The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis

Utopia is necessarily a place that is no-place, a place that only exists in the imagination. As soon as a utopian vision is attempted in the actual world, it is doomed; the ideas do not translate when the realities of bodies and personality and weather are involved. But Freetown, Virginia, in Edna Lewis's remembering, comes as close as anything I can imagine as an actual utopia. Freetown was founded by Miss Lewis's grandfather, who was a freed slave, and the community he and his wife and neighbors created was a community of free formerly enslaved people raising and educating their children and farming the land and building their world as they wished it would be—and doing so with an ethos of generosity and cooperation and celebration.   I have always felt that the people of Freetown were very special. They showed such love and affection for us as children, at the same time asking something of us, and they knew how to help each other so the land would thrive for all....And when we share