From Madison to Manhattan: Underground Food Collective Shares Their Community

As a Manhattan girl on a budget, I relish the opportunity to have a nice meal out every once in a while. But when I find out that the Underground Food Collective is making a trek to New York City for one of their many-coursed meals, I lose all sense of fiscal responsibility and drop few nice dinners’ worth of dough without a second thought in order to attend. And after partaking in their dinner for a third time, I’m already saving up my dollars for when they return.

Although based in Madison, Wisconsin, the Underground Food Collective, a catering service run by three guys whose aim seems simply to provide good food, grown, cooked and prepared by good people, share their motivations and their community with the New York metropolitan area through an occasional series of dinners. Be it a Pre-Industrial Pig Dinner, where the farmer who raised the pig traveled down with his family to explain how he raises his livestock in humane and sustainable way, to a hosting these New York dinners with like-minded folks such as Sweet Deliverance, a catering service that provides a direct link from farm to table, the Collective strives to connect the food that comes from a community with the one that consumes it. And although one may argue that these dinners, inclusive of ingredients and chefs from Midwest, break with the rule of “local” and “sustainable,” the New York events very much seem more of demonstration of how these folks love and want to share the bounty of their community, while you, as the consumer, not only come away with an extremely happy belly, but learn by example about how to partake and find value in your own community of farmers’ markets, local purveyors, and otherwise locally-sourced food.

For their most recent New York event, titled “A Dinner in Celebration of Winter,” the menu focused around a season of the year when nature’s offerings often get shorted, and most folks may turn to less sustainable or less local options in preparations for their meals. By being based in Madison, the Collective has access to Dane County Farmers’ Market, the country’s largest producer-only farmer’s market. A member of the Collective recalled that at one point, the market closed during winter due to the seemingly lack of fresh produce, but a few farmers gathered together and decided to keep it running during the slow season and promote the lesser known winter offerings, like root vegetables, cabbage and preserves, among others. The folks of the Collective explained at the dinner that the point of this particular meal was to simply cook and serve what a farmer might prepare for himself during this time of year. To boot, a portion of the ticket price for the event was funneled directly into the host city’s community by supporting East New York Farms!, a collective whose mission is to put food issues into the hands of residents by presenting them with local and sustainable food options that can economically spur on their own community.

So although this catering service is technically run by three individuals, their success is really due to the people who surround and assist them. From their website: “We have a community of partners, children, and friends who support and help us. On most nights of the week they cook with and for us. At all of our events they help us in and out of the kitchen. Sometimes, after a particularly long day, we wonder why they do it. We couldn't do what we do without them beside us.”

This aspect comes across as clear as day when you attend one of the dinners: a solid team of friends and colleagues prep and cook the dinner directly in front you, immediately connecting the experience to you before the food even makes it to your plate. And with the communal setting in which the dinner is served, you become a participant, not a patron, and, for an evening (at least) you become a part of this Collective feel.