After three years of fighting the good fight, explained Maude Bauschard, Maude’s Market is closing. The Dutchtown sustainable-food market and CSA club was no longer financially do-able, she said.
For those knee-deep in the struggle to address what it means to live in a country where half the food in the grocery store is made of needlessly corn-based ingredients, more and more people contract Type-2 diabetes, chickens are raised in their own waste, and Monsanto will sue a farmer into penury for spitting in their general direction, the closing of Maude’s tiny grocery occasions a certain mode of analysis.
“After three years on a really thin margin and never making a real profit, I am going to close my doors,” Bauschard said.
“I feel that the three years was an amazing experience, and gave me a sense of what’s required for a Slow Food-type movement,” she added, “I mean, as far as healthy local foods go, what’s really involved in procuring them and getting them on our tables. In our country, real food isn’t considered a commodity and doesn’t receive subsidies – that’s why healthy food is so expensive and the margins you have to operate on are so slim. That’s why the success of the economy as a whole is critical to the success of the real-food industry.”
One cannot help but consider the recent agitation over the Local Harvest locavore empire and its shaky financial underpinnings. Trying to fix the world, one free-range organic chicken at a time, ain’t easy.
Then, too, Bauschard hung her shingle in Dutchtown, which isn’t exactly flush with the Whole Foods, quinoa-sucking demographic, either.
“I fell in love with my community in Dutchtown,” she averred, “and this is a cause worth fighting for, but I also need to make a living. You can only take a movement so far if you can’t put food on your own table.”
Bauschard, who has long been involved in do-gooder causes, said she plans to continue along the same lines in a new position as a commercial district manager for the St. Louis Development Corporation in the Dutchtown area.
But, she said, if any local farmers want to partner up with her, she still represents a passel of CSA customers looking for produce. Though recent attempts at forging such an arrangement have not worked out, hope – like a stubborn cabbage that sprouts annually – springs eternal.
Maude’s Market is currently open by appointment only, said Bauschard.
