Comments on: You Are Where You Eat

By: Pamela Price

Pamela Price — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:36:05 +0000

Happy to see the cross-pollination of creative class and sustainability addressed here, Richard.

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:43:20 +0000

John Robb, author of Brave New War, has been addressing this in his series of blogs on Resilient Communities – turning them into self-sufficient cells rather than depending on long distance, easily disrupted chains. Also, Gene Logsdon writes in his book All Flesh is Grass about pasture farming – how chickens, etc., can be sustained on a small lot of less than an acre. Finally, Joan Dye Gussow talks about growing your own supply of vegetables and fruit in her book, This Organic Life. Local solutions abound…

By: Michael Wells

Michael Wells — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 04:44:00 +0000

The link missed some punctuation and wouldn’t work. Trying again:

http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=124466994574899200

By: Michael Wells

Michael Wells — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 04:42:24 +0000

A story in today’s Portland Tribune says that local farmers’ markets are booming during the recession. Overall numbers of shoppers is way up and sales are up 20% from last year. Purchases made with Oregon Trail cards (which replaced food stamps here) are up at the Saturday market downtown from $800 a weekend last year to $2,000 this summer, and the season isn’t at its peak yet.

Whether this is because of the national effort to get people to eat better or shoppers trying to save money, is hard to say. Sales go down towards the middle and end of the month during the weeks furthest from paydays. But the farmers market vendors branch of creative agriculture is defying the elite image of locally grown fresh produce.

Here’s the story:
http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.phpstory_id=124466994574899200

By: Michael Wells

Michael Wells — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:08:40 +0000

Oregon’s land use law is a model for preserving farmland close to cities and makes smaller farms that sell to farmers markets and organic grocers possible a few miles from the city center.

Unfortunately, the kind of thoughtful rural Republicans that initiated and backed it (with the support of urban Democrats) have been driven from the Party and it would be hard to replicate in today’s political climate. The anti-planning yahoos like Randy O’Toole talk about the urban growth boundary as if it were a plot by liberal city planners, but it was in fact the Farm Bureau and old-style farmers worried about California-style sprawl that were the driving force. O’Toole knows this because he lived here, but it doesn’t fit his narrative.