Robert Paterson's Weblog

Farmer's Markets Boom - Why?

The Secretary of the Department of Agriculture released the growth figures for 2009 of the number of Farmers' Markets in America. During a year when unemployment rose to an unprecedented high and companies — in fact whole industries — are failing in this country, more than 700 farmers' markets started for the first time. That represents a 13% increase over 2008 — a truly astonishing figure. There are now 5274 Farmers' Markets in America. Last year there were 4685.

Why is this happening? What are the trends that point to such growth? What message does such growth deliver to Americans — consumers, growers, communities around the country? And what does the future hold? It is clear that supporting sustainable food sources is having an impact on the economy and the health of this nation.

Here are some trends we see at exemplary farmers' markets around the country:

Fresh food from a local source has become fashionable. The Farmers' Market in Hollywood attracts movie stars and their families because these people know they can buy the freshest best tasting food from the growers who sell there. Being fashionable has the potential of changing behaviors but it also has the potential downside of becoming unfashionable — of losing its attraction. So there's a trend to make farmers' markets more than just fashionable. Those that are really successful have become destinations for families looking for something to do on a Saturday morning. They have chef demonstrations, musical entertainment, playgrounds and even yoga sessions. These "extras" make market day special. And this trend will continue. Families need to eat and to have something to look forward to. Farmers' Markets satisfy both.

Communities are looking for ways to revitalize their shopping districts — to bring in more customers who are ready to buy. Buying from a local source has real value because there is a personal connection. The store owner may even know your name. Local sourcing allows us to return to simpler more personal interactions while helping the local economy. Farmers' Markets attract customers who like to shop local. And after they visit and buy at the market, they spend the day shopping. Such an economic stimulus is vital to community-owned and operated enterprises. It can revitalize the town. Store owners increase their revenues during the days the farmers' markets are open. That is a fact. This trend will continue.

Returning to the land has been a trend that is beginning to take hold. Our increasingly electronic world has taken something away from our connection to the earth and nature. So we are taking it back, in huge numbers on a weekly basis. In addition to greater numbers of people growing their own gardens, more people are shopping at farmers' markets every week. Dane County Farmers' Market attracts 25,000 people to the Capital Square in downtown Madison Wisconsin every Saturday. 10,000 people visit the Davis (CA) Farmers' Market every market day throughout the year. California has over 600 farmers' markets throughout the state. The San Francisco Bay area has over 100 Farmers' Markets all by itself. And Los Angeles has recently embarked on a contest to make it the biggest Farmers' Market community in the country. More markets are opening every week. This trend will continue.

And finally, the emphasis on health and nutrition brought about through our new President and First Lady promoting home gardens and farmers' markets is a part of the solution to the healthcare crises this country faces. Many Americans are asking themselves "How can I eat more healthfully?"

via onlyatfarmersmarkets.com

As the local economy sags - and we seek to find work near home; as we have less money in our pocket and need to buy food, as we learn of the harm that processed food brings us and the planet - local food will grow as an idea and as a practice.

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

Real Food for Real Kids - Set healthy habits early = Health

Home About Us Our Mission

Our mission is to...

Change the way children eat and understand food.

Provide children with delicious, healthy, all-natural meals and snacks.

Reconnect children and families to real food.

Inspire future generations to make healthier choices, every day.

Support local farmers and producers who are as committed to responsible and sustainable business practices as we are.

via rfrk.com

In the face of an obesity epidemic, officials tell us to eat better. But busy families feel that they don't have the time or the budget. A tsunami of ad dollars influence our kids to reach for the crap. Our schools are full of it. Jamie Oliver found out how hard it is to change these habits and to stand up to these powerful forces.

But there is hope. In Toronto a few pioneers got together in 2005 and had a crazy idea. Why not source good local food, cook it from scratch every day, educate daycares and parents about it and deliver it to day cares and kindergartens.

5 years later, RFRK is the largest buyer of local food in Toronto and supplies nearly 10,000 young children every week day.

What they are doing of course is changing the palate and eating habits of thousands of families. What they are doing is driving a wedge into Big Food at the right time in life - EARLY.

