The work suggests that consumption of junk foods may make you relatively indifferent to novel food, which may encourage overconsumption,” Morris said. “Also that you may overeat when exposed to signals linked to palatable foods, so an obese person may be more sensitive to advertising for foods like ice creams and chocolate bars.”
Urban Quality of Life and Green Placemaking | Sustainable Cities Collective
Perhaps the most striking finding of the study is the fact that happiness was more strongly correlated to green space than socioeconomic status. Participants living on blocks with 10% fewer green areas than the average were more likely to report stress and depression. Following this logic, a ‘poor’ resident living in an area with more trees and open space would report being happier than a ‘rich’ resident living in an area without access to green space.
Another study, this one by the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, uses 18 years of survey data from over 10,000 participants across the United Kingdom. Its analysis shows a strong correlation between access to green space, self-reported well-being, and even physical health. The researchers even found that the sensations associated with living close to green space yield similar feelings and levels of satisfaction to getting a new job or getting married.
Urban Quality of Life and Green Placemaking | Sustainable Cities Collective.
Harvest of Change
An engaging interactive story on today’s agribusiness sector from the Des Moines Register and USA Today.
Amid all the challenges, farmers find lucrative markets shaped by shifting consumer tastes. Farmers markets, where consumers can interact directly with the growers of their food, expanded steadily in the USA from 1994 to 2014, almost quintupling to 8,268, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
In 2012, fresh fruits and vegetables sold directly to consumers were a $1.3 billion industry, up 8% since 2007, the census found. That same year, organic food sales reached about $27 billion, according to the USDA, up from $11 billion in 2004.
Inside the ‘Pay What You Want’ Marketplace
I wonder how many markets reach out to the yard sale-rs as potential shoppers? An ad in the paper near the listings perhaps? Or creating an event for a cookbook swap or a kitchen item swap at the market? This is one way markets can utilize the ecological community that connects farmers markets to other like-minded re-users interested in less packaging and waste in modern society.
The informal economy [of the yard sale] grants consumers much more power to stretch the value of their dollar—which has become especially crucial in the context of the Great Recession and other times of economic stress and uncertainty, where yard sales and other means of informal trade can be a survival strategy for many middle- and lower-class people.
The “metrification” of urban life
As some may have noticed in comments on any index that I share on here, I am usually more interested in how the makers of that index collected the information and how the metrics were defined, than in the final ranking system. One of my online discussion groups “The Future of Cities” had a recent post on the fallibility of the happiness and livable indexes you see on many sites. The original post by Sam Jacob was so thoughtful, I thought I’d link it here and also send a link to the discussion. I have also added my own comment here.
His final conclusion was succinct:
We can draw on big data, on communication technologies but we shouldn’t be in thrall to it. We need to recognise the sheer difficulty of comprehending the complexity of cities and the difficulty of making them. We need a fuller understanding of the texture and depth of what life – and “liveability” – might be. We should openly acknowledge the intrinsic political dimension of the city and its fundamentally democratic nature.
My comment:
As someone who offers support to those between the formal and informal economies (in regional food systems), I appreciate the thoughtful comments above on the subjective nature of metrics in terms of indexing livability and happiness levels. I also agree that using these in terms of ranking cities or any endeavor is a marketing ploy and without real value to those in that place. However, as a food system organizer, I can assert that we are in need of well-developed and shared metrics that reflect the values that we forward, such as small business economic activity (success is not always about pure job creation in other words), social cohesion (trust between parts of the community unknown to one another before that activity like farmers and family table shoppers), ecological values (building a closed loop of sustainability) and human capital (transferring knowledge and building skills). I am working on a project that will forward a set of metrics that WILL have context as to the individual place that is being measured and not be designed to be used for ranking one place against another. We hope that this will allow for success measures that derive from the work at the grassroots level of organizers and users of that community and yet can explain the transformative nature of the community food system to policy makers as well and is therefore in agreement to Mr. Jacob’s original idea. Feel free to check out the early days of this work, done through a partnership of the Farmers Market Coalition and University of Wisconsin at FMC’s FMM page
Training Your Brain to Prefer Healthy Foods
Scientists have suspected that, once unhealthy food addiction circuits are established, they may be hard or impossible to reverse, subjecting people who have gained weight to a lifetime of unhealthy food cravings and temptation. To find out whether the brain can be re-trained to support healthy food choices, Roberts and colleagues studied the reward system in thirteen overweight and obese men and women, eight of whom were participants in a new weight loss program designed by Tufts University researchers and five who were in a control group and were not enrolled in the program.
“We don’t start out in life loving French fries and hating, for example, whole wheat pasta,” said senior and co-corresponding author Susan B. Roberts, Ph.D., director of the Energy Metabolism Laboratory at the USDA HNRCA, who is also a professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and an adjunct professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine. “This conditioning happens over time in response to eating – repeatedly! – what is out there in the toxic food environment.”
