We drove through the green countryside with my great-grandfather one long-ago summer afternoon, finally stopping near the farmhouse of his rural neighbor. The friend sliced for us a juicy muskmelon, fresh from the garden, its sweetness so intense it has lasted in my memory for decades.

The flavors and values of my great-grandfather’s turn-of-the century generation flooded back in my mind last week when I visited a new nonprofit restaurant on East Sprague.

The place, called One World Spokane, has been open a month now, and it’s designed to make the tastes of locally grown, organic food available for people who can’t afford to order it from this city’s upscale menus.

It’s located in the heart of East Central, one of Spokane’s struggling neighborhoods.

One World Spokane sits across Sprague from Pho Bay Vietnamese Restaurant and Market, and just down the street from Truth Ministries and the Rainbow Grill.

If this city were a Monopoly board, One World would be sitting right around the corner from Go.

Yet inside the restaurant last week, the food tasted rich. Chefs filled a pot pie with trout from Lake Pend Oreille, made soup with local butternut squash and stirred fresh plums and pumpkin into its constantly evolving Everything Cookie.

Here there are no menus. Customers select their serving sizes and even the price they’ll pay. Some chip in extra to help cover the cost of someone else’s meal.

The restaurant offers complimentary dahl and basmati rice to anyone who walks in the door and it provides the hungry a chance to trade volunteer hours for a free meal.

My great-grandparents fed dinner to everyone who came to their house, regardless of the time of day or night. In their world, there were no McDonald’s Value Meals down the street or granola bars waiting to be unwrapped in the back seat, just long, lonesome roads stretching back across the prairie.

This kind of concern for the common good was called simply being “neighborly” back then.

My flapper-era grandparents also lived primarily on food grown in their own gardens or nearby. Unprocessed and predating the modern agricultural revolution, this food sustained them throughout the year. In the winter, jars of pickled cucumbers and watermelon rinds, of home-canned peaches and chokecherry jam helped carry them through.

And in the summer, oh, in the summer, they ate tomatoes tangier and sweeter than any sold in contemporary supermarkets. They shelled plump green peas and cooked up pots of green beans they flavored with bacon and onion and vinegar. They served fresh golden corn on the cob in July, and by September they were topping apple crisp with thick country cream.

Similarly, the food I ate last week at One World Spokane tasted of real corn, real apples and real tomatoes.

Janice Raschko, who with her husband, Keith, helped start this nonprofit, says the values stretch back to her childhood in Canada, where working together for the good of all was as linked to the national identity as the maple leaf. Keith grew up in Spokane, where his father, Ray Raschko, started innovative programs for the elderly that were copied around the nation.

A serious economic downturn may be just the right time for this business model. We’re once again ready for innovations that recognize our common humanity.

So far, says Janice Raschko, One World Spokane’s been serving 85 people a day, who have paid between $8 and $15 per meal. This nonprofit is designed to sustain itself, not tap one quickly siphoned pile of grant money after another. It’s giving people on a budget a taste of the goodness that once nourished our grandparents.

On Thursday my unusually healthy grandfather, who grew up on this kind of food, died quietly in his sleep at 103.

He knew what the Great Depression tasted like, homegrown and more or less organic, and it suited him just fine. Grandpa ate with more relish than anyone I’ve ever known. He also loved a good Scott Joplin rag, a chilled martini and a dance with a beautiful woman. In good times and bad, he always saved room for dessert.