Here in New Orleans, we have one of the largest Vietnamese communities in the US, although few non-Vietnamese enter it. Centered in New Orleans East, it started as a refugee settlement of 2 North Vietnamese fishing villages that had resettled in South Vietnam after the Communist takeover. Those villages then left Vietnam after the fall of Saigon and were brought to New Orleans from refugee camps by Archbishop Hannan in the mid 1970s.
The largely Catholic community (the Buddhist Vietnamese community is mostly settled on the West Bank of New Orleans) runs the gamut of socio-economic statuses from low-income rentals to middle class stability all of the way to large homes in cul-de-sacs. They even have a traditional market on Saturday mornings from 6 am til 8 or so, with elders squatting behind their produce, arranged on blankets or bamboo mats on the ground with the church holding a place of honor in the middle of it all.
New Orleans East was hammered hard by Katrina, both with high winds and water. It is surrounded by water and therefore although a perfect home for the fishers who dock their boat at their door or at a commercial dock down the street, it is a cruel place during storms. Of course,the rebuilding was difficult and without a major fundraising and political push from the activist priest of the church Father Vien, the area would not have rebounded so quickly. Interestingly, Father Vien is no longer in the parish; some rumor that he was removed for too much media attention while fighting (what he called) BP’s paltry settlements that did little to rebuild the fishing communities after it was destroyed by the spill.
In any case, the community HAS rebounded and seeing it during Tet festivities is always a treat. If you get a chance to come to New Orleans, ask me the way to Alcee Fortier Blvd. so you can see the village for yourself..
Until then, here is a short video (featuring the aforementioned Father Vien) that I did while working at MarketUmbrella that tells some of the Vietnamese history in New Orleans:
Tet New Year Festival starts Friday at Mary Queen of Vietnam church | NOLA.com.
As much as many people like to denigrate the internet as unchecked narcissism, it is certainly one of the keystones of the “open source” future. Our access to information today is quite different from the 20th century version and has changed our world, I think, mostly for the better. The internet is a good example since, as someone states quite well in this video, an open source future is about more than local control of production; it also is about distribution and information sharing.
Those tenets are certainly part of the building blocks of the community food system; however, we could do much more in regards to sharing farming technology and food production secrets in order to make our movement a true open source movement.
I had just thinking recently what happened to communities doing grassroots assessments? Seemed like I used to read a great deal about those, and then not so much, and then along comes this excellent story…
Eradicating Food Deserts One Congregation at a Time | Civil Eats.
An article about a mobile market starting up in Massachusetts is attached. After reading it (well even before reading it) I must confess I was just not sure about mobile markets as the method for adding healthy food to a community.
The purpose of the farmers market is to allow civic engagement to happen at such a regular interval that behavior change can also happen. Farmers can slowly build their business to meet their face to face customer needs, shoppers can watch others shop and compare notes and learn the seasonality of their region among other things and the neighbors get an amenity that encourages a more vibrant area. All of these things take time and sustained effort and even with the best of intentions may still fail but if it does all work, it can lead to a powerful change in a community. That is the promise of a farmers market, and it also allows everyone to be part of the decision making.
And may I add, the use of the term “market” in its title also troubles me as I think it implies a system that resembles a farmers market and yet we share almost no characteristics with mobile food initiatives.
And as someone who helps build and expand public markets, let me say this: I don’t believe that we have done enough with it yet. I think the type of market that we see in most cases is a “flagship” or “neighborhood niche” (some typology terms that are evolving in the market field) which may not fit the goals of some communities. I believe that there are many types of market types for communities that are organizing themselves. For example, there is a type of farmers market for food deserts (food security market type) that we have yet to fully understand or what the uses of those other types could be.
What worries me about people jumping completely to to the next bandwagon is that I wonder if the mobile market is actually a barrier to communities ever getting a full-fledged farmers market. Adding to that, I think farmers markets are part of a spectrum that can ultimately get communities other food retail options, including at times, full-scaled grocery stores. Can mobile markets lead to that? I’m just not sure.
However, I do see that mobile markets can offer some short termed food access answers and also gather some data about choices that a neighborhood wants. Also, that the mobile market can help some small farmers get prepared for farmers markets among other things.
I also appreciate the nimbleness of the mobile option. I did some research for a potential mobile market while working at MarketUmbrella in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and still believe that there is a use for it in disaster-struck communities. And having talked with the good people of Toronto FoodShare and others who are thinking about the mobile market role, I suggest that it might be a useful bridge to offer healthy prepared foods that could arrive in a neighborhood throughout dinner time and by using local fruits and vegetables in their simple recipes (meals under 4.00 for families and less than 15-20 minutes prep time perhaps?) still support local growers.
So I wonder if how communities deploy farmers markets and mobile markets separately and together could be analyzed using similar measurement (Oh I may find the time to do this myself soon!) and where there has been a successful model of a mobile market, that some in-depth research can be done of this option as an answer to food system needs.
By the way, this quote from the article struck me as a perfect example of the lack of awareness of what farmers markets do and how they do it:
“Traditional farmers’ markets, the pair argue, are often time- and labor-intensive, and have the downside of being stationary.”
Changing behavior takes time and a regular commitment and even though the idea of a moving truck sounds good as a way to get to more people, it also takes the chance away of establishing a haven that can become the start of a neighborhood getting long term amenities.
BUT I lay part of the blame on public market advocates: in order for food system organizers to know what farmers markets can do, we have to share data about what they do.
And find ways to encourage a full spectrum of answers that should well include mobile food.
A mobile farmers’ market revs up – Food Features.
