Guest Post Alert
We asked Brian who is a Fam Din OG, avid hiker, piano tuner and customer service guru, to pen this week's newsletter. He's also a Red Sox fanatic and a man of many plaids. He is part of the gloriously weird and wonderful fabric that is this team of people. People we love with our whole hearts and we want to share them and their views of the Fam Din community with you.
Love,
Erin
From Brian:
The day begins (at least for me, a resident of the dear old Granite State) at everyone’s favorite time to be awake: 4:30am. After each, individually battling through the existential horror show that is waking up and getting out of bed (both in general and two hours before sunrise), and making it to Woburn in one piece, a half-dozen or so bleary-eyed people, hobble up a concrete half-flight of stairs and into a warehouse in the middle of a wholly undescript industrial park.
(also - hey hi hello, I’m Brian. I’ve worked here for four years and am the person who answers most of your emails, among other things around here. Erin asked me to write the newsletter this week so here we are)
This group is eclectic, in the most wonderful way, like the record collection of the second coolest person you know (second, because, if you're like me, the coolest person you know owns very few material possessions).
It is a fascinating hodgepodge of characters, often featuring high school students and folks who are mostly retired working side by side. We have among us an aspiring farmer, a brewer, a government marine biologist, the bassist of a metal band, a butcher with a culinary degree who loves soup more than I love some living members of my family, an occasional English civil war reenactor currently pursuing a Ph.D. in astrophysics, and then there’s myself, a once and (my right knee willing) future long-distance hiker, studying to be a piano technician.
Like all days, this one begins slowly, and perhaps a bit begrudgingly. We start by bagging produce and baked goods, before setting out a few dozen crates and coolers of the various goodies that make their way to your door each week. After a quick huddle, we divide into two teams: produce and meats, and begin packing, order by order. Produce and grains in those battle-tested black bags with three dozen staples in each of them (zero-waste is the future!), meat, fish, dairy, and frozens go in green bags, which then go into coolers (the most common thing people say, with wide-eyed wonder, upon entering our warehouse for the first time is “wow, I’ve never seen that many coolers in one place”).
After an hour or so, drivers begin arriving in 10-20 minute increments. They sort all the bags (please send those back! Zero-waste is still the future!) and ice packs and milk bottles (please rinse those out!) they have in their cars from last week, before we load them up with one or two dozen new orders and send them on their merry way.
Interspersed throughout the morning, a few of you pick up your orders (Hey Doug - hope you’re well). That is an option, by the way: save the delivery fee, see the warehouse, meet the team. Occasionally, we have extra treats and we’re always happy to share. It’s a nice place. Frankly, I wouldn’t drive down from New Hampshire three or four times a week if it wasn’t.
This goes on till a bit after noon, when maybe half the folks packing load their own cars up and meander home, delivering shares along the way. The rest stay behind and button the space up. It’s nothing crazy: taking inventory, sweeping up, doing the dishes, taking the trash out, stapling bags for Tuesday. And maybe, we’ll crack open one of Erin’s beers before heading home. (Beer cooler photo above.)
The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that one of the manifold “flaw[s] in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” While his observation reaches far beyond the logistics of getting all of you wonderful people a beautiful bag of delicious, locally and sustainably sourced groceries every week, he gets right to the heart of what we do: we care for the Earth (that Tesla guy be damned, this is our only home and the only one we’ll ever have), for our community and food system, and for each other.
But it's usually impossible to do something so important directly. These sorts of things have to be done obliquely. The day to day—chock full of rinsing milk bottles, breaking down cardboard, looking up the mercury content of bluefish cause we all forgot again (it is a high-mercury fish, just in case you were wondering), and all the nitty-gritty details involved in putting groceries in a bag—isn’t glamorous. Very little that’s truly meaningful is. But the attention to the physical world and its inhabitants, and all the comradeship, laughter, and serious joy found along the way, makes that 4:30am alarm tolerable.
So in whatever warehouse or home or field or office or forest you find yourself in during this dark and dire season of American life, I hope you can find a few small ways to engage with the world and the people directly around you this weekend.
And if you can’t find one, we’re always looking for drivers.
Have a great weekend,
Brian
