Old friends and multiple-movement-colleagues Ken Meter and Karen Lehman lead a cooperative sing along at the Illinois Farmers Market Association with a song found in a attic of a woman organizer from the 1930s, song to the tune of Auld Lang Syne called Cooperate. A sweet moment.
Great article about the (negative) relationship of the food movement to gentrification and therefore culture. We have to know the entire history of our movement (including its elitist characteristics) and acknowledge how our work has positive and negative implications on the less fortunate even as we continue to push its boundaries.
Some quotes from the article that I found useful:
“We think of gentrification principally in terms of real estate, race, and class, but I more often find that food is the thermometer reading the temperature of gentrification.”
“Much of what we call food politics today—buying local, farming organic, eating vegetarian—originally came from collectives that wanted to raise awareness about industrially produced food. The People’s Food System of the mid-’70s was a network of community food stores and small-scale food collectives that organized to take back control of food from large agricultural and chemical companies; they built direct connections to farmers to establish the first farmers’ markets. Meanwhile, the Black Panthers were hosting free community breakfasts in their neighborhoods, and Alice Walters opened Chez Panisse partly as a space to talk about politics. Various collectives shared the urban farm known as the Crossroads Community (The Farm) on Potrero Avenue at the edge of the Mission.
All this activity resulted in a paradox: as radical food politics succeeded, healthy food became commodified as elite food, proving that successful social movements can be gentrified, just like neighborhoods. The best farmers’ market in San Francisco, at the Ferry Building, is also the least affordable, and Waters’ Chez Panisse, the standard-bearer of locally grown, seasonal food, has become one of the most expensive restaurants in Berkeley.”
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.
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
A great framework to think about humanity and its potential.
Ah incentives. This is a great interview with NYC Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs about their cash incentive program. The Mexico model was the one that was explained to us in New Orleans back in 2006 (by the same public health researcher that is now working for NYC) and became the basis of the markets’ innovative work on the Gulf Coast which continues to this day. We understood (because of her training) that we were using cash as a short-term way to reduce significant barriers around open-air farmers markets, especially for low-income shoppers that face barriers such as lack of transportation, short market hours (that are often at odds with service workers schedules), the need to learn new shopping behavior, the perception of markets as elitist and so on.
To me, markets are in the business of incentivizing behavior change and we use many tools to that end: events, seating, music, children’s educational resources, support for farmers to grow their businesses and so on. Cash incentives are now well understood by public health activists and so were brought to our markets as an efficient way to do targeted outreach to at-risk communities. It’s not the answer to all of our market issues, but it has allowed us to regain our rightful place as the center of innovation in community food systems and to add some disciplined measurement strategies to our portfolio.
I really like how the NYC describes this in the interview; I like the analogy of the tax code as being a set of incentives as well.
The entire series Freakonomics is based on incentives as well. Check that out for a macro view of the subject.
Link to interview
Good language in here for project proposals that involve taking student groups to farms and gardens. That the number of children involved in creative outdoor activities fell so quickly is shocking and can be addressed by activities that markets organize. Also, how access to nature can be a creative stimulant for later learning could also be the basis of your project for your targeted market day activities.
The remarkable collapse of children’s engagement with nature – which is even faster than the collapse of the natural world – is recorded in Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods, and in a report published recently by the National Trust. Since the 1970s the area in which children may roam without supervision has decreased by almost 90%. In one generation the proportion of children regularly playing in wild places in the UK has fallen from more than half to fewer than one in 10. In the US, in just six years (1997-2003) children with particular outdoor hobbies fell by half. Eleven- to 15-year-olds in Britain now spend, on average, half their waking day in front of a screen.
In her famous essay the Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, Edith Cobb proposed that contact with nature stimulates creativity. Reviewing the biographies of 300 “geniuses”, she exposed a common theme: intense experiences of the natural world in the middle age of childhood (between five and 12). Animals and plants, she contended, are among “the figures of speech in the rhetoric of play … which the genius in particular of later life seems to recall”.
Studies in several nations show that children’s games are more creative in green places than in concrete playgrounds. Natural spaces encourage fantasy and roleplay, reasoning and observation. The social standing of children there depends less on physical dominance, more on inventiveness and language skills. Perhaps forcing children to study so much, rather than running wild in the woods and fields, is counter-productive.
UTNE Altwire – If children lose contact with nature they won't fight for it.
