Every year we host an event called the Liberty Food Fest. We do the event in mid-December, a couple weeks after Thanksgiving and a couple weeks before the end of the calendar year. It’s a time when the growing season is over and most farmers are in recovery mode. Our goal is simple: celebrate local farmers, share locally-grown meals, listen to live music, and constructively discuss how we as a region can build a more-thriving agriculture.
The first year we did the event was 2023; the idea had come while shoveling gravel. Longtime friend Joel Salatin agreed to headline, and suggested reaching out to his friend John Klar who was excited, too. Joel is a lifelong Libertarian, and John is a Republican. Both are farmers. It was important the event not become overtly political, because local food is larger than politics, it is existential. Soon Winona LaDuke- farmer, hemp advocate and former vice-presidential candidate for the Green Party agreed to speak. Then someone mentioned Maine had recently passed a “Right to Food” Amendment with widespread bipartisan support. Craig Hickman was the Democratic state senator who co-authored the amendment with a Republican representative Billy Bob Faulkingham. This kind of bipartisanship is exactly what we were striving for. Craig agreed to make the drive a few hours West to speak.
He showed up Friday night during our screening of Farmers for America. He stood out: A tall man with a cowboy hat on and a suit. We caught dinner and became fast friends. The following day Craig provided the closing keynote speech, one that was equal parts poetry and prose. He’s got a unique charisma, a passion for individual freedom that had the small group of about eighty of us in the basement of the Bellows Falls Opera House all standing to applaud when he finished. Someone in the group turned and said to the rest of us, “Now it’s time for us to do what they did in Maine.”
About six months later, it was my turn to drive out East and film with him. He lives with his husband Jop on Annabessacook Farm on Annabessacook Lane in Winthrop, Maine. It’s a very rural Republican area President Trump recently won by 10 points. On the same ballot, Craig won re-election as a Democratic State Senator by 10 points. One in five voted for both Craig Hickman and Donald Trump.
Craig cooked homegrown pasture-raised BBQ chicken ready upon my arrival- sometime around 8pm. It was wrapped in tin foil and sitting on the grill. At first, turned it down, not wanting to be an imposition. After a short while, realizing he’d cooked extra- gave the chicken a try. It was among the best meals ever had. We sat back and talked politics for hours into the night, agreeing and disagreeing on viewpoints and strategies- without once being disagreeable.
Weirdly enough, if I’d paid Craig for the chicken dinner it would have been illegal.
Spent a couple nights and days there, a guest in their old and charming home, that not long ago had served as a bed and breakfast. Shadowed Craig picking blueberries, planting peas, hammering in homemade wooden signs with updates on the latest produce at his small roadside farmstand. He’s a natural politician, who thrives at small-town firefighter fundraiser BBQs and greets seemingly everyone on the street and in town with genuine excitement.
It’s a fools errand to try and make sense of why and how we end up the way we do. When Craig shared his pathway into politics, it felt miraculous. After a visit from the apparition of his recently departed father, he felt a spiritual calling to farm. From there, he had setup a thriving farmstand selling produce as well as homemade yogurt and cheese. But before long the dairy inspector showed up, and demanded he spend twenty thousand dollars on a new addition to his home kitchen just to continue selling the yogurt and cheese his neighbors had been happily buying and eating for months.
The injustice was so raw that Craig decided to run for office on a food freedom platform. He would be a champion of the growing number of Mainers who wanted to be able to buy food from the source of their own choosing, even if the food was raw milk, pickled tomatoes or homemade cheese. After losing the first time, Craig won the second time. The movement for food freedom had just gained a major champion...
Please enjoy this rough scene for free. It’s an introduction to Craig and will be part of our upcoming feature documentary The Right to Food.
If you believe people have the right to choose what food to eat, support our food freedom documentary.
A huge thanks to Craig and Jop for opening up their home, and to Craig for having the courage to run for office when most people would have simply shut down shop. A big thanks to all of our paid subscribers who make this work possible.
It means the world.
best thoughts,
Graham
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