The Diner Building Community In Times of Crisis: Ladybird’s Meg Heriford

Danny Caine

Sometimes when I talk about diners, the person I’m talking to has to suppress an eye roll. With that in mind, bear with me dear listener, while I say, I think there’s something sacred about a good diner. About a server who greets you by name. About ordering “the usual.” About the conversation and clinking dishes and staccato chatter of the guys at the flat top. About a coffee cup that never goes below half full. About being called hun, or sweetie, or dear. About the fleeting but robust community that forms on vinyl booth seats every Saturday from eight to 11 a.m. About a really good slice of pie.

As I say this, I feel like you might accuse me of being too idealistic. Surely not all diners are this good. Surely a server calling you hun is a product of an idealized past that perhaps never really existed. Maybe there’s some truth in that, but during my travels from hash brown to hash brown, across the US, I have indeed found a few diners that are actually that sublime. Ladybird Diner in Lawrence, Kansas, is one of them.

I lived in Lawrence for almost 10 years, and for most of them, I worked as a bookseller at the Raven Book Store. Countless mornings, I’d find myself perched on a chrome stool at Ladybird down the street before a shift. Now, after moving away from Lawrence, I think back on the coffee conversations and pie with fondness.

If my feelings about diners are strong enough to make people roll their eyes, Ladybird is primarily to blame. Even in the midst of this attempt at explaining the magic of a good diner, I find myself falling short. Ladybird Diner’s owner and pie slinger in chief, Meg Hereford, is today’s guest on Building Local Power. She’s here to tell stories from her little diner, yes. Egg prices will come up in conversation, as will that magical pie.

Ultimately though, what stuck with me about the conversation are Meg’s startling insights about how to use a small business to build community during times of crisis and political upheaval. I think it’s a great conversation. Enjoy listening to it and let me know if you need a slice of pie or cup of coffee to go.

Meg Heriford, it’s so good to see you again and thank you so much for joining us on Building Local Power. I think I wanna start by asking your kind of diner origin story. Is there like a specific moment where you knew diners were important to you? I’m just wondering how you got interested in the idea broadly of food, small business and community building.

Meg Heriford

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. It really was looking for a model that would encapsulate all the things that I felt that first of all, I’m best at there was sort of a need for in the community. And the first of those things was just like a place you could go get a piece of pie that wasn’t corporate pie, like where someone was making homemade pie every day.

We didn’t have anything like that. And at the time I was working at another restaurant and I was doing the feature desserts there on the weekend. And I, I made pie one of those weekends at the request of the owner and, the people just started lining up for it. They started calling to find out if they could come in and just get pie. And so that’s kind of where everything sort of grew around that. That was the nucleus of everything.

And I started looking at, what other ways I communicate. Just kind of scratch comfort food is at the top of that list. So that’s where the diner kind of came from. And the design, the build out all was meant to mimic the places that I felt most comfortable as a kid. those were like, diner, small town diner feel or, you know, something about your weird aunt’s house, something, something about your grandma’s kitchen. And I just kind of brought all of that together into one space.

Danny Caine 

Can you tell us specifically one of those places you felt comfortable as a kid?

Meg Heriford 

There was a restaurant called Bricks in Oldsburg, Kansas that we used to go to for milkshakes and it was kind of dark. It was not as bright as Ladybird is, but on the weekends it was a really lively place, a really fun place to go sit and just have a chocolate chip milkshake. That’s what I remember most, most often ordered.

As I grew up, the places that I felt most comfortable going when I was in a town that I didn’t know well were the diners. I always trusted that the local mom and pop diner was going to have a decent meal and was going to be a safe place for me to walk into, where I wouldn’t feel out of place or like I didn’t know how to act.

Danny Caine 

I think that kind of leads to my next question, which is a and forgive me about that, but I, like you, really believe in the diner a capital D, I think you can learn a lot about a community from their diner. I believe the same thing about bookstores too, but these are places where you can really get to know a place. So just in general, can you talk to us a little bit about the role that a diner plays in its community and the importance of a place like a diner to its town, its city?

Meg Heriford 

I think it is typically reflective of the population because it’s kind of whatever you want it to be. So I recognize that we serve a lot of different types of people, people who have, you know, who are in different economic levels, come from different backgrounds. Some people, I think, think Ladybird is like down and dirty, like they’re kind of slumming it.

