You wouldn’t think food would have much to do with democracy until you go to town meeting. Last year we didn’t even take a break at lunchtime, though some towns do a whole ham and baked bean spread. Still, there was food all over the place, all day long.

Our town meeting comes in April, a little later than some towns. It is nonetheless our primary mud season (or post mud season) entertainment. Last year we had a gorgeous day for it, lots of sunshine, not too chilly. It is hard for a caretaker, gardener or painter delayed by a wet spring with June and summer people breathing hotly down his or her neck to turn down a decent day to sit on hard steel chairs or back-less bleachers and listen patiently while their neighbors dissect the school budget. Coffee cake and muffins help.

I drove down-island to the school a little late last year, about a half hour after the meeting started. It was eerie. I only met one other vehicle coming up-island. The stores were deserted; no one was parked in front of the post office. At the school, though, cars and pick-ups were parked every which way on the sides of the driveway, in the lot, filling in all empty spaces, large and small. Little kids under the eye of a teenaged girl played on the swings, and other teens ebbed and flowed in tight clusters around the school front steps and the door to the gymnasium.

The first order of business was the election of town officials, and when I arrived, people were standing in line, paper cups of coffee in hand, to drop their ballots in the ballot box. By 9:55, we had progressed to Article Two choosing school board members and the ladies in the kitchen had produced a dozen or thirteen carafes of regular coffee and three of decaf. Between votes, our Moderator reminded everyone that the Masons were sponsoring a baked bean supper that evening, or maybe the week after.

At Town Meeting the sale of baked goods and lunch, too, benefited the senior class trip. Moms shuttle from kitchen to the table where the goods are displayed with plates of sour cream coffee cake, that rich one with the swirls of cinnamon, nuts, and sugar baked in a tube pan, and the teenagers do the heavy lifting of taking money and making change. We help ourselves to muffins – lemon poppy seed, cornmeal, blueberry, apple cinnamon crumb. Or try crumb cake, or maybe banana bread – last year there was a wonderfully rich and unctuous banana bread, moist and buttery.

At 11:00 or so, the Moderator announces that in the interest of concluding the meeting in a reasonable time, we will not stop for a break. People with Post Office boxes make a fine calculation about whether they will get to and from their mail before a certain article comes up.

By noontime, all that arm-raising to vote, or standing up to speak, has everyone starved for lunch. The seniors’ moms have laid out for our delectation BLTs, salami on hard rolls, small subs with roast beef or ham. There are turkey sandwiches, hummus and sprout sandwiches, even a mock lobster salad. They all look good, and the teens don plastic gloves to scoop handfuls of potato chips to add to floppy paper plates burdened with sandwiches. We get our choice of brownies, chocolate chip cookies, pieces of cake or cookie bars of various sorts. We can have coffee or punch. A quiet, but not disruptive, murmur from the lunch line forms an undertone to the reading of the articles, the requests for moving the question, for the ayes and nays.

Back in our seats, we hold our plates on our laps, trying to keep the Town Report open to the pages of articles still to come.

When the meeting is over, around 3 or 3:30, and we have rejected closing a section of town road, pared a couple thousand out of the school superintendent’s budget (a sort of warning shot over his bow, so to speak), and voted down what seemed to be an excessively large contract for snow-plowing – why, there are still muffins and cookies left! Some of the moms fill up paper plates and press them on neighbors to take home.

There is no excuse for going home hungry or without having spoken your mind.

Sandy Oliver is the publisher and editor of Food History News, at .