I grew up in the Upper Valley, a region of towns along the Connecticut River that straddles Vermont and New Hampshire. There, the river winds through the heart of New England, splitting Vermont and New Hampshire like an apple, before flowing across Massachusetts and Connecticut and emptying into the sea at the Long Island Sound.
My river-town high school was a convergence of residents from both states. Although stereotypes insist that Vermont is full of progressives and New Hampshire brims with conservatives, the truth lies somewhere in between. To the people who cross river bridges daily in the Upper Valley, everyone is a little bit of everything.
Long before “local food” became a fashionable term, New Englanders simply said, “I grew these tomatoes,” or “We hunted pheasant this morning,” or “I found a whole patch of wild raspberries at the edge of the pasture.”
Among my high school friends, many Vermonters harvested from large, bountiful summer gardens. Others grazed sheep and raised chickens in their backyards. My friend Sarah’s mom named their sheep Shish Kabob and Mint Jelly so they would think of them as food and not pets. My friend Zephyr regularly participated in transitioning chickens from the henhouse to the kitchen pot, saying the work earned her the privilege to eat them.
In the 1980s, brands that became nationally recognized were local to us. We smeared Cabot butter on our toast. For summer jobs, we scooped Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. On Friday nights, we made pizza dough from scratch at the home of the people who owned what was then called King Arthur Flour because their son ran on our track team.
Although it’s a Vermont company, King Arthur sources its wheat from the Midwest. And that’s what makes a new wave of Vermont farmers growing heritage wheat, one of the developments in the June 9 Monitor Weekly cover story by Stephanie Hanes on the state’s local food economy, so exciting.
As Stephanie’s story illustrates, northern New England is a region made up of rugged individuals who value the cohesiveness of a community church supper, the kind of folks who will help drag a neighbor’s car out of a muddy ditch without a second thought. This push-pull of independence and interdependence lays the foundation for an emerging local food system that aims to be free from distant corporate conglomerates. If anywhere is fertile soil for such an experiment, Vermont is the place.
This column first appeared in the June 9, 2025, issue of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly. Subscribe today to receive future issues of the Monitor Weekly magazine delivered to your home.