What was David and Lulu Farnell and their first employee, Hope my daughter's mad idea where they did everything - is now a major enterprise.

What gives me hope is that this no longer seems like a way out idea.

Like UFIT - this is an idea that addresses part of the core of our modern health problems at source.

Additionally, not only does it offer the kids a great start in life - but also may do for the locavore people what Ray Kroc did for Coke and the French fry guys - offer a massive market pull. What an irony!

Additionally as we have seen in Wisconsin schools where a similar program has been working for years - we see a revolution in learning and in behaviour too.
http://smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/2009/10/the-the-whole-truth-revisited.html

Isn't this an approach that all schools should take?

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

A warning about Food Systems I wrote in 2003 - Looking on track

We will see the end of wild fish in the sea in our lifetime. We, like Clovis hunters, will only have memories of fishing the ocean. Like Clovis men our ability to use technology and organization will have deprived the world and ourselves of a great bounty. We too will have overexploited the soil itself. But most importantly we will have overexploited fresh water.

In 50 years time it will not be possible to grow food in California. In 50 years time the Orgalla aquifer will have run dry and we will not be able to grow food in the mid west. In 20 years time China and India will have outstripped their water supplies. Maybe our world will be warmer as well and we will have droughts thanks to nature as Clovis man endured the great melt. In 50 years time our population will be about 8 billion just as our food system comes to a halt.

If we are smart we will use some hiccups along the way to start making some changes.

In 10 years borders will be shut to the transshipping of food as food safety scares such as mad cow, foot and mouth, wart etc are used politically to protect local food systems. The whole idea of mono cropping aimed at exports will die off. The farmers in the west will crack before the water runs out.

In 5 years, the outcry against processed food and its role in our obesity epidemic will start to change food habits in the mainstream. This month we have seen Kraft and Nestle begin to make changes. Pop and trans-fats will be seen like tobacco. A demand will rise for food grown in a new way.

Our children will have to reinvent how we get and process food. Vast cities with only 3 days supply of food will no longer be able to rely of an industrial complex to send them cheap food. I have seen this in Ukraine where every family in Kiev has a Dacha plot and ensures its food supply by gardening. In Havana, every family has an urban plot.

As with the end of the large animals or the takeover of the Gardeners by the Herders, all our power lines will shift. Vast agro-industrial enterprises will have no place in a such a a world. The process of cityfication, started in Mesopotamia 6,000 years ago will have to unwind.

It will not be the internet per se that will change how and where we live and who has power or not. It will be the end of our current food system. It may be the internet that will enable us to adapt more quickly to whatever we find as the alternative but be assured when power shifts it is not a fun time.

It may be likely that the balance of power will once again shift between the sexes. I suspect that the new food system will be local and will be closer to gardening than farming. Women are already in the vanguard in this field.

So what do we do? We can wait for the collapse. You say that it will not happen. It’s a matter of simple math, when you take more water over time than is recharged, it runs out. When you pollute your water systems as we are on PEI over time with nitrates, you tip at a point in the future and you have no usable ground water. If we do nothing, all this is only a matter of time. Or we can wake up and see that water and food are the key. We will not be able to save the western water shed, not the Orgalla nor India or China but we can save ourselves. All we have to do is to wake up and look at the trends. Then we do as man has always done we get together and find a new way!

via robsoldradioposts.wordpress.com

I am seeing the first step in this right now - just as we woke up in the 1980's and saw that Tobacco was not cool and nor was it safe, so it is becoming more clear that Agri Food is at the heart of many of our health problems today.

Now I can see that the gauntlet is down. It is no longer just a few of us that know that our food system is the foundation of much of thre sickness that confronts us. That "cheap food" is very expensive!

We can see also that the Agri Food folks are losing the debate. Soon they will be seem as Big Tobacco which by the way many are as well.

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

Food reform will be hard to digest - Fight of our Lives?

And last month, after U.S. President Barack Obama had mused about the need for a farmers' market across the street from the White House, the First Lady cuts the ribbon on a new farmers' market a block away from the executive mansion.

