Our Mission 

          Picture a loaf of bread. Think of the basic ingredients needed to make that one loaf of bread: flour, oil, yeast, salt, sugar, water. Now take one of those ingredients, and try to trace it back to where it was grown. Take for instance the wheat, which is needed to make the flour. To find where the wheat was grown takes you on a three thousand thousand mile journey, crossing over ten states. 

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          To begin, we went back to the grocery store where we had bought the bread. Most grocers buy their food from a distributor, who buys the finished product from a manufacturer. This took us from our super market in Harrison, New York across the first state border into Connecticut, where the closest distribution and manufacturing plant for our bread was. That was only the first step, from locating the distribution plant, we had to find where the flour was milled.  This took us to a plant in Ohio. It’s at this stage when minerals and preservatives are added. These additions to the four come from New Jersey, Minnesota, and China. Now we had traced the flour back to its roots; however, we were still thousands of miles away from finding the wheat that made the flour was grown. After more research we found that most of the wheat used by the company we had bought the bread from came from the upper Midwest or Canada, so based off where most wheat is grown we picked North Dakota. This journey for one ingredient, barely scratches the surface on the complexities of the supply chain, as if you look at the ingredient list on the back of my brand of bread you find over twenty different ingredients shipped from all over the world.

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          This supply chain got me thinking, and inspired me to create the food for thought project, a collection of resources for people located in the lower Hudson region of New York.