At the Food Policy day of the Community Food Security Coalition annual meeting in Des Moines (Twitter hashtag #cfsc) (where it snowed Saturday morning), I took 16 pages of notes in Word and twittered some of the gist of what I was hearing. I also took a few pictures of people at the reception, to be captioned
"After a hard day of talking about food, we decided to try some." Then we went to dinner (at a restaurant that serves local food), so I did not post or upload. I will be reporting at length about what I'm hearing and learning here in coming days and weeks. There is so much going on in so many places, it will take awhile to synthesize things on different topics and think about what could work well in San Antonio. Here are some highlights of yesterday.
Highlight #1: I heard a presentation from Cleveland/Cuyahoga County, where food-system efforts are being handled through an unusual collaboration of government, university, and local businesses and non-profits. Through grant funding, two part-time staffers help organize local talent around eight program areas to advance projects that are starting to recreate the local food system into a holistic, closed loop that supports local economic development (including agriculture and processing), improves the environment, and delivers healthy, affordable food into the community and neighborhoods. This seems like a good thing for San Antonio to emulate.
In too many cases, food policy councils are unfunded arms of local government where overworked volunteers and experts try to do the research and relationship building needed for doing things differently. Or they become politicized, and nothing really changes.
Highlight #2 was hearing from Cynthia Torres of the Boulder, CO food policy council, which as their first task had to deal with the question of whether local farmers on public land should be allowed to grow genetically modified (GMO) sugar beets. She described the unhappy prospect of voting against local farmers, whom in theory all on the council wanted to support. She told of being vilified in the press by pro-business interests, of council members wanting to quit and resume their happy lives of community gardening. Finally, she told us that the farmers are working with Extension to find alternate crops that are compatible with their equipment.The food policy council is staying together and will be systematically reviewing local policies to propose ways that sustainable-food priorities should be written into them. She and others who commented agreed there were things that could have been done differently to avoid the firestorm of controversy, but for a brand-new council thrown into a hot issue without much preparation, they handled it very bravely and the outcome is mainly positive.
Highlight #3 was learning about models for connecting farmers and consumers with a buying network through an existing auction. Martin Bailkey, of the Dane County Food Council (Madison, WI), spoke about an institutional buying model for local food. He emphasized the importance of developing a public policy that facilitates local projects. Then, Heather Hilleren presented a new website, localdirt.com, piloted in Wisconsin and just going national, that provides the ability "to buy, sell, find and feature local food for buyers and sellers of all sizes."
