Category: About Three Rivers Market
Co-ops Grow Communities!
17th October
Co-ops around the world share a set of guiding principles, including “cooperation among cooperatives,” and “concern for community.” When you purchase delicious, healthy food at a locally-owned food co-op, you’re supporting a business that cares about people and contributes to a livable, sustainable community. And when you choose products from co-op farmers and companies, that impact grows and grows!
Keep an eye out this week for cooperatives featured in our store!
Spencer Mountain Mennonite Farms
20th September
Spencer Mountain Mennonite Farms is one of our largest local producers at Three Rivers Market. This hard working group produces a variety of vegetables: potatoes, summer & winter squashes, peppers, eggplants, onions, tomatoes, herbs & more.
We even have a selection of their Kuntry Kitchen jams and jellies to spread on your favorite biscuits or toast.
Come in to check out our produce department and aisle 4 to support local growers and producers!
Local and Independent
24th November
Noted thinker and agrarian Wendell Berry is a prolific writer whose prescient essays get at the complexity and importance of growing a just and healthy economy. The quotation above, from his essay The Idea of a Local Economy (which you can read in its entirety here), gets at the heart of what separates Three Rivers Market (and our fellow locally-owned and independently-run businesses) from big box stores, chains, franchises, and the like. We are part of this community from top to bottom. Our commitment to providing local products to our customers is more than a mere preference; we actively seek out local producers and vendors and promote their items in a number of ways, including highlighting the local items on our shelves and serving as a drop-off site for area CSAs. Our work strengthens the local economy, supports local farmers and … Read More »
Award Winning!
17th November
We’ve been in our new building for over a year now, but we haven’t gotten over our enthusiasm for its great design. A panel of nationally renowned architects agreed and recently awarded Studio 4 Design, the firm responsible for the design of our building, both the Design Excellence Award and the People’s Choice Award (voted on by all the attendees at the event) at the The East Tennessee chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Design Awards gala. The jury was held in Marfa, TX and included Laura Lesniewski AIA, BNIM, Kansas City; David Murray AIA, BohlinCywinski Jackson, Philadelphia; Hugh Hochberg, The Coxe Group, Seattle; and Dennis Cursack AIA, SRG Partnership, Porland. The jury considered Functional Innovation, Community Asset and Context, Craftsmanship, Sustainability, and Clarity of Design Idea as they evaluated submissions and asked questions like, “Does the design significantly contribute to its neighborhood and surrounding community?” and “Does … Read More »
Wendell Berry on Local Economy
14th August
Below are quotations from an excerpt from an essay by Wendell Berry published by Orion magazine in 2009. It is posted here with permission from Counterpoint Press.
The Idea of a Local Economy
‘The idea of a local economy rests upon only two principles: neighborhood and subsistence…”
BY WENDELL BERRY
Published in the Winter 2001 issue of Orion magazine
A TOTAL ECONOMY is one in which everything—“life forms,” for instance,—or the “right to pollute” is “private property” and has a price and is for sale. In a total economy significant and sometimes critical choices that once belonged to individuals or communities become the property of corporations. A total economy, operating internationally, necessarily shrinks the powers of state and national governments, not only because those governments have signed over significant powers to an international bureaucracy or because political leaders become the paid hacks of the corporations but also because political … Read More »
