The National Good Food Network is a set of regional organizations organized with The Wallace Center and has long offered webinars for anyone interested in the specific topics they present. If you have always wanted to sign up for their cluster calls but never got around to it, here is your chance to listen in after the fact.
Author: D.W.
You think that YOU have a hard time with mix of products…
This market really has some explaining to do…
Earth Markets
In the quest to find your sister markets, don’t forget to look outside of the U.S.
Slow Food International has been working on a project to create markets that closely resembles the mission-driven ones in the farmers market movement here.
Here are their principles:
A worldwide NETWORK of farmers’ markets respecting the SLOW FOOD philosophy.
COMMUNITY-run markets that strengthen local food networks.
Quality food you can TRUST, bought directly from the producers.
Fair prices for both consumers and producers that foster LOCAL ECONOMIES.
Access to good, clean and fair food from the local area to reduce food miles and SHORTEN the FOOD CHAIN.
Consumers become COPRODUCERS, learning from producers and EDUCATIONAL activities.
The Network of Earth Markets:
Parndorf, Austria
Tel Aviv, Israel
Alba, Italy
Bologna, Italy
Cairo Montenotte, Italy
Calamandrana, Italy
Ciampino, Italy
Colorno, Italy
Milan, Italy
Montevarchi, Italy
San Daniele del Friuli, Italy
San Miniato, Italy
Umbertide, Italy
Riga, Latvia
Beirut, Lebanon
Tripoli, Lebanon
Bucharest, Romani
New Zealand relief
Since 2005, the idea of raising money through retail sales to support victims of those disasters is a strategy that we understand. Two successful examples that come to mind were the sales of ReNew Orleans t-shirts that raised money for the Musicians Union after Hurricane Katrina, and believe it or not, another was when employees of the Whole Foods stores in Georgia voted to use sales of king cakes to support my organization’s White Boot Brigade project after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The White Boot Brigade are a series of roaming shrimpers events to direct market wild caught seafood far and wide. That money allowed us to bring a group of shrimpers to California ( at a time when our residents had no way to buy seafood) where they made many sales to restaurants and stores, some of whom are still customers of those shrimpers.
As someone who has met some of the New Zealand market folks while attending the Australian market conference a few years back, I know how much they all appreciate being connected to the larger market world. So, I attach the link for the relief work that you can support (by buying wine!) and also one that goes directly to support the market organization in New Zealand. Sometimes just a cheerful note from a far-off place makes a great difference I can tell you….
Philanthropy Blog
I met Steven through a funder and find his blog VERY useful. Check out this post….
Good webinar on insurance and liability for markets…
Happening right now online from Farmers Market Coalition. They promise to get the powerpoints and recorded audio up by next week on the FMC site.
life after the credit card swipe…
While the European payments industry hopes its declarations will prod U.S. banks into upgrading systems here, there is little chance that U.S. card issuers can be bullied to quickly adopt the Chip and PIN system. Already, several celebrated attempts to issue so-called smart cards — such as the American Express Blue card in the late 1990s — have fallen flat. In fact, Jun thinks it’s likely the U.S. system will skip over the European system and adopt even smarter card technology, such as the Near Field Communication chip, which allows consumers to make payments wirelessly without removing their cards — or for that matter, their cell phones — from their pockets.
Nice to hear about, but it still doesn’t solve our wireless range issues at open-air markets….
Get to know the faces of the movement
Pam has been working on food and justice issues for many years, but quietly, as is her way. She has recently joined me on the Community Food Security Coalition board so now I get to see her regularly. Isn’t it odd that we organizers don’t give ourselves more time to just hang with our colleagues?
ba·zaar also ba·zar (b-zär) n.
1. A market consisting of a street lined with shops and stalls, especially one in the Middle East.
2. A shop or a part of a store in which miscellaneous articles are sold.
3. A fair or sale at which miscellaneous articles are sold, often for charitable purposes.
[Italian bazarro and Urdu bzr, both from Persian; see wes-3 in Indo-European roots.]
We explored the idea of naming our Festivus market a bazaar back in 2002 as we were designing its structure. We had planned on inviting churches, immigrant organizations and entrepreneurs with ties to their home culture to sell during the holiday months. Instead we focused on the artists who were doing more New Orleans cultural gifts and recycled material products along with fair trade items. After five years of Festivus, we decided as an organization that we had concluded that pilot. There is a Greenpaper on our website over at marketumbrella.org (under the marketshare tab) if you want to read about what we learned from Festivus. I do know we felt honored to work with the artisans that do so much to create a vibrant culture along with our farmers and fishers.
