Never have I ever been so excited to get jabbed in the arm with a needle. Twice. But I was, and I hope you were, too, and now we’re taking longer and more confident strides back into normal life. Of course, it’s possible—likely, even—that normal will not at all look like what we remember it looking like some 15 months ago.

And maybe that’s a good thing.

Maybe the past year-plus has given us permission to live a bit differently, better. It’s way too soon to tell for certain what that new life will look like. But with our feature story starting on page 22 in this issue, we set out to answer a couple of key questions: What have we learned about our local food system during the Covid-19 pandemic? What new habits have Ohio Valley consumers adopted around local food, and which of those habits will we stick with?

We asked a range of folks involved in that system what they’ve seen over the past year, and what they expect to see in the future. We talked to people with insight both upstream and downstream, who know what’s happening on the supply end and on the consumer end. To a person, the sources we interviewed were optimistic. That our neighbors who sampled local products for the first time, for whatever reason (because they had time on their hands, or felt safer shopping at an outdoor market, or reallocated eating-out dollars into better ingredients for cooking at home), and were hooked. That we all have a better appreciation for growing and preparing good food because we spent so much time doing it ourselves. That we’ll go back to eating out, sure, but with a greater respect for (and willingness to pay for) food that’s grown, cooked, and served locally.

There’s lots of work yet to be done to make local food accessible and affordable for more of our neighbors and to make the business of growing and serving local products more financially sustainable for farmers and hospitality workers. But we’ve collectively made strides. Now we just need to keep moving—forward.