A few years ago, I was watching a Charlie Rose interview with the musician, Tori Amos. She was going on tour with Alanis Morrisette and Charlie asked her how that worked, how could they combine their shows. Tori frowned in concentration and said (I’m sort of paraphrasing here):
it’s not really about merging them. Really, I’m… a pirate ship. I have a captain, I have my own mates, my own wenches…..and so does she…
That comment stuck in my mind. When I went to work the next day, I shared it Richard McCarthy, who was then the Executive Director of Market Umbrella. We were constantly searching for metaphors for farmers market organizing to describe the way it was bending (or could be) to becoming a true movement rather than a series of random events in towns and cities. We had collected some cool descriptions, still wondered if we had yet found the best way to describe it.
“A pirate ship. Hmmm,” he said. True to his nature as a leader who employs engaging and system-level thinking, he kept at it, coming up with a powerpoint on the pirate ship idea that he continues to refine and use in his global work with civic and food organizers.
When I’m out in the field, I find that much of what we do in markets and in food systems is duplication of the worst sort, meaning unnecessary and a time waster for overworked markets or networks, or just as bad is the an expectation that all markets or projects should operate and be measured the exact same way. Why is that, I often wondered? Why don’t markets or organizers talk more to each other, sharing more tools peer-to-peer and find the strength to resist being measured and judged by inappropriate metrics?
Well, I do know why it happens. It happens because the work of community organizing is so important to do correctly and yet so unrelenting that it is hard to find time to share. And then what should be shared and how it could be shared is often as complicated.
The Tori Amos interview spoke to that idea.
The idea that innovation and creativity is handmade and often an individual exercise, or coming from a small committed group who are learning as they go.
And that sharing is not necessarily about combining efforts, but more often about connecting when needed and not overemphasizing one set of values over another.
That individuals or small groups need some autonomy and yet, in order to build a movement there are times when building the networks is as important.
So from that Amos interview came this line that Richard and I created while standing outside of a coffeehouse:
Sail Alone, Anchor Together
Like pirate ships or if you prefer, privateer ships, markets have their own flag, their own code and their own mates. Sooner or later though, they may need to join up in order to defend themselves from other forces or come together to succeed on an issue.
How they do that is important. When they do that is important too.
The lack of a national or even a regional convening primarily for farmers markets may be starting to hamper our efforts for long term policy changes and impair capacity building. In lieu of that, we can (and should) moor our nimble little ships to sides of elegant liner like a re-imagined public markets conference or join a strong armada such as a well-organized school food initiative when we can, but even then, when we don’t know what to share and when, it’s hard to contribute meaningfully.
We also have our own issues to talk about. What about SNAP/EBT? Disaster planning for market farmers? Training for market managers? Food safety issues? Permanent locations? Sustainable funding? Building appropriate networks for policy work? Evaluation? We need to work this stuff out together and decide how it’s appropriate to our scale.
Some market networks are lucky. They have solid food systems that they work in and grow in sustainably. But even the best need to anchor with the odd little markets and share and hear because innovation within a field often comes from unlikely sources.
And sometimes it’s as hard to get the larger, more established markets to take the time and find the right voice in which to share their ideas and plans, to do that even as they are piloting ever more complex projects.
Respect to each pirate ship must be paid by the others. Learn to spot the flags and to find ways to anchor together.
Below, find an article about an anti-local author from Canada, of all places. Never forget these folks are out there, writing and speaking to other academics and a few decision-makers too.
My feeling is that these are the same type of folks who told us that nuclear power would be “too cheap to meter”, that global weather instability was “bad science’, that health care insurers know more than we do about costs and so on. A healthy suspicion of energetic movements is fine, but to limit food movements to upper middle class foodies buying fancy items is a short view of the many outcomes that come from alternative food systems. What about (to name just a few) healthier menus, soil reclamation, farmer generation, multi-cultural mapping, seasonal food increase, smarter regional planning, more public edible or low-water usage landscaping, biodiversity education, seed-saving, mental health projects, child health, social cohesion, geographical awareness?
What also occurs to me is he seem blissfully unaware that he views industrial ag as having the purpose of being for all when it is actually only for profit-making corporations. And then argues that food activists (“locavores” as he terms us) only want better food for their class and ignore the “realities” of the social woes in the larger system. I laugh aloud when I see or hear this, as I know that many, many food activists came to it from other social movements because they know it is a necessary approach for every system, whether we are talking about education, childcare, aging, anti-racism, environmental issues, immigrant reform, healthcare and so on.