They come get a cheeseburger and a milkshake. And for other people, it’s a real treat. Like that might be their dining out dollars for the month. And they’re choosing to spend it on this, you know, comfort food and pie. So I think that, know, there’s something that feels really fertile about the space diners are in. There’s something that feels like anybody can come in and sit down and immediately feel rooted in the experience that they’re having there. Very few people feel uncomfortable. So I think that, you know, just sort of naturally the conversations that happen in our space and the exchanges that happen are, kind of deep.

They can get pretty, I mean, like, you we’ve, we’ve served people pie who have openly wept about the experience that they’re having with that pie because they haven’t maybe had homemade pie since someone very significant in their life passed away and doesn’t make it for them anymore. But so yeah, there’s something, there’s something familiar. There’s something really, just fertile, I think is the right word for it.

Danny Caine 

I would never think to describe a diner as fertile, but it makes sense when you explain it. Okay, so you’ve alluded to the start of Ladybird itself. You’ve got a line out the door for your non-corporate pie at a separate restaurant. You’re beginning to realize something might be happening with this pie in the community. Tell us how you got from there to opening the door of Ladybird.

Meg Heriford 

Well, a space came open a couple doors down from the restaurant that I was working at and the ownership group of that restaurant said, you know, we need a place that, that you can do this that isn’t this place because this place is not supposed to be that. And so,  you know, do you want to go look, would you maybe consider, would you be interested in opening a place where you can do this pie. We went and looked and that the space was divided into two, one small side, one larger side. and I thought, well, I’ll just need the small side because I’m just going to do a little diner and it’s never going to be that busy. Like I was planning at that time to do almost everything myself. I thought I can get up and I can make the pies and I’ll have a little staff to help in the kitchen.

I’ll wait the tables. It’ll just be this cute little place. And as we were doing the build out for Ladybird, I was posting on social media that this is happening. And all of a sudden we had like, 3000 followers, 5000 followers, 10,000 followers. And I’m looking and I’m like, these people are all local. This is not like…

Like, we’re going to need a bigger boat. And by that time it was too late for a bigger boat. We had to just deal with the little space we were in. So we have this really odd layout in this very small restaurant that, that I feel like at this point, it’s been 10 years of working around this tiny little space and figuring out how to crank out 700 plates of food in a kitchen that’s the size of a shoe box.

And I don’t think I can move it. You know, once we were established and things were up and running, I thought we have to stay. Like this is the experience that people are now familiar with. And I don’t want to change the vibe at all. It’s become something that people can count on. They know what they’re walking into and the feeling that it gives them is what matters.

We had to find a way to work within the confines of this space. So we have.

Danny Caine 

Funny to think you didn’t think it was going to be that busy, having personally waited for 45 minutes outside on the sidewalk on a Saturday morning for a table.

So let’s, I want to move it a little bit more into the Ladybird story itself. you know, as a former business owner in Lawrence and as a friend of yours, I intersect here a little bit, but in a way, because of what’s happened over the last couple of years, I always think of Ladybird as kind of intersecting with the world in general, with broader sociopolitical issues. The last meal I ate before all the restaurants closed in Kansas was a Saturday morning at Ladybird. I remember the bottles of sanitizer on the tables. I remember talking to you just about how scared we were about what was coming up. What happened to Ladybird during the height of the pandemic and how you navigated all of this?

Meg Heriford

It’s wild to remember that day because I remember how busy we were. And there was a reporter who came in from the local newspaper who was doing a story on restaurants downtown to find out how they were coping with the decline in traffic that they were experiencing because people were starting to stay home. And he opened the door and was like, wow. I mean, we were slammed. It was March 14th, so it was Pi Day. And we were trying so hard to sanitize things in between sitting tables and it felt really out of control and really scary. And I decided at the end of that day that we were not going to, I might’ve even decided it while I was talking to you, that we were not going to reopen the next day.

It was too much of a challenge to try to protect people while we were also trying to serve them and feed.

And so, I went home and wrote something and put it on social media that basically said like, to pull back for a minute and make sure it’s safe to reopen. And in the meantime, we have a lot of food. And so if anyone needs something to eat, we’re going to be putting together lunches. Well, I guess I had also heard that school was not going to, the kids were on spring break that week.

And I heard that school was not going to start back up the following week. So I knew there would be a lot of kids home who didn’t have access to the school lunches and breakfasts that they were used to. So I kind of thought, we’ve got all this food and we can feed people until that runs out at least, which, you know, should be around a week. And hopefully at the end of that week, everything will be safer and better and we can reopen.

