In the U.S., a Quick Walk to the Store Is a Rare Thing Indeed

Another report to share with food communities as an indicator of the positive changes we can make if we can embed our initiatives in neighborhoods.

“After you pass Seattle, ranked 13th with just 31 percent access, no other city in the U.S. cracks 30 percent, and the bottom 22 cities of the U.S. top 50 by population all have 10 percent or fewer residents within a five-minute walk to the store.

The numbers paint a picture of a dramatically divided nation, one in which even residents of the nation’s largest cities rarely have quick access via active transportation to the ingredients for fresh and healthy meals.

It’s just one more way of measuring how development defines our lives and our choices in ways that we are only beginning to understand.”
Link to story

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The Crunchy Cities Index – Support Farmers Markets

This is an exciting piece on the explosion of farmers markets, but I must confess that based on my own knowledge, I find the data to be less than precise. The USDA list of markets is not checked for accuracy and as it is up to market organizers to list and to de-list their own markets, most estimations believe that the list is far from accurate, even though the USDA does everything within its (limited) time to make it right. Even the definition of what can be listed as a market is loose; this may seem like nitpicking (after all more “markets” is good news isn’t it?) but since we know how the capacity of markets remains low partly because of low support among funders and policy makers, the lack of clarity may hurt chances to expand well-managed farmers markets or public markets that support local entrepreneurs.
What is also true is that many retail operations masquerade as farmers markets without directly supporting farmers or managing those involved in direct sales; regular operation, transparent governance and some direct sales for regional producers should at least be the minimum to being listed on this list. Don’t get me wrong; I like the idea of auxiliary and ancillary food initiatives that get regional food into more communities being listed somewhere and to be tied to efforts at flagship or sister market organizations, but we should get better at describing each of them with their own type so we can allow more to flourish.

The Crunchy Cities Index – Buy Local by I Support Farmers Markets.

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Experience helps restaurant managers stick with local foods

In a study of the cost and benefits of purchasing local foods in restaurants, managers and chefs indicated that certain actions of local food producers stand out as reasons why they continue to buy local foods. For instance, managers said that a local farmer’s or producer’s response time — the time it took a business to respond and process an order — was more important than delivery time — how long it takes to actually receive the goods — as a factor when they considered buying local food products.
Managers did not seem to think food safety was an issue with handling local food.
Clear labeling is another selling point for restaurant managers who are purchasing foods in grocery stores and markets. The labels should be accurate and easy to read, containing specifications including weight, date and product details, for example, according to Sharma, who worked with Joonho Moon, doctoral student in hospitality management, Penn State, and Catherine Strohbehn, state extension specialist and adjunct professor in apparel, events and hospitality management, Iowa State University.

Amit Sharma, Joonho Moon, Catherine Strohbehn. Restaurant’s decision to purchase local foods: Influence of value chain activities. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 2014; 39: 130 DOI: 10.1016/j.ijhm.2014.01.009

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You Get What You Measure

I look forward to this measurement workshop, which I plan on attending. It is open to the public and the cost is very reasonable, so anyone in the Baltimore area might want to join or look at their other opportunities. I am currently involved in a few evaluation projects, at implementation (market) level and at the creation level-at least one with the Farmers Market Coalition. I hope to announce another of those projects soon on this blog (meaning as soon as the funder is ready to announce!). In the meantime, I hope many of you saw the announcement we made about the FMC/Knight Foundation Farmers Market Metrics Prototype project which is rolling merrily along:

Knight Foundation Prototype Grant

Yellow WoodYou Get What You Measure

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Food sovereignty is what?

Agrarian Reform
Defense of territory
Agro-ecology
Local food systems

“World-wide, peasants, pastoralists, fisher-folk and other small-scale food producers
provide some 70% percent of the food consumed by humanity, even though we
probably only hold a quarter of all farm land. In Africa, we women farmers do about
70% of farm work, and we grow about 80% of the food. Peasants, and especially
peasant women, feed today’s world”

viacampesina.org/downloads/pdf/en/Elizabeth-The Hague-ISS-25 January 2014.pdf.

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10 Best School Lunches in America (Slideshow)

A bow to the hardworking people working on school lunch programs across America that made this top 10: Chef Ann Cooper, Alice Waters/Edible Schoolyard Project,and my pal Donna Cavato (along with April Neujean!) who fought mightily to create the New Orleans version right after Katrina, and the many other unsung heroes working to reconfigure this beast in systems large and small, public and private.

