A Home For “Food With A Sense Of Place”
Daniel Schreiber had a passion for “food with a sense of place.”
What this meant, first of all, is that food comes to us from a particular place, from a community instead of a corporation. To take just one example, this past summer Dan helped start up Dine In My Back Yard – an informal group of amateur cooks, gardeners, foragers who collaborated to put such food on the table and make it accessible. The idea was local food in a local setting. An amazing 95+% of the food on the table was locally-produced, some of the food coming from the very garden where the diners gathered. And Dan wanted not only the food, but the table and everything on it to be touched by someone’s hands: the tables made by one of our members, the flowers gathered from the garden around us, the menus hand-printed, the napkins sewed by someone at the table, the very dishes we were eating out of bearing the imprint of a local potter…
In his own business, Flatlander Chocolate, he strove to create “food with a sense of place,” from choosing the very name “flatlander” for a business here in the glaciated plains of east central Illinois, to working with local designers to make a chocolate mold that represented our local landscape, to incorporating local ingredients into his chocolate. And he left an imprint on everything he made, from choosing his bicycle as a symbol of his business to sometimes writing up and doodling the labels on his chocolate by hand.
While he worked to set up the necessary facilities for his own business, he very much wanted to open that space up to others who shared his passion. He wanted the former Monical’s on East Washington Street where he set up Flatlander Chocolate to offer a home to groups such as the fermentation club and 1,000-year-old food club – both of which he started. He wanted the kitchen to host cooking classes, where people could learn to prepare simple and delicious meals from scratch. He saw the bare asphalt around his business as the potential site of a vibrant community garden. And he hoped that his certified kitchen space could also be an incubator for similar, small-scale, artisanal businesses, working with local foods.
Dan appreciated that the food emerging from such a kitchen and from such a lively ferment of ideas has the power to feed our souls as well as our bodies. Because a community is not simply a producer of food; it is simultaneously the product of its food. As Urbana poet William Gillespie put it, speaking of this idea of a “community kitchen,” when you have a place both “to bake bread and break bread,” you have much more than just a bakery or an incubator for small businesses. You have the birthplace of community. That’s the vision on which the Flatlander project and its goal of a community kitchen are founded.
Learn more about the Flatlander Community Kitchen project here.