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Oral Histories

The SFA oral history program documents life stories from the American South. Collecting these stories, we honor the people whose labor defines the region. If you would like to contribute to SFA’s oral history collections, please send your ideas for oral history along with your CV or Resume and a portfolio of prior oral history work to info@southernfoodways.org.

< Back to Oral History project: COVID-19 Project

ORAL HISTORY

Lauren Cox

Georgia Organics

Lauren grew up and attended college in Arkansas. Her family influences in food and farming included her mother and her Aunt Mary. She studied at Slow Food University in Italy and owned and operated her own farm in Georgia prior to working for Georgia Organics in her current role, where she connects organic producers to restaurant markets across the state.

COVID significantly impacted her daily work of building relationships between farmers and restauranteurs, and she describes her new initiatives designed to help farmers ride out the pandemic and maintain connections to restaurants, including a pop-up farmer’s market and relief supply chain that provides produce to out-of-work restaurant staff.

Date of interview:
2020-09-17

Interviewer:
Diana Dombrowski

Photographer:
Sara Wood

Download Transcript

“

"One of the chefs that we worked with last year a lot that we ended up having like three farmers connect with him for the first time, he made three new relationships with these farms, he called me two weeks into COVID and said, hey, I have this crazy idea. Like, all of us restaurants that always source from farms, we want to still support them, but we can't. And my landlord wants to throw money at a project. . . They have money they want to throw at these people to help them. And so, Chris, the chef at Root Baking Company, said, why don’t we do this? Why don’t we you know create a program that sources product from these farms and gives that product to our employees at these restaurants because they are now in a situation where they’re financially unstable and they don’t have income from being able to work in the restaurant industry right now?" - Lauren Cox

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