So we really quickly started putting bags of food together and the line for that was, far surpassed what I was expecting. There were a lot of people who were trying to figure out, and this is, you know, not just school-aged kids, but this was whole families. This was people who were retired. you wouldn’t be able to say, and this is who showed up. It was everyone.

After that first week, I knew that we needed to keep going. And so we just decided that we would start preparing real meals, not just sack lunches, but that we would start cooking. And I assembled a very small team. There were just a couple of us, and we would make 200 lunches a day and just hand them out to whoever needed them.

And the community responded with donations. So other restaurants who were closing brought food that we could use. People who were just interested in helping out would bring $5 or $10, send us a check to turn into lunches. And so that continued for entire summer.

And then there was point where we ran out, or where I saw that we were going to run out of resources to provide lunches. And I had already given away everything that I had, and I had kind of run through the donations that people had given us, and we were still doing 200 a day, 200 a day, every day.

And I kind of looked around at, what else I had that I could sell because the need was still so great and there were still so many people out of work. and there was, you know, this need that I think had previously been invisible, on main street was filling out right before all of our eyes. Again, this was not just people who were unsheltered.

This was lots of people who were food insecure, many for the first time. And so it really felt like it was too great of a burden for the nonprofits to have to shoulder on their own. Like that was just a really unfair ask. And having this other, you know, smaller little hub where we could just put together ready to eat meals every day made things just, you know, just took the tiniest bit of edge off of folks that were working really, really hard at the local food pantries to try to meet all the needs. So that was when I had the idea that maybe I could collect all of these stories that I’d been writing. And Lady Bird had been a place where people knew they could come get something to eat if they didn’t have any money for years. So I had…

I had documented some of that, like I had written about that and about that experience of running a small business that kind bent some of the rules capitalism and how I viewed the role of community in the health and the success of my business and how I viewed my responsibility to promote the health of my community and to, you know, to shoulder some of the, some of the burden that typically has been assigned to nonprofits. So that’s when I called you, I called you and I said, how do I write a book? How do I, because I need it fast. And you were like, yeah, we, we can, know, and you kind of laid it out for me. And I was like, I got three weeks. I have three weeks to do this. And we got it done. Like it was amazing how it came together that with the help of you and the team at the Raven and the press at KU that came through and said that they would do the printing at their cost.  So all I had to pay was their cost. They didn’t charge me anything above that. And we had the presales out in under a month. It was remarkable.

And so the community, not even just the local Lawrence community, but other places that had been following our story and seeing we had responded to this increased need for food security in our community. They bought the book. They bought the book and every book was $25. So it funded, we were averaging like $5 food cost in all of the meals that we were doing. So every book funded five meals. And we flew through that first round and had to do a reprint. was really amazing. So that is the story of how Lady Bird pivoted from diner to little makeshift food pantry during the pandemic.

Danny Caine 

Thanks for sharing that story.

Meg Heriford 

And we did that, so was 15 months of those meals before I finally was like, okay, we gotta get back to work.

Danny Caine 

Well, thanks for sharing that story. from my angle, it was just a really powerful thing that happened and to watch you do that and to be able to help in my small way. I thought about this story a lot, from my new perch here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, we have a cool group of people working on compost and food waste issues. And from that angle, it struck me that that it all started with a desire not to waste food. You shut down, you’ve got this food, you wanna make sure it gets to people who need it in the community. We’re approaching International Compost Awareness Week this May. We’ve got a ton of resources about this, the restaurant industry, food waste. I wonder how you think about it now that you’re back open.

I’m struck by what you said about this kind of invisible thing happening on Main Street where you’ve got people hungry. It’s not necessarily as visible as the restaurants that are always full of people and the restaurants have extra food and across the industry, it doesn’t always make it to people who need it. It often gets just thrown away. So can you talk now about how Lady Bird is viewing wasted food and what you do to mitigate it and make sure people who need food are fed?

Meg Heriford 

We have been really fortunate with the that we do and the way that our menu is designed that we don’t have, like, I very rarely come across something and say, this is about to be out of date. We need to hurry. we’re…making food as fast as we can sell it. again has a lot to do with the space constraints that we work with. But, you know, Lawrence is really lucky to have some really innovative programs with that and one of the local food banks, Just Food has a chop shop is what they call it, where they will take restaurants, extra and turn it into ready to eat stuff, you recognizing that not everyone has a kitchen, not everyone has someplace that they can prepare a meal from raw goods. So having things that are pre-made out of ingredients that restaurants would have wasted is a really, really innovative idea.

