
About Us
Purpose: The Agora Food Club connects members with food and products that are produced in a natural way. The food club not only connects members to these offerings but also supports farmers and producers who practice these principles. In doing so, The Agora Food Club provides an alternative to the mainstream public commercial food system.
Every dollar you spend supports something.
There is no neutral action.
You are supporting something in line with your morals and principles
OR
you are supporting something that goes against them.
We operate by pooling together our money, buying in bulk, building relationships with local natural producers, attaining wholesale accounts, consolidating our purchases, and bringing all that to one physical location to pick up. We’re just a group of people joining together in our pursuit of real food with a few representatives to manage and organize the efforts.
There are a great many problems in the world today and the commercial food system is one of the most impactful. Participating in and thus supporting the current food system creates health issues, sustains immoral practices, is damaging to the environment, and restricts local farmers and producers from being able to scale up or often to even exist. The Agora Food Club aims to allow its members the ability to eat local, naturally raised food and products as well as support local individuals who follow these practices. The majority of what we offer comes from less than an hour away from our physical location. Our standards are very similar to certified organic and we personally inspect and work with our suppliers to ensure the best products possible for members.
The Agora Food Club is not a traditional store. We actually do not sell anything ourselves but rather have a unique service model structure for the best attainment of our members’ goals and for the protection of all involved. This includes being representatives for members, being a food aggregation hub, and supplying the majority of our members’ groceries on a weekly basis.
When members join, they create and fund an account with the food club. The representatives of the food club provide the services of getting natural and local food and products for members, vetting suppliers, managing the club, and anything else needed. Every member pays a membership fee that covers the cost of these services and gains access to wholesale pricing and unique availability to food and products. Much of what we have is often very difficult to source otherwise and/or is very pricey through traditional channels (premium grocery stores, farmer’s markets, online retailers, etc.). We provide the ability for members to not only attain these quality products but to do so at reasonable costs and to shift their support from the corrupted commercial food system to a more local, natural, and healthy alternative.
Local options for eating truly healthy food are not very realistic for most of us and often these options aren’t as healthy as we desire. Whole Foods is too expensive for most of us and requires diligence and research since they still carry many products with seed oils, glyphosate, toxins and chemicals, commercially raised meats, etc. Buying organic at a grocery store at least removes most of the glyphosate but leaves many of the other issues. Main Street Market has many truly healthy and local options but is often much more expensive than what the food club can provide the same things for. Acquiring food affordably involves going to the farms and suppliers themselves, working out better pricing, ordering bulk online, doing a dairy drop, and piecing things together likely still with a grocery store run too. We’ve done the math, as have multiple other members, and when you do this as an individual, time, gas, and other expenses typically erase the financial savings of sourcing this way. It is also hard to sufficiently vet farmers and products. Amish and Mennonites are “natural” but often farm conventionally. Most “natural and local” meats and products (pasture raised chicken, eggs, pork, etc.) are fed in a way that makes them high in toxins and PUFAs. Many local raw milk dairies feed hay and alfalfa sprayed with chemicals. These and many other factors make piecing together groceries affordably difficult and often ineffective in achieving our goals of truly healthy real food. Your representatives have performed continuous education in pursuit of defining what real, healthy food truly is and all the gray areas in between. There have been countless conversations with producers and natural health providers as well as deep dives into related research. This is the other service we provide, albeit in the background and often unseen. Your representatives try to get as close to the ideal as possible while still being affordable and realistic. In general, our main focusses are no glyphosate, no seed oils, non-GMO, no vaccines, no hormones, no chemical preservatives, pasture/naturally raised animals, grass finished meat when applicable, regenerative farming practices, organic produce, raw dairy, and no sugar unless it’s supposed to be there (candy). In addition, we try to offer options that go a step further towards the ideal- sourdough with fresh milled ancient grains, corn/soy free (low PUFA) meat and eggs, certified organic options, and more. With our unique structure, the food club can consolidate the expenses of piecing together healthy groceries, use our volume to get even better pricing, use our knowledge to ensure truly healthy offerings, and have all this in one convenient location without compromising quality. As a bonus, each one of these perks of the food club are continually being improved upon.
The only way for many of us to eat this way is to join together for sourcing, funding, knowledge, and community. Some of the items and suppliers we have wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for the demand and support from the food club encouraging them to produce and to produce by our standards. There are three ways to approach an alternative to the modern food system: piece it together alone – OR – give up / give in – OR – build an alternative together with the power and support of our like minded community.
In addition, we don’t know what the future holds. There have been times in the recent past when shelves were running empty, prices skyrocketing, and mandates were beyond what many of us were willing to participate in. Many of us found community and alternatives but compared to our monthly budgets, the money that goes to supporting these alternatives is extremely limited. Unfortunately most people, including ourselves, spend a large portion of our money and resources supporting companies and causes we openly disagree with and we recognize as immoral and harmful. Every dollar you spend supports something. There is no neutral action. You are supporting something in line with your morals and principles or you are supporting something that goes against them. Hopefully in many ways in your life you are making a conscience decision to support good. Feel free to ask for ideas and recommendations as well.
Maybe society will turn around and we’ll have a future that trends towards sunshine, love, and butterflies. I’ll be a happy participant in the food club in this utopian vision. However, if the future isn’t so rosy, those who didn’t prepare ahead of time setting up and supporting alternative food systems, gray markets, bartering systems, local physical community, mutual assistance options, and other moral alternatives will be scrambling. If the future has hard times ahead, it’ll likely be too late if we wait for them to be here to start building.
We choose to build now- to build community, to build our health, to build our resilience, and to build a way to operate outside of the corrupt, unnatural, and unhealthy systems that surround us now (and the versions that will surround us in the future). We’d love to build with you and we’d love to have as many as we can manage participating in these goals with us. We understand we are outside the mainstream culture. We know we are sacrificing some convenience. We know we don’t have the resources that the mainstream has. We know we are spending more money up front on our health. We believe it’s worth the cost. We know our money is supporting the regeneration of the land, the support of healthy and natural practices, the small producers among us, and the investment into a future we can be proud to be a part of. We are building something good, something valuable, something bigger than ourselves. We are preparing and building for a positive and thriving future for our community, even if it’s just a relatively small group of us. We aren’t just complaining about the problems in the world, the corruptions in our society, the poison in our food, the indoctrination of our kids, the poisoning of the land, and the mistreatment of animals around us. We are choosing to do something about it. We only have control over our own spheres of influence, our own money, and our own attention but when we come together for this common cause, we can truly make a difference for ourselves, those around us and those to come after.
Thank you for joining us in this worthy mission.
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