Dear RFRS Community Member,
Biting into a Gold Dust peach at the Masumoto Family Farm was nothing short of magical. So we were saddened to learn that this incredibly delicious variety of peach might never see a restaurant plate or a kitchen table, because supermarkets and popular culture had deemed it too small for consumption.
We're "trained to eat with our eyes," explained Nikiko Masumoto, fourth-generation farmer at Masumoto Family Farm, when she reached out to us to find an audience for this undeservingly unpopular fruit. Nikiko, as one of our featured storytellers in 2016, knew that part of our mission is to be a catalyst for improving our local food system.
Together, we brought volunteers to help harvest the fruit and reached out to our contacts in the food industry to find homes for over 1,000 lbs of the misfit peaches. This was the very definition of a grassroots movement supporting sustainable agriculture. The Masumoto Family is part of a small group of farms that is doing something very different: growing heirloom varieties that don't have a ready market and harvesting the fruit only if food purchasers can pay to support fair wages for the farm workers. It's the kind of accountability and commitment to quality that exemplifies our vision for the food system.
In the end, we partnered with Airbnb, Google, Kitchentown, Stanford University, and State Bird Provisions to bring the Gold Dust peach to local tables. And for the first time in six years, this beautiful heirloom peach didn't end up in the compost bin, challenging a small but significant part of the produce market paradigm.
It's local stories like these that inspire us to act. We invite you to join us in improving our food system one bite at a time.
Please help us support similar food system actions like this by contributing to our #WeTheEaters year-end fundraising campaign.
With gratitude,
The RFRS Team