Photographer Todd Selby helps the rest of us indulge in one of the most satisfying of all human pursuits: looking at other people’s stuff.
Now, in conjunction with his new column at T Magazine, the photographer has launched a sister website, Edible Selby, where he focuses his lens on chefs, chocolatiers, bakers and taco-shack operators, chronicling them celebrity-style with close-ups in their work or home kitchens.
The Neighborhood Food Project Assessing food security and access in Saint Paul, MN
The Neighborhood Food Project is a grassroots effort to begin to address food security and access issues in four communities in Saint Paul, MN (Dayton’s Bluff, Payne-Phalen, Thomas-Dale/Frogtown, and Summit University) through a community food assessment project. The project was initiated and coordinated by a partnership of four organizations (The Minnesota Project, Community Design Center of Minnesota, Minnesota Food Association, and Afro Eco) that are committed to neighborhood revitalization, sustainable food production, and equitable food distribution. The assessment project was conducted from November 2009 – November 2010. A total of 478 residents completed surveys in English, Spanish, or Hmong and 12 focus groups, held in English, Spanish, Hmong, and Somali, engaged more than 100 residents across the targeted Saint Paul neighborhoods. This work was supported by a Planning Grant from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Community Food Project Program. Support was also provided by Saint-Paul Ramsey County Public Health and by Metropolitan State University’s Center for Community-Based Learning..
sign of the times? or a sign of the wrong scale?
Great information as to measuring your “Return on Investment” for all of that time the market spends on social media. With these calculations alongside your one time a year SEED survey, you would have some incredible data!
What are some concrete, effective steps we can take NOW to make our food system more sustainable? FAIR FOOD, a soon-to-be-released book by Oran Hesterman, has answers. On this special NGFN webinar, Oran will share some of his solutions born from years of experience.
A host of books and films in recent years have documented in great detail the dangers of our current food system, but advice on what to do about it largely begins and ends with the admonition to “eat local” or “eat organic.” This advice is not helpful if, as Chicago Congressman Bobby Rush once pointed out, you can buy ketchup where you live, but no fresh tomatoes. Just as you can’t impact the course of climate change by simply switching to CFL bulbs, you can’t fix the broken food system by simply growing a backyard garden. It requires redesigning our food system.
This is one of our newest projects and builds on the last few years of our Meet Me at the Market (MM@TM) work. I wanted to share the early days of the project, although we are not ready to talk about measurable outcomes-since it’s only the first full week-and our market staff is running everywhere (not walking) these days to accomplish their to-dos on their calendar!
The Meet Me at the Market has been marketumbrella.org’s project for the last 4 years in which we travel to schools and community centers, do some activity with the attendees and then invite the organizers to visit on a selected day where we have a tent set up and a staff or volunteer person ready to assist the group. The purpose of the MM@TM (and targeted incentives) is we believe that once we build the relationship with the shoppers that goes beyond a passive chance visit to the market, we make long-term market community members, especially when there are barriers such as transportation issues, lack of knowledge about how to use open-air markets, or past purchase barriers (food stamps as an example) to overcome. The more barriers, the stronger the incentives.
Therefore we work to find ways to get our groups back as soon as possible, as often as possible. This has been an excellent way to introduce our Senior FMNP incentive; that incentive is where we offer a matching 24 dollars after they complete their FMNP booklet (to spend on other non-FMNP foods.) Those seniors stretch out the tokens as they did the coupons, coming in cooler months with family members to buy dairy or seafood with their tokens. Of course, they also know our market staff and interact with them more often throughout the year which builds trust and more knowledge transfer.
It has been harder to find some measurable outcome from the schools that have visited in the past years, as not all are using the market to teach the same lesson. So for 2011, we came up with a project we hope will do that and introduce more food-vulnerable children to the benefits of the market community.
This project has targeted a handful of schools that have a 50% +1 free and reduced meal enrollment, and are in zip codes near to one of our markets. The staff goes to the school, does a quick pre-Market visit tutorial in the classroom. This is where we measure their local food knowledge with our Bean Survey tool. Soon after, they attend the Market with their school in order to a) observe and participate in commercial and social transactions, b) attend a cooking and tasting lesson, and c) bring home from the Market sample specialty crops and an invitation to join the Market’s summer Marketeer events. The Marketeer events are held on Saturdays; kids of every background receive a postcard in the mail in the month of their birthday, which they can bring to the market to get a 5.00 token to spend and also come on the first Saturday of every month for a Marketeer event. The goodie bag the 2011 schoolkids will receive in their initial visit also contains an incentive for the parent to receive tokens when they come with their child to the Marketeer event.
We can measure the success in a number of ways:
1. The change in their knowledge from the Bean Survey (questions like have you ever met a farmer? have you ever tasted a Louisiana strawberry?) to after their market visit.
2. The number of bags we hand out with a pint of strawberries and the information.
3. The number that join our Marketeers club.
4. The number of parental incentives used.
This is a Department of Agriculture and Forestry grant through their Specialty Crop Grants; we are lucky to have such great partners that are interested in using their department to add knowledge about Louisiana specialty crops to the next generation of shoppers.
These are early days for this project so very little as far as outcomes can be shared yet. I will be updating its success here and am happy to talk via email (please direct questions to me so our market staff do not have more work from my sharing!)
How exciting to share my colleagues excellent work.
*Discover You Can Summer Canning Education Program *
***
*We are excited to introduce *Discover You Can, a summer canning
education program developed to assist Farmers Market Coalition member
organizations in achieving their education mission. The program is sponsored
by Jarden Home Brands, makers of Ball® Brand Fresh Preserving Products.
