articles

Corporations pick up on “shared value”

Harvard Business Review recently published an article with some language that sounds an awful lot like the stated “triple bottom line” of Farmers Market Coalition, marketumbrella.org and others in the public market field. Shared value is the new concept to deepen corporate social responsibility to include social progress as a measurement for their company. Seems like markets need to use the language and idea to find ways to connect with Main Street more…
Harvard Business Review

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Where do food truck vendors use the bathroom?

Street vendors are interviewed about their culture:

Huff Post article

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Subway map of food culture

Well this is interesting. Using a subway system, it shows chefs (and one or two activists) who are changing food at the present time and have influenced this current crop (Julia Child, Ruth Reichl). I can believe that this will stir some debate-for example, I know that the one New Orleans chef mentioned here John Besh is probably deserved, but I would say that Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewlski do too for Cochon, Herbsaint and Butcher. And if you are trying to get at the heart of it the local/simple ingredient movement in my city, then Jamie Shannon and/or Susan Spicer need to be mentioned. I am also not sure why Joel Salatin and Will Allen are the only 2 growers that I noticed in here.

Map on Huffington Post

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Civil Eats talks about Food Policy

Messages from Food Policy Conference: From Neighborhood to Nation.

I love it when other people make my blogging job easier: here is a very good overview of the Portland conference from Jen Dalton, the editor of Local Eats about what she got out of the conference. Seems right to me…

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Certifications

The Chicago Green Market is adding a level of transparency to their markets. Starting this month, vendors will show their farm names, where they are located and what certification process they currently have passed. As many of you know, there is a wide selection of programs besides the USDA organic label that farmers can use. The Beyond Organic movement is growing, and it is quite possible that market vendors are more likely than industrial sector farmers to look for alternatives to organic; they have the ability to tell their own story to their shoppers which reduces the need for the complicated long work to get the USDA label.
And here are two points of view from the article that bolster my theory:
“GCM farm forager Dave Rand notes that it’s incredibly difficult, for example, to grow organic peaches in the Midwest because of pest and climate challenges. So a peach grower might opt for Food Alliance certification, which requires integrated pest management strategies that minimize pesticide use but allow it when necessary.”
“Three Sisters farmer Tracey Vowell said that she prefers the Certified Naturally Grown program because inspections are carried out by fellow farmers rather than certification inspectors. She finds this process fosters community and best-practices sharing rather than just requiring farmers to fill out paperwork.”

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More data on social capital

As many of you know, the organization that I have been associated for the last 9 years, marketumbrella.org has been doing some very interesting data collection and measurement on markets in this area. Using trust as a proxy, NEED (Neighborhood Exchange Evaluation Device) has been measuring the quantity and quality of transactions and hopes to get an online tool (like the free SEED tool) up very soon.

When we started this project almost 4 years ago, only a handful of stakeholders understood why we were interested in this. Now of course, interest in bridging and bonding has grown exponentially, as has the interest in markets ability to manage that effort.
This article is another in a long line of studies of social cohesion, but is a good primer for anyone in your world who needs to understand how this can be seen as healthy behavior.

In a now-classic study of 6,928 adults living in Alameda County, Calif., conducted by Harvard researcher Lisa Berkman, PhD, and University of California, Berkeley, researcher S. Leonard Syme, PhD., people with few social ties were two to three times more likely to die of all causes than people with wider and closer relationships.

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Food Stamp use soaring in these states

“Recent statistics from the USDA indicate that 14.2 percent of the U.S. population was using food stamps in February 2011, or around 44.2 million total, up from 33 million just two years before in 2009.”

slideshow

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Carbon T.A.P. project

“So we ask the question of, ‘What if we can imagine the end of infrastructure as we’re designing infrastructure?”

interview with Christopher Marcinkoski

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Measuring success in community gardens

A speaker at the Nashville Food Summit: “Community gardens are more about the community then the gardening.” I agree that has been true in recent years but is that the future?
And then this morning saw this on the comfood listserve:

Community Gardens Win the Food Wars
Millions of pounds of fresh food and produce were raised during the World War II years—as much as 40% of all vegetables consumed nationally.

5,285,000 Victory Gardens in the United States

According to The War Garden Victorious, Indianapolis “estimated the value of its war-garden crop in 1918 at $1,473,165. Denver placed its yield at $2,500,000 and Los Angeles at $1,000,000. Washington, District of Columbia reached $1,396,5000.” Thanks to propaganda (“your garden is a munitions plant”) there were 5,285,000 victory gardens in 1918. The City of Rochester, New York alone had more than 15,000. The “estimated value of our war-garden crops for 1918 (was) $525,000,000! A half billion dollars!”

Important history for us to know and to use as an impetus for today. Speaking of today:

Thanks to the research efforts of Farming Concrete, we know the value and weight of produce created by 67 of the 500 community gardens in NYC:

* 67 gardens comprise 1,200 plots
* 1,200 gardeners (give or take) raised 39,518 plants
* 39,518 plants produced 87,690 lbs of food
* 87,690 lbs of food  worth $214,060

But here is the statistic that really caught my eye. All this work, all this fresh food was produced on just 1.7 acres of land, or 71,950 square feet. The parking lots at suburban malls are bigger than that!

Check out Farming Concrete for their excellent resources to measure the benefits of urban gardens; the toolkit is very similar to the Farmers Market Metrics we are creating at the Farmers Market Coalition.

 

 

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CSAs are not for everyone

Barbara Haber is an author, food historian and the former curator of books at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. She is a former director of the International Association of Culinary Professionals and was elected to the James Beard Foundation’s “Who’s Who’s in Food and Beverages” and received the M.F.K. Fisher Award from Les Dames d’Escofier. This article comes from Zester daily, a food blog:

blog piece on CSAs

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Eastern Market is asked to expand its days

April 12, The Detroit News: “Why should Eastern Market only be open on Saturday? Why not Sunday? Why not every day?” said Stabenow, D-Lansing, at an appearance at the Detroit Economic Club in Southfield. “They are looking at expanding.

Detroit News story

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Strong Towns

A link to a site that explores land use from a planners point of view. I downloaded the Tactical Urbanism report that talks about diversity of use (both informal and formal).
Jane Jacobs’ words and ideas are embedded throughout the site and that is always a good thing for us in the public market movement…

They write:
“The American approach to growth is causing economic stagnation and decline along with land use practices that force a dependency on public subsidies. The inefficiencies of the current approach have left American towns financially insolvent, unable to pay even the maintenance costs of their basic infrastructure. A new approach that accounts for the full cost of growth is needed to make our towns strong again.”

I look forward to reading more.

Strong Towns

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Natural dyes for Easter Eggs

In case your market is legendary for its Easter Egg “eggstravaganza”. (Ha. puns are the emoticons of markets, yes?)
a href=”http://www.care2.com/greenliving/homemade-natural-easter-egg-dyes.html

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Edible Selby via Tasting Table

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.

Tasting Table

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