Also, a link to the Greenpaper that I wrote while at MarketUmbrella:
Greenpaper
The legendary founders of Fresh Farm Markets (in DC, Maryland and Virginia), Ann Yonkers and Bernie Prince shared their template for success for building markets in this article. Their characteristics for success include: producers only, local focus, good management, event and service ethos and markets acting as town squares. A solid list; what always occurs to me when I hear this are the amount of variables from that list that I see from market to market and region to region.
When I ran markets in New Orleans, we would have added:
Rain or shine, meaning a regularly occurring market.
The market as a mechanism for behavior change, meaning an active role to expand its reach by acknowledging the social determinants of health and affecting the policies that shape them, which is, of course, closely related to the town square ethos.
I’d also like to hear what YOUR non-negotiables are in your market community.
In other words, what are really the “non-negotiables” for all markets? How can we be sure that we get measured for what we actually do, and not what the neighboring market does or even what a partner organization thinks we should do without taking into consideration the capacity and goals of the existing market community.
I have been struggling with an article that I’ll share with the market and food system field (when completed) challenging researchers and practioners to help define sets of characteristics that will identify the types of market that the local community wants to offer. This methodology, called market typology, will show how communities choose their own structure, product selection and partnerships based on their goals and community assets and yet need to align their work with peers across the country in order to share and grow the field for the future.
If anyone is interested in reading the draft and commenting on the typology question, feel free to email me directly and I’ll send you a link.
“The hardest work in building FlashFood from theoretical to actual will likely be the networking itself, although the team has a strong head start on connecting with vendors. “We have been speaking a lot with organizations that already do work with restaurants to cover perishable food,” says Irwin, citing Food Donation Connection as an early partner. “But the difference between us and the organizations that are out there right now is that we account for late at night. Restaurants don’t always know how much they’re going to have left over, so we’re trying to fill this donation market of food that’s unexpected and needs to be transported really rapidly.” That means prepared dishes that can’t be frozen down for storage (unlike, say, leftover chicken breasts), or trays of food from weddings or conventions that were never served. FlashFood intends to find mouths for those leftovers within an hour.”
This is an encouraging evolution. Technology actually moving the dial to answer issues like late night restaurant leftovers and prepared foods.
How might markets support these entrepreneurs? What about mobile markets? Could this be one of the answers as to how mobile markets can be sustainable and still serve the most needy?
Interesting from the point of view of how farmers market have been working on full access to all citizens. If folks are discouraged from getting needed assistance, then the emergency food services will be overwhelmed and a potential road to better health intervention and access to community engagement is cut off for the most at risk population.
Sad. Scary.
I wonder what the community food system could do to change this policy in Georgia?
It is true that we still await a major city seriously investing in community food systems as their economic bridge to a new renaissance – sure, it could be Chicago. It would be great if it was Chicago.
Chicago Urban Farms Initiative: Englewood Could Become Major Agribusiness Hub.
My checkered past includes a long stint as a field canvasser on consumer and environmental issues in the very state of Ohio that has secured the win for the Democrats. I find door-to-door canvassing almost as fascinating as my current work of devising strategies for direct-marketing community food producers, so I have read a great deal about ground strategy this fall. Having friends who knocked on doors in this campaign season up there, I was privy to some of their pre-election training as it is laid out in this NYT article and it strikes me that there are lessons in here for the community food movement.
First is the awareness that how people poll is not the whole story. The primary reasons that the Repubs say they thought they had this election won was that they believed that the minorities that had carried the Dems last time were surely not going to vote that strongly this year and that they believed that the white vote would be theirs at a larger rate. All of those assumptions may have been true at the beginning and maybe with their antiquated general polling it seemed very true throughout.
Ultimately though, the sophisticated approach that the Dems used to get out the vote in a massive field campaign and Facebook style messaging worked wonders: it allowed them to focus on training their field campaign workers to then spot and communicate with likely voters and to encourage connections between neighbors to get them out to the polls. And on the media end, to offer a combination of positive (sometimes very localized) campaign messages and then to switch up those message regularly. This was the one-two knockout punch that the Repubs did not see coming. And maybe the media too: since except for 538 blogger/analyst Silver, most misjudged the final numbers. In other words, established centers of decision makers and analysts misjudged the effect of individuals making decisions based on real facts about their wealth and health.
Any of that sound familiar to community food organizers?
These very strategies would be useful for the food movement to study and to adopt (oh, I don’t know, maybe during the Farm Bill negotiations?) such as doing in-depth social science studies of our likely shoppers and to make more connections between those early adopters of ours and their “strong” and “weak” social ties to then reach more potential community food activists, shoppers and producers. I understand that many organizers are slightly appalled by the idea of using sophisticated scientific and marketing methods to support regional food systems, but something else the Dems have shown is a win is a win friends, and action from those emboldened winners will surely follow this historic day.
Let me also point out what many of you may have also noticed: the excitement and engagement from citizens on all sides – even in states that had no contest and therefore no campaign – was impressive.
Even though we’re probably not going to raise and spend a billion dollars to win on issues that benefit our movement, if we were to simply embed what seems to me a level of respect and follow through in identifying and understanding on a one-to-one level who the 21st century idiosyncratic citizen is and how they make decisions as the Dems did in this election, I can only imagine the deep ties we would create.
‘Dream Team’ of Behavioral Scientists Advised Obama Campaign – NYTimes.com.
Often, I talk about forms of capital and how it’s a great framework for defining local food systems. I use the forms of capital for the Indicator Matrix framework that I have been working on Farmers Market Coalition (FMC). I thought I would share the handout given to me that defines a great many of them; I believe this is a Ford Foundation handout done by Yellow Wood Associates, an excellent consulting firm that is focusing on the same outcomes that our market field is hoping to achieve.
Here is the list of capitals that the handout defines:
Intellectual (FMC refers to this as human)
Social
Individual
Natural
Built
Political
Financial
Helping Farmers Markets Grow 