You know, most of the waste that we see is stuff that people didn’t eat, that they ordered, they didn’t finish. And so now our job is to scrape that into the trash and throw it away. And I think there’s going to have to be broader movement in Lawrence to work on city composting for the businesses downtown. It can totally be done. We have the space to do it.

There just has not been, I guess, a big enough call to action from the restaurants. So that’s probably something that we need to figure out as a group. where can we centralize this? How can we run it? So I’d be interested to see how other communities handle just their scraps. I can’t hand that to someone in a box with any level of dignity.

Danny Caine 

Yeah.

Meg Heriford

Someone didn’t finish their pancakes, would you like them? yeah.

Danny Caine

Yeah, well again, ILSR has the resources and the people to help with things exactly like that. We’ll link to a bunch of that stuff in the show notes in case you’re curious about what restaurants can do to compost and mitigate wasted food. But I think there’s a lesson in there too about just the size of the restaurant and how you order. To run an efficient and small restaurant within your means, too seems like it could really mitigate wasted food, because it’s like you know what you serve.

Meg Heriford

Absolutely.

Danny Caine

You know how many people you’re gonna serve. You’re not letting your ambition create a wasteful situation.

Meg Heriford 

Absolutely, and I would rather have to 86 something than to risk making too much and wasting.

Danny Caine

We’re talking about these broader socio-political issues and how they intersect with the diner life, we find ourselves in a very interesting and volatile time right now. I have to imagine that Lady Bird is a place where high egg prices really hit home. On top of that, you know, the idea of running a small business and the tariffs.

You know, I just today read a survey that Main Street Alliance put out there, an advocacy group that’s made up of entrepreneurs and Main Street advocates. They found that 81.5 % of their respondents indicated that they’re going to have to raise prices due to the tariffs. And 31.5 % of them indicated they would have to cut staff because of all of this. So amidst the uncertainty, the volatility and high egg prices, how are you navigating the current political moment and economic moment?

Meg Heriford

It is a political moment and an economic moment. So, it’s funny that that’s a question you know, we just talked about the pandemic and the sort of pivot that I made during that time. And, I will say that all of this feels a little like familiar to me, right? Like, this is a muscle that I have access to.

I think that one of our greatest strengths, one of the greatest strengths of most small businesses is our agility. we’re these little scrappy guys you know, I, I’m not beholden to any shareholders. So, I’m also really used to working with super narrow margins. So this feels like a strain that I have navigated before, not for the same reasons.

I have thoughts, but no one is consulting me, right? Nobody’s gonna come ask like, how can we make sure that your business makes it through what we’re launching right now? the truth is, I guess it might not, right?

I hold no illusions about how difficult this year is gonna be, especially on top of the very difficult year that we just had. We’ve been kind of waiting for prices to come back down and they haven’t. And so now it’s time to figure out how we work with this new set of information. And for me, that means that I re-examine kind of our core principles, right?

Because I think principle is really just words until it’s tested. And then once we have an opportunity to put it into practice, it becomes something weightier. Than it’s conviction. So now I’m looking at my, at my principles and, and this is where I test them. And so for me, that means that I prioritize my staff, my community, and, and that I find a way to balance my family and right. None of this is any good if I’m out of whack personally, and I think I learned that during 2020 and 2021 when I was working really, really hard just try to do the most I could, the best I could as fast as I could. And, and I got a little out of balance and that wasn’t good for anyone. Right.

So, short answer is that I know the things that I won’t compromise. And if that destroys my business, then that destroys my business. And I’ll have to live with that. But I know that I won’t lower wages. know that I won’t, I’m not going to trade in on value that I think people deserve. Like people come out to eat because they want this experience. Anyone can make eggs at home.

What they’re coming for is to be part of this little tiny community that we’ve built there to watch the show, to see the dance that happens in a very small, very busy restaurant. I’m not going to compromise the quality of the ingredients that I’m using, and I’m not going to compromise the quality of experience that my guests should have.