"In this society today, sometimes it's hard to make regular meals, healthy meals, a part of everyone's existence," Michelle Obama said. "For those of us who are battling the time crunch and those of us to whom access to fresh food is an issue in our neighbourhoods, farmers' markets are a really important, valuable resource that we have to support."

New York City is poised to implement a tax on soft drinks, as West Virginia and Arkansas already have done. A notion in the mainstream media beginning last summer of a tax on overweight people – a "fat tax" – quickly evolved from joke status into a serious debate. A health commentator on CNN, Rudy Ruiz, declared "the food industry is making us sick."

We could be at an historic turning point in North America: a dramatic change in diet that transforms agribusiness and holds potential for improving our quality of life at little cost.

For Americans, even radical reforms in the hotly debated proposals for change in health care hold little promise in themselves of improving health and longevity rates and lowering the nation's health-care bill compared with a widespread change in diet.

Yet, the minimal U.S. health care reforms most likely of gaining passage, by forcing insurers to take all comers, will make insurers a powerful new force championing an American diet that keeps people from getting sick. Americans made sick by poor diets will soon jeopardize insurance industry profits.

And it's true, the food industry does make us sick. It does so as a matter of government policy, in both Canada and the United States.

When U.S. corn farmers were coping with chronic gluts in the 1960s and 1970s, Earl Butz, agriculture secretary in the Nixon administration, unveiled a sweeping program of farm subsidies, changes to school lunches and alterations in the food processing industry by which corn became a mainstay of the American diet. Canada heavily subsidizes farmers, as well.

The U.S. corn glut was absorbed. But the collateral damage has only in recent years become a pressing issue. The ubiquity of corn, which U.S. farmers are skilled at producing in massive quantity, reduced the cost of food. Which makes possible a $5 (U.S.) tab for a Big Mac, fries and a soft drink. The average restaurant charges that much or more for a fresh salad alone.

But cheap food is expensive.

The medical costs of obesity have nearly doubled in the past decade. A study funded by the U.S. CDC Foundation published last month in Health Affairs finds the cost of obesity-related treatment has skyrocketed to an annual average of $147 billion.

Another estimated annual $116 billion is spent treating diabetes. And hundreds of billions more is spent annually on treatment of cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer believed to be related to the Western diet.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins, who describe the obesity trend as "a public health crisis," project that by 2015 – just six years away – three-quarters of Americans will be overweight or obese. Already, a shocking 26 per cent of U.S. children entering kindergarten are overweight or obese, according to the Center for Children's Health Innovation.

Most farm-state politicians are sure to fight for the status quo. So will the processed-food industry. An impassioned Muhtar Kent, CEO of Coca-Cola Co., took to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal recently to complain that "our industry has become an easy target in this debate."

Yes, and that's because Coke and other soft drinks account for a staggering 15 per cent of the average adolescent's daily caloric intake. And it's the fattening high-fructose corn syrup used as a soft-drink sweetener that looms large among culprits in the epidemic of Type 2 diabetes.

via thestar.com

The first moves in the fight of our lives - to regain control over what we eat and to take power back from a few big firms in Agribusiness - are being taken.

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

The The Whole Truth Revisited

Miracle in Wisconsin

APPLETON, Wisconsin -- A revolution has occurred. It's taken place in the Central Alternative High School. The kids now behave. The hallways aren't frantic. Even the teachers are happy.
 
The school used to be out of control. Kids packed weapons. Discipline problems swamped the principal's office.
 
But not since 1997.
 
What happened? Did they line every inch of space with cops? Did they spray valium gas in the classrooms? Did they install metal detectors in the bathrooms? Did they build holding cells in the gym?
 
Afraid not. In 1997, a private group called Natural Ovens began installing a healthy lunch program. Huh?
 
Fast-food burgers, fries, and burritos gave way to fresh salads, meats "prepared with old-fashioned recipes," and whole grain bread. Fresh fruits were added to the menu. Good drinking water arrived.
 
Vending machines were removed.
 