As we continue to create a typology for markets in our evaluation suite of tools (SEED and Market Portrait now, NEED and FEED soon), I am back to thinking about where a bazaar fits in the public market arena. Seems the words miscellaneous and/or cultural displays are key to its description…Love to hear from any of you if you have used it to describe your market and why.
Mapping America-NYT
These maps are so very useful. Useful to see an overview of housing, ethnicity, income and education for market purposes.
Here is one of the hard parts of what we do…
Here in my own city of New Orleans, on last weekend’s bright and beautiful Sunday I happened to be on site to see the closing by our police of a Mardi Gras costume bazaar .
For 20 years, costume designers have collectively set up on Frenchman Street in the weeks leading up to Fat Tuesday to sell their one-of-a-kind creations. The need to gather artists in one place, to allow for casual walk up traffic as well as those seeking out the designers and the mix of shops that might benefit from this event has made for a happy relationship with the Frenchman community. Well maybe…
This year, the New Orleans Police Department showed up and quite quickly shut it down. They cited the organizers for not getting a permit. Did a store complain? Sounds like no, that the NOPD just happened on them, But, as we know in our market world, it’s best to prepare for conflict and know what needs to happen to avoid it to keep the sales flowing. So, I assume this is the tip of it, that random stores may complain even if it benefits them and so we need to solve this issue once and for all.
For many of you in the market world, this would seem like a sensible action. Sure, you might say, you simply go to your city hall and ask them what you need to do beforehand and get it all straight…
And if you have that type of process where you live, I envy you.
What we have here is a morass of rules for some vending and not for others. When the artists that were participating in our fair trade/handmade market “Festivus, the holiday market for the rest of us” went to City Hall in the first year (2003) to register because we asked them to, they were told there was no way to register for this.
Chiefly, they were told it’s like this: if you have a storefront, you register that. If you want to vend on the street for Mardi Gras along parade routes, you can register for that. Other than that, to sell at market, especially if you do not have a storefront in Orleans Parish , well it may depend on who in city government you talk to…
In the local food system here, my organization marketumbrella.org has decided all along the way to lead rather than wait. Back in 1996, we were able to get a “fairs and festivals” ruling for our weekly farmers markets, to ask for some zoning clarification and wrote a food handling guide and submitted that to the state to make sure no one would show up telling us we were illegal. And since most of our vendors are exempt from collecting sales tax (as farmers and fishers) they were okay themselves but we continue to tell our value-added vendors to make sure they are right with city government-although again if they live outside the city, its hard to do that. That was pretty much the last time we had a formal interaction with the government- that is until the NOFD came to our markets last year and ask for new permits and fees.
Based on that issue and others we were hearing about, we wrote a grant to do research and form recommendations to the city for open-air farmers markets. We have an RFP out locally for someone to take on the policy work and then will send a RFP out to update our food handling guide.
That work should be completed over summer and we hope the city accepts our recommendations. So, we feel our artist colleagues’ pain when we see them go through a process that has parts that are still to be decided and lacks clarity from our government, as happened this Sunday.
I guess with our experience, we saw this coming to them in a way. As much as I prefer to leave entrepreneurial activity as informal as possible, when you gather collectively you probably need some systems in place. Especially in incorporated towns and cities.
And this is where my work (in the marketshare project) is mostly felt: to add capacity and to professionalize market management so the risks are mitigated.
I feel for them, those amazing artists and designers. I will do what I personally can to support their work and professionally to encourage markets to thrive in my region.
MGshutdown
What is your food rule?
Last year I published Food Rules, a short book offering 64 rules for eating well. Food Rules struck a chord with many people, who found that it helped them navigate what has become a treacherous food environment, whether in the supermarket or restaurant.
Many of the rules were submitted by readers, and since publication I have received a number of excellent new ones.
So I’ve decided to publish an expanded edition, with additional rules and also illustrations, which the painter Maira Kalman has agreed to create. I hope you’ll consider contributing to the new book.
What are some of your food rules? I’ll pick my favorite three rules from within the Slow Food network and give those people signed copies of the book. Let me know your food rule here:
http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5986/p/salsa/web/questionnaire/public/?questionnaire_KEY=541
Thanks in advance for your help,
Michael Pollan
PS – the deadline for submission is February 27th. Don’t forget to forward this email to your friends so they can share their food rules too!
Don’t just think about the traditional grocery stores when comparing prices
Dollar stores might be where some of our shoppers are also shopping: This report talks about the biggest increase in their shoppers are among households earning over 100,000 a year.
Helping Farmers Markets Grow 