“I use to ride the bus, now i DRIVE the bus.”

— Otto, The Simpsons

Sharing your food with friends is wonderful. And knowing your food comes from a quality source just adds to the joy.

Kurt from the Organic Valley bus tour

Today I met Kurt and several of the Organic Valley bus tour folks while they stopped at our recently-opened New Seasons grocery store.

Organic Valley put a group of fun-loving people into a vegetable oil-powered bus to drive around the country and talk about organic foods.

Kurt is a pretty cool guy who’s interest in organic farming started when he quit his life as a concert promotor and fled to the country to buy a cattle farm. When he made the jump, there were about 1000 farmers in the co-op. Now there is about 1700.

That was only six years ago. Today Kurt is a part of that Organic Valley veggie-bus tour.

The best thing though?

Kurt gets to DRIVE the bus.

Organic Valley Veggie Bus

Kurt went on to tell me that Organic Valley is a cooperative, actually a cooperative of cooperatives, which groups together farmers in different regions of the country to make sure that organics can reach the consumer with a minimum of transportation. Here in the Pacific Northwest anything from Organic Valley is only grown in Oregon or Washington.

The veggie bus group was a lot of fun. There was a lot of info about organics and farming. They also had important things like water bottles which won as a prize for correctly answering a few questions. (Ok, it was luck.) We even had cookies and milk.

I knew the veggie-bus folks were part of a marketing campaign. But like Kurt told me, when the product is good, as organic foods are, the marketing aspect of it does not seem so bad.

Thanks for the cookie, veggie-bus folks. And take good care of that bus!

Shared dinner with a friend of my son’s, ate some organic tomatoes from the garden, chose several organic items at the store, and took a bike ride with my son.