boil the onions
cut them half when cooled
use the spoon to make the onions as bowls
fill them with stuff
cover with cheese
bake them in the oven

The vision of community food processing facilities on Lopez has been around for years. The mobile slaughtering unit is a manifestation of this vision. The next step is to manifest a shared use commercial grade production facility to create jobs, enhance our sustainability, and provide our nourishment by adding value to the food we grow in proper processing facilities.

This survey intends to ascertain if enough people would like to start or expand a food related business, supplement their income, or just safely and more easily preserve their food using commercial grade equipment in a shared use kitchen. It further serves to guide infrastructure investment and equipment acquisition.

The idea of shared use community kitchen/food processing facility (Lopez Island Sustainability Hub or The LISH, until a better name comes along) addresses five broad categories of opportunity:
1. Job Incubation
2. Community food processing
3. Sustainability
4. Education
5. Security

Job Incubation
Job incubators help people start and grow their own small business by providing shared access to production facilities, business advice, technical training, and financial help. They have been created across the country to help people get started in business. They provide employment opportunities as entrepreneurs grow their business and help people supplement their income by having their food ideas (for example, old family recipes) turned into marketable products even on a small scale.

Community food processing
Gardeners and farmers can grow A LOT of food on Lopez. People already pickle, dry, can, or otherwise preserve their produce at home. A shared use facility permits people to process their food on a larger scale using professional equipment to accomplish this safely and efficiently, perhaps in collaboration with others at harvest-time work parties.

Sustainability
A shared use facility to process local produce provides incentive to grow an increasing variety of foods in greater abundance. In the long term, this biological diversity establishes an inventory of genetic resources (varieties of plants and animals) that could mitigate possible climate changes, broadening the base of foods available.
Also, a diverse selection of produce increases opportunities to create locally unique products and explore new markets.

Education
Learning about safe food handling and processing benefits any student. Learning how to safely produce food products and sell them to the general public permits people to create jobs.
Learning to run a business can be carried over to many enterprises. The study of physics, math, biology, law, economics, ecology, material fabrication, and other sciences could be integrated into our community’s educational system.

Security
Local jobs based on local production provide more secure livelihoods that are less susceptible to economic swings than construction or tourism. A robust diversity of food in production with established infrastructure to handle it is better than money in the bank. We may not always be able to rely on an interstate highway system and global shipping for our sustenance. We live in a time of vast abundance and ready access to high quality durable industrial equipment. It seems prudent to assemble the requisite infrastructure to take advantage of the potential abundance surrounding us.

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Shared use community kitchen/food processing facilities are not a new idea. Other communities have created them with varying degrees of success. We can learn from the experience of others.
Resources exist to assist endeavors that bring long-term employment and security to communities. Federal, State, County, service organizations, and private funds have been allocated for just such innovative projects.
Also, much support lives in the hearts and minds of community-oriented individuals who have time and skills to offer beyond a ledger’s accounting.

Students are encouraged to participate in this survey as they imagine how they might like to support themselves in ways that develop their creativity and their dreams for the future.
Underemployed or retired persons might have an old family recipe or some culinary invention just a legal kitchen away from earning a bit more income.
Please consider the questions below and answer them imaginatively. Feel free to write in the margins or add more pages of ideas. This survey is only a starting point; a way to learn what learn what people would do if they could do.