I know I think that we probably will not raise prices. I really want folks to be able to count lunch or their monthly brunch that they treat themselves to. So I think narrowing the menu and just kind of redefining our focus onto the things that we do best and fastest and the things that people count on is probably what will get us through this year. I don’t foresee having to lay anyone off.

I think that there are definitely ways that we can avoid that by maybe we expand hours at some point or we look for other ways that we can drive revenue. But I think I have a very committed staff of people who really believe in what we’re doing and I’m nothing without that, without them. So, everyone who’s there is there because they really buy into the nobility of this work and they, you know, they believe that what we do matters. So we’re just going to keep doing it.

Danny Caine 

Another word choice I love there is the nobility, the nobility of the diner and the non-corporate pie. And I think your convictions are clear just hearing you talk about that. And I think those convictions throughout all of this, throughout the pandemic, throughout Lady Bird’s story have made you something of kind of a prominent Kansan, I would say. Your social media posts are widely read. That book, you know, last time I checked was the Raven’s Bestseller of all time. So people read the book, people buy it.

Meg Heriford 

Amazing.

Danny Caine

So people in the Lawrence community and perhaps outside of it look to you as something of a leader. So from that leadership position, the nobility of the diner and the person who runs it, what do you hope to accomplish? What can you do and what do you hope to do as a diner owner slash community leader slash pie slinger?

Meg Heriford

One of the things that I’ve, that I’ve hoped for a long time and that I think, I think I have achieved on some small level is to gain some buy-in on this idea that the for-profit sector of the economy does not weaken itself by directly trying to strengthen the community around us. It’s okay to open ourselves up to people who can’t pay. That has not put me out of business. And I think that it probably explains the strength of our business. I think that we are really only as strong as the community that we’re rooted in.

And so every opportunity I have to extend something looks like what probably people used to call charity, I feel that that’s really just investment. And I think that for a long time, people thought that that was because I was like a really good person. And that’s not, that’s not it. I mean, I don’t think I’m a bad person.

But I also think that I don’t see the difference between serving my community members who can pay and my community members who can’t if what is happening is an exchange that kind of radiates to some other area of the community. in a sense, you could say that I’m really just trying to be a smart business person and not a saint, and again, I’m not saying I’m a bad person. I don’t think I’m a selfish or a bad person, but I don’t think that this should be considered unusual. I don’t think that this shouldn’t be something people look at and say, wow, she’s a saint. It should just be like, wow, she owns a business. She’s just doing it the way it should be done.

Danny Caine 

Meg Heriford, thank you so much for coming on Building Local Power and sharing your story. I think you’re a clear example of what it means to build local power. And I hope our listeners enjoy your story and stop in for a slice of pie next time they’re in Lawrence, Kansas.

Meg Heriford

Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Danny.

Danny Caine

Ladybird Diner is open Wednesday through Sunday from nine to three in downtown Lawrence, Kansas. Everything on the menu is good, but you absolutely must get a piece of pie. To learn more about Meg and her story, you should definitely get a copy of her book, Ladybird Collected, which is available from the Raven Book Store. I’ve put a link to buy it in the show notes. Also in the show notes, you’ll find some ILSR resources about wasted food and community compost. If you’re in a community like Lawrence that doesn’t have community composting, but should, I encourage you to get in touch with ILSR’s Composting for Community team.

In other ILSR news, you might’ve listened to our last episode, an invigorating conversation about the antimonopoly movement with my colleague Ron Knox. On that episode, he mentioned his new zine, Resist Monopolies! How to Fight Corporate Control and Support an Economy that Matters. As of today, Resist Monopolies is officially available from Microcosm Publishing. I’ve put a link in the show notes to buy this essential little book. If you’re interested in copies for your organization or group, send us an email at [email protected].

Here at Building Local Power, we’d love to invite you, our listeners, into the conversation. If you have thoughts about this or other episodes, ideas for future guests, or if you just want to get in touch, send me a note at [email protected]. And as always, if you like what you hear, please like, subscribe, review, and share with your friends.

This episode of Building Local Power was produced by me, Danny Caine with the help of Reggie Rucker. I did the editing with help from Téa Noelle who also composed the music. Thank you so much for listening and see you in two weeks.

Order Meg Heriford’s Ladybird Collected from the Raven Book Store

The Just Food Chop Shop in Lawrence

ILSR Resrouces on Wasted Food

• • What is Community Composting?
  • Transforming Your Community’s Waste to Wealth: Infographics

Ron Knox’s zine, Resist Monopolies!