Discover You Can**SM** *is offering 50 FMC member farmers market
organizations the opportunity to apply for $1,200 in funding. The funding
is to be used to support local efforts to educate communities on the
benefits and simple ‘how tos’ of canning. In addition to funding, the
selected 50 organizations will also receive a starter kit, signage, coupons,
samples, and more from Jarden.
The Food Channel recently named home canning as the #1 food trend. This
program will allow you to host canning demonstrations—a topic relevant and
of interest to consumers. It will bring value to your community as they
learn the benefits of canning and buying fresh, local produce.
If you are interested in participating in this program, *click
here<a href="”>
* to complete the application and read the full list of Frequently Asked
Questions. Once completed, please return the application to *
DiscoverYouCan@imschicago.com* or fax to (312) 664-5454. If you have
questions about this program, please contact Amber Meairs at 312-242-4723.
Jarden Home Brands is accepting applications until Friday April 29, 2011.
Select farmers markets will be announced the week of May 2, 2011 and welcome
kits will be mailed immediately thereafter.
Don’t miss out on this great opportunity. If you’re not currently an FMC
member, you can join
todayto be
eligible for Discover You Can Apply now!
The forageSF folks are receiving some coverage about their underground market in the New York Times and in other publications. Their mission is about reconnecting the urban SF dweller to their wild foods and the market seems to have grown out of the need to have a place to encourage more knowledge, more new items AND because they could not get in to markets because of the rules about “grow it to sell it”. I wonder, how many markets around the country would have flatly said no to these foragers?
As some of you know, I am fascinated by the relationship between CSAs and public markets, and have noticed that many CSAs end up operating as a type of market, and I am always curious if the opposite is true too. This one seems to be moving more in the direction of the market being more useful for their work as it evolves.
What’s interesting about this is the idea is they seem to rate new vendors highest (based on the quotes in the story.) So, the usual criteria of favoring return vendors is much less useful to them, which tells me they have a very good sense of their 4Ms (mission, management, marketing and measurement).
On top of that, they have a free membership that you need to sign up for to get into the market, as you need to check off their hold harmless as a shopper so it really seems like the are dotting their is and crossing their ts…
So I wonder if this is a new typology of market (in marketumbrella.org’s spectrum of market analysis we are collecting with the Market Portraits).
They are definitely an organization to watch.
A bottle cap of fertilizer rather than spraying the entire field. Huh. Why does it take so long for us to see the small solutions?
This amazing list is from The New Rules Project which is:
A program of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the New Rules Project started back in 1998 and continues to bring fresh new policy solutions to communities and states to ensure that they are “designing rules as if community matters”.
Localism Index
A version of this appeared in the April 25, 2011 issue of The Nation.
Number of new independent bookstores that have opened since 2005: 437
Increase since 2002 in the number of small specialty food stores: 1,414
Increase since 2002 in the number of small farms: 111,839
Number of farmers markets active in 2010: 6,132
Percentage of active farmers markets started since 2000: 53
Average percentage of shoppers at a large supermarket who have a conversation with another customer: 9
Average percentage of shoppers at a farmers market who have a conversation with another customer: 63
There are some good numbers in there for our work, but I say we need more!
I can tell you the impact that the 3 Crescent City Farmers Markets (the markets that are run by my organization marketumbrella.org) has on our city of New Orleans and its region by using numbers from our 2010 SEED report. This was done with our web-based tool called SEED which stands for Sticky Economic Evaluation Device and uses the government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis multiplier for our region.
The multiplier is a term for tracking how money is spent and re-spent in a regional economy in any one sector. Obviously, when local businesses make money (like our market vendors), they re-spend that locally. How long it stays here before “leaking out” depends on what businesses they have available to them, whether its only Walmart (where the money is sent to their home base of Arkansas more quickly) or Joe’s Nursery, which spends that money locally again.
2010 SEED
Market impact: $6,717,630.32 Sales in the market, and the amount of money generated by those vendors spending it again. The BEA multiplier we used was for our region was 1.9% and was for the retail sector.
The impact the market has on its surrounding areas: $3,217,727.94 Again, this is shoppers telling us if they were going to spend money in the businesses around the market while there. That number multiplied by the regional BEA number.
Sales tax from sales at nearby businesses to the market: $151,620.69 Those who grow their own food and then sell it directly in Louisiana do not collect sales tax. However, the market does add sales tax to the city and state’s coffers because of the sales at nearby businesses that happen when our shoppers go there.
Overall economic impact $9,935,358
From three 4-hour markets each week.
This story could be useful to cite when writing grants to public health organizations for your market:
Shopping regularly can help people live longer.
That’s the suggestion from a study that found older people in Taiwan who shopped frequently tended to outlive those who went less often – even when other factors were taken into account.
Those who shopped every day were 27 per cent less likely to die within the 10-year study period compared with those who never shopped, or who went shopping less than once a week.
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BOSTON – April 6, 2011 – With farmers’ markets preparing to open for the season, the Patrick-Murray Administration today announced that it will be providing $50,000 in grants for equipment and support to help farmers’ markets process Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits used by low-income residents.
The phrase that runs through my mind over and over is “too early to tell.”
(Don’t I know that living and eating from the Gulf of Mexico…)
In any case, here is a thoughtful piece on possible issues from Japan’s third tragedy in 2011:
Helping Farmers Markets Grow 