Emily to Earth: I’m actually beyond Burlington now but wanted to report on it anyway. More current updates soon!

Burlington is everything I would want in a city.

1. It’s beautiful and surrounded by natural beauty. With Lake Champlain to the west and the mountains to the east, this city is meant for the outdoorsy type. You can tell by the number of roof racks you see on cars and the concentration of sporting goods stores around here.
2. Bikes are big. Burlington itself has numerous bike paths, bike parking, and bike advocacy groups. Local Motion, a non-profit promoting people-powered transportation and recreation, was very helpful, and the kind folks at Bike Recycle VT even let me in off-hours to fix my bike. Old Spokes Home is the place to go for used bikes, or an antique bike museum if you’re so inclined.
3. They love food here as much as I do! Considering Burlington is a fraction of Toronto’s size, they still have about  markets each week, community potlucks at every opportunity, and food coops that put my little Karma Coop back home to shame (although who really needs 25 varieties of granola anyway?). On top of all that, there are about a dozen farms and a big composting facility a stone’s throw from downtown.

I spent the last few days exploring all these food friendly things around town. On Tuesday, I headed down to the Intervale, an agricultural hotbed less than a 10 minute bike from downtown. There, a dozen small organic farms are renting land for a few years while they incubate their businesses. This is one of many of projects coordinated by the Intervale Center – some of their other endeavors include a giant composting operation, school programs, gleaning, and local food activism.

What is happening in Burlington presents a great model for change that many other cities should take note of. Perhaps Burlington is what it is because most people here are educated, left-leaning, environmentally- and socially-conscious people and therefore share a vision for how they want to live. You could say that this city is as close as it gets to an intentional community without being totally intentional about it. But the challenge with intentional communities is that they tend to only attract those who think alike, thus creating a bit of an insular, homogeneous way of life. There are no Little Portugals or Chinatowns in Burlington, and I doubt they have a Caribana parade, or ever experience Israeli and Palestinian activists shouting at each other from opposite sides of the street like I saw once in Toronto.

Nonetheless, their progressive policies and avant garde community projects (often centered on food) are to be commended, and better yet, learned from. I could definitely see Vermont in general acting like a training ground for community food activists around North America.

The opportunity to learn from folks around here was particularly apparent on my trip to Shelburne Farms, a dynamic agricultural and food education center on a rolling 400 acre property on Lake Champlain outside of Burlington. The farm estate actually began as a showcase of model agricultural practices back in 1886 and this approach has continued since 1972 under the leadership of Shelburne Farms. Today, they have a sustainable forestry practice, an organic dairy, an award-winning cheddar cheese-making facility, an Inn, and a market garden that feeds its guests.

What I was most enthralled with at Shelburne Farms, however, was the focus on youth education when it came to food. The farms had all sorts of fun, hands-on educational activities that could be experienced by visiting families, and by kids on field trips or at day camp. As a child-at-heart, I could check out the worm composting bin, milk a goat (I had never done that before!), hunt for freshly laid eggs and watch cheese be made. I had the time of my life!

What makes Vermont so ahead of the pack when it comes to school food education is VT FEED, a partner of Shelburne Farms. VT FEED is an organization that works with schools and communities to raise awareness about healthy food, the role of Vermont farms and farmers, and good nutrition. They are on the forefront of “farm-to-school” programs and have mastered a prototype for classroom-cafeteria-community partnerships. They have been integral in making Vermont the state with the lowest rate of childhood obesity in America. It’s a place I will surely be back to, hopefully with some more time to really get my head around all that these folks do.

For more insight into all the places I visited in Burlington, check out the Flickr gallery! A picture is worth a thousand words, although it seems my blog posts are trying to compete.