LACE Founder Ariel Zevon Speaker at Harvest Festival
By Cornelia Cesari

Ariel Zevon of the LACE (Local Agricultural Community Exchange) market in Barre will be the keynote speaker at the Chelsea Harvest Festival Wednesday, Oct. 3 on the North Common. She will recount her own experience launching a locally-based retail market, and outline her vision for the future.

Zevon was puzzled…it made no sense. She knew that good, organic food was being grown locally; she worked on some farms outside Barre. Yet, that food was not affordable or readily available to local consumers. Thus, the seed for the LACE (Local Agricultural Community Exchange) project in Barre was born.

Zevon’s whole premise is that—without the wholesalers’ and distributors’ markups, the transportation costs and delays, the processing and packaging—fresh, locally grown food should be affordable for everyone in the community, and farmers should receive a fair price for it.

When you enter LACE, "affordable" is not necessarily your first impression. It is an airy, open space, unconventional for a retail establishment. The walls are adorned with exhibitions of local artists’ and craftsmen’s work. There are books and music for sale, as well as bins of colorful produce unfettered with packaging. Central to the space is a large, safe kids’ play area. The welcoming café serves breakfast and lunch, with live music at Sunday brunch. The back of the store is taking shape as a vendors’ market, facilitated by the Community Action Council, in which local small businesses can rent retail space.

Zevon acknowledges that shopping is often an educational experience; in fact, she is seeking tax exempt status for her non-profit for that reason. There is learning here all day long, she maintains, in the conversations.

"Shoppers want to know: why don’t we carry oranges?" she laughs. "Really, local is the thing. Essentially all the produce is organic as well; ‘naturally grown’ is the agreement. But it’s all about local."

The café’s menu changes daily, depending on what's available. People really had trouble, Zevon relates, with the unavailability of mayonnaise. When patrons were forced to take risks, they discovered many delicious locally prepared condiments for their sandwiches, but "what could we do?" she shrugs. "No one around here was making mayonnaise. So now we make it here."

Zevon is not afraid to roll up her sleeves, and she is motivated by her mission: to create a working model of, she says simply, "how to eat." To her, LACE makes perfect sense.

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