On February 8th, 2018 we were recognized by the Austin Food and Wine Alliance or AFWA with a $10,000 Grant Award. We were truly speechless! It was an incredible night of good food and cheese, celebration and for me (being 7 months pregnant) Topo Chico.
I had the opportunity to say a few words after our award about FOND and about our story. I wanted to encourage yet-to-be-entrepreneurs to find the missing things, to pursue them with passion and yes, sometimes reckless abandon. I shared Rudyard Kipling’s poem, The Explorer. I think this poem has so many parallels to what it means to be an entrepreneur, down to the “twelve Chaps who will follow.” (But that’s a story for another time). Here is an excerpt of the poem below:
THE EXPLORER
"There's no sense in going further --
it's the edge of cultivation,"
So they said, and I believed it --
broke my land and sowed my crop --
Built my barns and strung my fences
in the little border station
Tucked away below the foothills
where the trails run out and stop.
Till a voice, as bad as Conscience,
rang interminable changes
In one everlasting Whisper
day and night repeated -- so:
"Something hidden. Go and find it.
Go and look behind the Ranges --
Something lost behind the Ranges.
Lost and waiting for you. Go!"
In my case, bone broth is a story with centuries of history, yet most of us have no idea how to make it. The bone broth story is rich and somewhat mythic, but it is so new to us that we doubt its value. It has a unique place in a beautifully complex system that cultivates the land and year after year improves it instead of taking from it. The first year of FOND's life felt like I was discovering something lost and something precious every day that passed. I still feel that way and I LOVE sharing the goodness of bone broth with others to their nourishment and delight. And it was there, just waiting for me all I had to do was go and look for it.
There has never been a better time to start something, and there have never been more distractions to keep our wonder and need for adventure at bay. I implore you to put down the screens, to dream about what should be, to listen for the lost things that are waiting for you and to…”Go!”