Unfortunately, often we play into hands such as these with our gorgeous color photos of someone carrying a root vegetable who looks like they’re from upper-class middle America (read young, trim white person in overalls with white teeth and skin smiling from the cover of the report who tell us inside about their transformation from college kid to new farmer as they work in some “underserved” area) rather than reporting a before and after of what health crisis our citizens have saved themselves from by turning to human-scaled sustainable agriculture.
Stories should abound of activists who came to this to reclaim their health from their own degenerative medical conditions, or of those who lost the last of the soil on their farm or those who use it to engage multi-cultural communities. Or of communities organizing around cultural assets to create true wealth, and it just so happens that those assets happen to be food based.
Actually, I don’t worry too much about these writers. I don’t worry that much because I know that those we have already reached with our message so far have taken the time to consider the alternatives, so won’t be easily swayed. The audience for writers such as these may therefore even smaller than ours! And most of those who haven’t joined the good food revolution yet aren’t reading academics like this.
But as I said at the beginning, for some policymakers, this argument would be appealing. After all, inertia is an easy thing to allow. And I know that brands are powerful: there are people among us that remember being called: 1950s “reds”, 1960s “dirty hippies”, 1970s and 1980s “tree-huggers”, 1990s “angry queers” and so on. Smart people; they turned those tables and labels to their advantage and still made change in their time. Let’s do the same here. Gather data on your impact and share it widely. It’s the best way to silence the Chicken Littles of the industrial world.
Tens of thousands of community lunches in one weekend…
“Guests at the Big Jubilee Lunches were asked to bring food to share with their friends and neighbours, with the royal couple offering a cake that had the union flag colours.”
Details for grant proposals when you are greening a vacant lot with a new market :
We can use reports like this to know how to set expectations for our own markets and their warm brand of social cohesion. In addition, it’s another way for markets to use to explain their added worth to the community.
I just returned from giving the keynote at the Greenbelt Farmers Market Network Market Manager Day in Toronto Canada. I know, how lucky does one person get…
Spending four days with my peers to the north taught me a great many things and confirmed some others. I will post a few different stories and highlights about the trip this week, but let me start today with some generalities:
1. The deep awareness of the importance of civil society in Canada serves the market and food system well. Those working on these issues know that in order for change to be calibrated correctly, it is important for citizens to constantly act as “civic agents.” They are not afraid to be oppositional when needed (when dealing with government especially) but also understand that they need to “assist each department in achieving their particular mandate” as eloquently stated by Barbara Emanuel, Manager of the Food Strategy at Toronto Public Health. (That civic agent term was defined again for me in an article I read on the way home in the latest Democracy: A Journal of Ideas in a series called Reclaiming Citizenship which I heartily recommend as well.)
2. Every food organizer I met on that trip understood that the farmer/producer needs to remain as the central partner in all projects. In other words, I didn’t come across lip service to the needs of the farmer. That lip service is usually found in code words or phrases such as “scaling up” or “elitist farmers markets” in food system conversations that I find myself in across North America and in other Western countries. Those code words tell you that the sayers are content to ignore the facts of the relative age and sophistication of our work and the intractable nature of the industrial food system so far.
I instead heard complex, thoughtful responses to the needs of farmers while balancing health equity needs for shoppers. I wish I found that more often in my travels.
3. A set of organizers who recognize that they all must remain at the same table. More specifically, that they all sit at the table but may not have the same menu of choices in front of them. Debbie Fields, the extraordinary Executive Director of FoodShare Toronto said as much to me about her colleague Anne Freeman (my host, the organizer of the Greenbelt Farmers Market Network and founder of the Dufferin Grove Farmers Market) “Anne and I understand that we have the same goal but have to use different avenues to get there.”
4. Internal evaluation is becoming known and necessary. I can’t wait to tell you more about the dynamic presentation (and later meeting of the mind) I experienced through Helene St. Jacques, a Food Share board member and marketing research professional showing results of the research done on behalf of the markets. . And, I look forward to doing some of that US/Canada evaluation sharing with Helene as well.
So much to tell you….
Our belief that farmers markets are for public good is based partly on this concept that many of our founders took from the European marche rather than the American. This describes the public space in Europe well in a few sentences.
Helping Farmers Markets Grow 