As reported in a newsletter called Pure Facts, "Grades are up, truancy is no longer a problem, arguments are rare, and teachers are able to spend their time teaching."
 
Principal LuAnn Coenen, who files annual reports with the state of Wisconsin, has turned in some staggering figures since 1997. Drop-outs? Students expelled? Students discovered to be using drugs? Carrying weapons? Committing suicide? Every category has come up ZERO. Every year.
 
Mary Bruyette, a teacher, states, "I don't have to deal with daily discipline issues. I don't have disruptions in class or the difficulties with student behavior I experienced before we started the food program."
 
One student asserted, "Now that I can concentrate I think it's easier to get along with people" What a concept---eating healthier food increases concentration.
 
Principal Coenen sums it up: "I can't buy the argument that it's too costly for schools to provide good nutrition for their students. I found that one cost will reduce another. I don't have the vandalism. I don't have the litter. I don't have the need for high security."
 
At a nearby middle school, the new food program is catching on. A teacher there, Dennis Abram, reports, "I've taught here almost 30 years. I see the kids this year as calmer, easier to talk to. They just seem more rational. I had thought about retiring this year and basically I've decided to teach another year---I'm having too much fun!"
 
Pure Facts, the newsletter that ran this story, is published by a non-profit organization called The Feingold Association, which has existed since 1976. Part of its mission is to "generate public awareness of the potential role of foods and synthetic additives in behavior, learning and health problems. The [Feingold] program is based on a diet eliminating synthetic colors, synthetic flavors, and the preservatives BHA, BHT, and TBHQ."
 
Thirty years ago there was a Dr. Feingold. His breakthrough work proved the connection between these negative factors in food and the lives of children. Hailed as a revolutionary advance, Feingold's findings were soon trashed by the medical cartel, since those findings threatened the drugs-for-everything, disease-model concept of modern healthcare.
 
But Feingold's followers have kept his work alive.
 
If what happened in Appleton, Wisconsin, takes hold in many other communities across America, perhaps the ravenous corporations who invade school space with their vending machines and junk food will be tossed out on their behinds. It could happen.
 
And perhaps ADHD will become a dinosaur.

via teamjp.net

Astonishing piece - "knew food was important - but this suggests that it could be pivotal. I wonder if the Eastern School Board might consider a test?

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

The Past & Future of Food

This TED video is of Carolyn Steele - showing in 14 minutes how cities and food are intertwined - how fossil fuel disconnected them and us from food - AND how we can reasonably reconnect. Her solutions are stunningly simple and hence I think viable.

Her mother is a Foodie

Roof Top Farming in Brooklyn!

A Farm Grows in Brooklyn...on a Rooftop! from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

The sun is blazing hot, but there’s a light breeze.The smell of compost thickens the air. And Annie Novak teaches a group of 20 or so Brooklynites some things about organic farming.(Farm to Table)

Welcome to Rooftop Farms, a 6,000 square foot rooftop farm providing fresh produce to local residents and restaurants via bicycle. In fact, that’s the only way they’ll transport their bounty. Their produce supplies nearby restaurants like Marlow & Sons in Williamsburg and Anella in Greenpoint. They’ve even made a trip to Franny’s on Flatbush Avenue, about 5.5 miles away.

It’s a farm, a learning center, an example of what’s possible in the urban landscape. From up here, with a better vantage of all the naked rooftops the city has to offer, it’s easy to imagine more city dwellers growing food this way.

Depression Era Recipes - Good Food on a low budget

Feeling the pinch? Ninety-something Clara Cannucciari can teach you how to survive the lean times. In a series of YouTube videos directed by her great grandson, Clara reminisces about the Great Depression ("I had to quit high school because I couldn't afford socks!"), and provides cooking tips on such Depression-era fare as Pasta with Peas (6:32), Egg Drop Soup (6:52), Poorman's Meal (6:50), Peppers and Eggs (Part 1, 5:41; Part 2, 5:47), Bread (4:08), and Depression Breakfast (6:13).

This is such a lovely site too - oh to have a great grandson to give you a voice. Everything is so well done - lots of love here

My true passion

Better than anything! My heart's desire