Plastic versus paper
From USAToday:
There’s a growing generation gap when it comes to using plastic for purchases under $5, a survey out this week by CreditCards.com reveals. More than half of Millennials are likely to whip out a card for a pack of gum or a newspaper, while 77% of people older than 50 still dig out cash.
The plastic cards young people are reaching for at cash registers these days are overwhelmingly debit. Those ages 18 to 29 favor debit over credit by a ratio of almost 3 to 1, the survey of 983 credit card holders showed.
Other findings from the survey, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International for CreditCards.com done July 17-20 and July 24-27:
• Overall, 65% of Americans typically pay for purchases under $5 with cash; 22% use debit cards, and 11% use credit cards.
• Cash is the preferred payment method for almost eight in 10 rural card holders, vs. 62% of city dwellers and suburbanites.
How Can a City Measure Its Happiness?
This is a good article about how municipalities are using well-being indexes to measure intangibles such as levels of happiness among citizens. That alone makes this article useful to markets (to compare to their shoppers happiness levels or to find metrics that markets could also use perhaps?) but also interesting is that the article details how responses were collected. Ensuring that the proper methodology and sample size is crucial to anyone collecting qualitative data.
Food system organizers in these cities could learn from the conclusions and even work with these municipal leaders to also survey farmers market shoppers, possibly adding a question or two about their use of local foods and markets. Additionally, knowing about these data collection projects could also allow markets to easily locate experienced survey teams and tested methodology for their own survey work.
“Despite this caveat, Hadley stresses that the undertaking is eminently worthwhile, given the relative ease of conducting the surveys. “It’s not as hard as it seems to do a good, simple survey of your residents,” he says. “We did it all in-house and we did it all for under $4,000. It’s totally doable.” And the more cities that begin to do the surveys, the better, because they can compare results and learn from each other. For example, Somerville’s average rate of satisfaction was 7.5, but this number is hard to interpret without the context of responses from other cities.”
Cuyahoga County’s Sustainable Food Cluster Roadmap
As some may know, I am originally from Cleveland, Ohio and follow the food systems and community organizing work there with great interest. I grew up in one of the inner ring west side suburbs, often visiting the West Side Market and various small butchers and bakeries but the only “farms” I saw were the historical sites around Akron or when spotting an Amish farmer as we headed south on vacation at 65 mph. Farming was clearly the past for most modern Buckeyes, and we thought huge factories and transportation hubs were our only possible future. Or so it seemed for most of my early life since, like many Cleveland children, any trip through the Flats would include open car windows allowing in the soot and smoke of the factories and a proclamation: “smell that, kids? That smell is JOBS.”
However, the decline of manufacturing along Lake Erie in my lifetime has sent its great cities in search of other answers, and I am very proud of Cleveland’s new dedication to sustainable infrastructure and value-based employment for its citizens. A powerful example is the city’s Sustainability 2019 plan that was born from one of our most shameful moments-the fire on the Cuyahoga River in 1969, caused by the chemicals and pollution we allowed to be dumped into it.
1969-Cuyahoga River on fire, Cleveland Ohio
Since the global media descends on Cleveland every decade or so to revisit that fire, it is likely they will come at the half century anniversary with renewed gusto. In preparation, the Sustainability 2019 initiative was born to reply with evidence of Cleveland as “one of the greenest cities in North America” as the city’s Director of Sustainability put it at one of their conferences. Because of that focus, I believe that Cleveland is moving faster to a hybrid model of creating post-industrial sectors that can thrive with the vestiges of whatever manufacturing that it claims (wind power anyone?).
I found this out on one of my trips home when noticing that the food system there had a slightly different hue than many others that I regularly visit. Often, when I dig to find the beginnings of citywide or regional food work, I find that it stems primarily from the cultural sector as seen in my other home town of New Orleans, or from a deep need for a new entrepreneurial answer, a la Detroit, or from a public health crisis of lack of healthy food access as in the Bed-Stuy area of NYC, or all of those needs at once, such as many First Nations and too many others. It seemed to me that Cleveland’s food work came from the deep awareness of the destruction heaped upon it from that industrial framework that had now mostly fled to warmer and less regulated places. That strong environmental underpinning was also present because of the first-rate organizing done by many 1960s-present activists including the Ohio Public Interest Campaign, where I was trained as a community organizer and worked for almost a decade.
Maybe because of that industrial vacuum, the need for jobs there seems tempered by the caution for real answers that allow workers stability and skills and not just a paycheck handed to them by a new corporate overlord. The cooperative movement afoot there seems to rise from this and from the professionally run, long-standing community development organizations embedded deep in the neighborhoods, east and west. And of course, credit must also be given to other areas in the region that started cooperative development such as Athens Ohio.