10 Best School Lunches in America (Slideshow) | Slideshow | The Daily Meal.

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How A Government Computer Glitch Forced Thousands Of Families To Go Hungry

“The glitches in North Carolina mark another example of government technology gone awry, turning a program created to sustain millions of people through hard times into a new aggravation. The high-profile failure of the federal health care exchange last fall illustrated what many low-income people have encountered for years: faulty computer systems and websites that prevent them from receiving public assistance on time.

In North Carolina, the fix was simple: In August, caseworkers found that their computers stopped crashing if they switched browsers from Internet Explorer to Google Chrome.

But the backlog kept growing. By the end of last year, more than 30,000 families in North Carolina had waited more than a month to receive food stamps — a violation of federal rules that require routine applications be processed within 30 days. About one third of those families had waited three months or more.”

How A Government Computer Glitch Forced Thousands Of Families To Go Hungry.

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The Agrarian Standard | Wendell Berry

Recently, I was working on a piece for The Nature of Cities blog, and wanted to re-read something that Wendell Berry had said about the agrarian culture; I found the 2002 Orion Magazine essay in which he reflects on the 25th year of publication of The Unsettling of America. I think the paragraph below is enormously descriptive of the tension that those of us involved in creating an alternative agrarian world work and live in:
To the corporate and political and academic servants of global industrialism, the small family farm and the small farming community are not known, not imaginable, and therefore unthinkable, except as damaging stereotypes. The people of “the cutting edge” in science, business, education, and politics have no patience with the local love, local loyalty, and local knowledge that make people truly native to their places and therefore good caretakers of their places. This is why one of the primary principles in industrialism has always been to get the worker away from home. From the beginning it has been destructive of home employment and home economies. The economic function of the household has been increasingly the consumption of purchased goods. Under industrialism, the farm too has become increasingly consumptive, and farms fail as the costs of consumption overpower the income from production.

The Agrarian Standard | Wendell Berry | Orion Magazine.

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Innovation through your people

Read a recent article on innovation, and I think the point about how to keep innovation alive, even with departing staff (or board) is crucial for market and food organizations to think about.

“Organizations really need to reexamine their management attitudes and practices within a new and more sophisticated framework of innovation. It is important that everyone actively seek out and support the human agents of innovation through, not only the best practices of good management, but also creative initiatives aimed toward innovation at all levels of the business. Assuming a degree of mutual trust and respect has been properly developed, when good people get ready to leave, organizations need to step up their efforts to maintain some sort of ongoing relationship.

A much broader, more human-centered framework for innovation may take on many forms, but could include a range of opportunities to have departing talent on the hook as speakers or mentors within a group. There should also be incentives to build joint ventures with the most entrepreneurial of the bunch, including seed money for new enterprises that feed into market niches of the organization’s endeavors.”

And if you missed this free workshop offer in an earlier post, here it is again:

https://darlenewolnik.com/2014/03/10/free-human-centered-design-workshop-offered/

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Maps Made Of Regional Foods

Love these maps; However, wouldn’t it be great if we could change the US map to something less destructive and harder to convert to sugar? Or is that just wishful thinking?

usa-11

“regional food” maps

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Childhood hunger

Link to a NBC news story about kids who only eat in school; this is an epidemic problem within the industrial food system that those of us working to build an alternative system must address in our initiatives. We can assist those working on school food issues by using our place and products to offer comfort and good food with just a little incentive…

How about markets offering a case of free fruit near the end of the day so kids have it for later in the day or offering a market incentive for high marks (think 5.00 token to the A students)? That token, along with bus tokens and all offered during SNAP incentive seasons could allow families to expand their time together and expand their meals.

http://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/invisible-problem-kids-who-only-eat-school-n55111

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Tomorrow is another holiday in the New Orleans area and in many other Italian-American areas- St. Joseph’s Day. St. Joseph is the patron saint of the island of Sicily and it’s said during the famines of the Middle Ages, residents prayed to St. Joseph to deliver them, and the altars are built in thanks on his feast day, March 19.In the late 19th century, New Orleans was a major port of immigration for Italians from Sicily. Many settled in the French Quarter, nicknamed “Little Palermo” at the time. Devout Catholics promise altars for answered prayers and favors granted, such as healing or safe delivery.The food on an altar is supposed to be donated, or “begged.” Countless people work on the altars: Altar societies, church members, Catholic and non-Catholic spend untold hours, starting at the beginning of the year. Many New Orleaniains try to make a “pilgrimage” to a number of altars on the feast day, to churches, store and even to private homes.

 

and for those of you looking, those who secretly steal a lemon from a St. Joseph’s Day altar will get a husband. For those not in the search, you can just ask for a fava bean: Legend has it that you will never be broke as long as you carry a fava bean.

St. Joseph's Day Altar

St. Joseph’s Day Altar

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