Good Health Starts on Your Plate
A pandemic reminder from Nourish Me Owner Julie Johnson
Story by Lex Nelson
The quintessential Beatles song lyric, “I get by with a little help from my friends” could easily be the pandemic motto of Ketchum, Idaho, health food store NourishMe. When the coronavirus arrived in the mountain town this spring, NourishMe started hiring.
“We had to increase labor while not increasing profit. For example our soup counter could not be self-serve any more. This meant an extra employee was hired to serve customers,” store owner Julie Johnson wrote in an email.
This was easier said than done in a resort town where affordable housing has been an issue for years. As of this September, a 55-unit affordable housing complex is in the works for the city, but in the meantime help is hard to find and many of the international workers Sun Valley Resort brings in for ski season aren’t coming. So, NourishMe turned to family and friends.
“Usually [finding help] is an issue for sure. We have a group of young women who are staying here, they grew up here most of them, and we’ve got three living together in an apartment down the street [who help us] … We feel lucky to have that,” Johnson said.
In an email, she noted that her daughter has also come to the store’s aid during the pandemic: “She wishes to go to grad school. Much to our delight, COVID has delayed that. She is working very hard and smart for NourishMe, allowing me to keep all [of] the farmer balls in the air.”
This focus on staying hyper-local and interconnected is at the heart of NourishMe’s philosophy. Johnson, who lived in France for more than a decade, is passionate about fresh, locally grown and raised produce and protein. She works with regional farmers including Squash Blossom Farm, Waterwheel Gardens, Kasota Hydroponics, Agrarian Harvest, Ballard Farm, Oasis Farm, Prairie Sun Farm, Picabo Desert Farm, Itty Bitty Farms, Harmony Organic Dairy, Malheur River Meats, and Raw Life Farms to stock NourishMe’s shelves.
“Only in the United States do people not know where their food comes from. Here [people] are disconnected from their health and food,” Johnson said. She stocks local, organic products both for its superior taste and nutrition.
Faced with a health crisis and shortages in the supermarkets, Johnson said that early in the pandemic Ketchum residents turned to local food. Though many of NourishMe’s supply chains were interrupted (small-batch meat processing and glass mason jars were both hard to come by) Johnson said the 10-year-old store still had, “biggest month in existence” in March.
Now though, eight months in, business has leveled off and Johnson has a reminder for those who’ve stopped buying local: good health starts on your plate, with good food.
“It seems like with this COVID thing, if there were a silver lining to it, it would be that at least 50% of the people who [shortages have] happened to have said, ‘Huh, I want to get connected to my food source.’ But the other 50% say, ‘Huh, I want more plasticized foods, things that don’t go bad. … I’ve seen the split in the public,” she says. Still, she adds, “We’re blessed to have people here who want what we have and are willing to pay for it.”
To learn more about NourishMe, visit jjnourishme.com.
Photos from Nourish Me