So, because of the hard work done by generations before, the development of the food work seems relatively balanced and quite ambitious. It seems to still lack regional cohesion but it is not ignoring that need either. I found a deeper awareness of the inequities and the need to work with existing both the corporate and informal sectors than in many other places that I visit and work. There is much to do there and mistakes will be made on the road to this new face for my old city, as I mentioned in a piece for Belt Magazine. Still, I am proud of the work being done there and hope you find time to read their new Roadmap and to visit too.
The City of Cleveland Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, Ohio State University Extension, Cuyahoga County,and the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Food Policy Coalition have developed a sustainable food cluster roadmap in Cuyahoga County, with a core objective to increase regional jobs, revenue and sustainability by supporting local food and beverage businesses.
Gulf Coast, 9 years later: Still unfinished.
The link below is from my New Orleans blog that details our life here post Katrina: today August 29th, it will be 9 years since that terrible day when our region suffered through the hurricane and then through the much larger federal levee disaster.
We community organizers learned that we needed to be constantly available to our family, our friends and neighbors (including our farmers and fishers) as they rebuilt their lives and businesses. And we had to carry the story of citizen-led recovery to our colleagues in other places while remaining vigilant when home to help combat bad ideas from our decision makers.
We still need to do that work unfortunately.
Some of this piece may be too local, but the sentiment is clear I think. Basically, the years of 2010/2011 were when we really began to really feel the pressure from corporations trying to find deals; this post tells some of what we were going through:
“We are now coming up to 6 years after the federal levee system disintegrated in New Orleans. When we look around, do we see our old neighbors, a resurgence in small mom and pop businesses, and a generally more livable city than before?
I’d say no….”
Graphic and misleading title: “Local food might not be as ‘local’ as you think”
An example of how the media reports unfairly on farmers markets; the idea that each market community decides its own definition of local is clear in the graphic, but the headline is misleading. It would be better and more appropriate if the story was titled:
Each community decides local for itself
Graphic: Local food might not be as 'local' as you think.
Survey Monkey sez start with your conclusion
Writing your conclusion first is just like proposing a hypothesis for a science experiment.
How America’s Largest Worker Owned Co-Op Lifts People Out of Poverty
New York City is going—in a big way—for worker-owned cooperatives. Inspired by the model of CHCA and prodded by a new network of co-op members and enthusiasts, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Council allocated $1.2 million to support worker cooperatives in 2015’s budget. According to the Democracy at Work Institute, New York’s investment in co-ops is the largest by any U.S. city government to date.
Cooperatives are businesses owned and controlled by their members on the basis of one member, one vote. Given enough time, worker-owned cooperatives tend to increase wages and improve working conditions, and advocates say a local co-op generally stays where it’s founded and acts as a leadership-building force.
Can the lexicon of local make a global impact? Book review by Stacy Miller
You may want to check out the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development’s (JAFSCD) “Book Nook”, which contains in-depth reviews of current books on food systems. The link at the end of this post directs you to a review of a new book on the language of sustainability: Local: The New Face of Food and Farming in America, by Douglas Gayeton. The review is by Stacy Miller, who many readers will know as the Farmers Market Coalition’s founding Executive Director. Stacy is now working as an independent consultant and as a FMC Program Advisor and also spends some of her time valiantly untangling my words by serving as an editor or by offering some spot analysis for many of the reports that I am doing for markets and their advocates.
Finding the appropriate bright and brave words to describe the energetic nature of a farmers market as well as the larger food system work happening is something we both think about in this work that we do and she probably had to think about daily as the FMC director. I can remember a day in her kitchen when we wrote down and discussed lots of words to describe what became the skeleton of the Farmers Market Metrics project at FMC and how we had to leave it unfinished when I left town a day later, promising to return to it. We did, and still do good-naturedly debate (alongside our colleagues at FMC and University of Wisconsin) for and against the use of different words and definitions within that metrics work.
So, to expand her thinking to this lovely book on the entire realm of sustainability language in our farming and food world seems mighty appropriate. Here are a few of my favorite passages from her review, linked below:
“The idea that language is fundamental to social movements is nothing new. The power to bestow names on objects, people, places, and philosophies is undervalued, so we hardly notice when it gets abused. Noam Chomsky famously observed that
destructive paradigms thrive because they impose on people “the feeling that they really are incompetent to deal with complex and important issues: they’d better leave it to the captain” (Chomsky,1987, p. 42).”
“I give a lot of credit to a former film director who can find a compelling poster child for, and condense the complexities of, expansive terms like economies of community (see Figure 1), soil food web, GMO, or traceability.”
“The hypothesis behind the Lexicon of Sustainability is compelling… We tune out vocabulary we don’t understand, avoid dialogue or questions that make us feel ill-informed or hopeless, and thereby enable a cycle of peripheral awareness that looks dangerously like apathy. And the corporate food monopolies take advantage of this whenever they can — on packaging, in advertising, and in lobbying efforts designed to “protect us” from too much information.”
I will pass this review to many of my colleagues and will also get this book based on her review and pass that around too. What better can be said?
Helping Farmers Markets Grow 