Feed a Neighbor: Sending Beef to the Table on King Street

There is a lunch counter on West King Street in Boone where you can eat whether or not you can pay for it. It has been there since 2012, in the old Boone Drug building downtown, a hundred year old room that spent decades as the kind of soda fountain where the whole town turned up. F.A.R.M. Cafe calls itself North Carolina's first donate what you can cafe, and the way it works is simple enough to explain in one breath. You pay the suggested price, or a little more than the suggested price, or you pay what you can, or you volunteer an hour. Children under twelve eat free. Everybody eats.

Starting this holiday season there is a new way to put food on that counter. You can buy a Shipley Farms gift card and name F.A.R.M. Cafe as the recipient, and we deliver it to the kitchen.

Why a gift card and not a box of beef

We thought about this the other way round first. It would be easy to send the cafe a pallet of whatever we have most of, take a photograph of it, and call that generosity.

The trouble is that a kitchen serving lunch five days a week knows precisely what it is short of, and a donor standing in a different county does not. Some weeks the gap is ground beef. Some weeks it is something cheaper that stretches further, or a cut that works in a braise when the weather turns. The cafe's cooks know. We do not, and neither does the person giving.

So the gift card is the point, not a shortcut. The money arrives as money, and the cafe spends it on what the next two weeks actually require.

How many people that actually helps

F.A.R.M. Cafe does not buy from us at the price you see on this website. It buys at wholesale, and we keep working on that number. We look for cuts that feed more people per pound, we point them at what we have a lot of, and when we can bring the price down we bring it down.

That is what turns a gift card into a number of people:

We say helps feed rather than feeds on purpose. We send the beef; the cafe buys everything else on the plate, cooks it and staffs the room. The figures are deliberately the cautious end of it too. Their cooks decide what to make and who comes through the door that day, so treat it as the size of the thing rather than a promise.

The same stretch of road

The cafe's own mission statement says it exists to build a healthy and inclusive community by providing meals produced from local sources, served in a restaurant where everybody eats, regardless of means.

Local sources. Our cattle are in Vilas, which is the next valley over from that lunch counter. This is not a corporate giving program routed through three states and a marketing department. It is a farm and a kitchen on the same stretch of road, where what we raise can be on the counter in Boone without a freight bill in between.

Our family has farmed here for more than a hundred years. Appalachian families have always fed each other, and nobody in a mountain community has ever needed the practice explained to them. This is the same thing with a receipt attached.

How to give

Buy a Shipley Farms gift card, press Feed people in Boone, and we take it from there. It goes to the cafe, not to a general fund and not to us. The cafe redeems it against what it needs.

If you want the mechanics, including what the receipt shows and what we can and cannot tell you about taxes, that is all in How the F.A.R.M. Cafe giving option works.

If you would rather give the cafe money directly, or volunteer an hour of your time behind that counter, do that instead. They take both, and an hour on a weekday lunch rush is worth a great deal. Their door is at 617 West King Street and they serve from eleven until two, Monday to Friday. You can see the place on Google Maps before you go.

We would just as soon you did both.