to the grocery store are more normal than home-cooking.

Johnson wants that to change. He and the others at the house, which doubles as headquarters for Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture, are committed to growing some of their own food and buying everything else from the people who grew it. They share the costs and the cooking, and they eat together when they can. They call themselves a family.

Polansky says buying food in bulk for the six housemates and sharing it is more economical than selecting small quantities of items only one of them likes. But if they share food, do they have to sacrifice their personal preferences?

“I think that we are sufficiently homogenous in our food tastes that it’s not an issue,” says housemate Adam Saunders, who estimates that about half of their food comes from their two gardens on St. Joseph Street.

They had been gardening for a year when the six moved into the house in August. This was after Saunders, Johnson and Soetaert founded CCUA to show people how to maintain gardens within city limits. The previous year, Saunders and Soetaert had begun teaching a service-learning course at MU, introducing students to composting, gardening and canning. Soetaert estimates 190 people have learned these techniques from the group, who have received grants from Mizzou IT and other organizations.
Bill McKelvey, president of Columbia’s Community Garden Coalition, says their approach is relatively new to the city but in step with movements elsewhere in America.

Looking ahead 10 years, Soetaert wants the world to contain “more healthy, sustainable communities less dependent on a global economy.”

For now, the house is trying to do its part. As Soetaert, Saunders, Polansky and housemate Carrie Hargrove sit down for dinner — scrambled eggs, goat cheese, peppers, onions and pancakes — Polansky says, “Raise your hand if you don’t like food.” They dig in; no one says a word.

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See Columbia (Missouri) Center for Urban Agriculture here.