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Food System 2.0: Can New Approaches Make Local Food Happen?

9. October 2009

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Food System 2.0: Can New Approaches Make Local Food Happen?

What is the price of food? $3.99 for a gallon of milk? $0.99 for an energy bar? Complex market and policy forces make those prices. Its a process that starts far from the point of sale. Centralizing our food into fast food chains and supermarkets causes the farms that feed the system to scale up into mega-sized operations. The idyllic, diverse farms of American lore were long ago converted into monocrop fields of staple grains, hog farms with hundreds of thousands of head and distribution centers bigger than football fields. But how do you make food scale back to something more reasonable, a new system in which communities connect with the food being grown there? Is it even possible, nay desirable? We saw a couple examples of new approaches to these questions in the San Francisco area during our Tour of America recently. One deals with technology while the other with community. Both are necessary components in what should become Food System 2.0. (Thanks to Flickr User Fazen for the cool shot).

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Food Safety – The Small Farm Perspective on HR 2749

1. July 2009

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Food Safety – The Small Farm Perspective on HR 2749

We have heard from some small farmers that the provisions in the latest Food Safety Enhancement Act HR 2749 will cause them great hardship. We asked a small farmer to outline the problems to educate our audience. Below is the opinion of one of these farmers.

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