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Produce to the People: Collaborating for Food Access
Twilight Greenaway, Civil Eats
http://civileats.com/2010/03/08/produce-to-the-people-collaborating-for-food-access/

When it comes to local food, supply and demand aren’t always in sync. Many 
Bay Area shoppers still lack convenient access to affordable local food while 
many farmers struggle to expand their markets, even as awareness of the value 
of their products continues to grow. And while traditional farmers markets 
and CSAs are crucial to the success of many small farms, they ultimately 
account for a relatively small percentage of the total food that people buy.

How then can communities provide access to more fresh, healthy local food 
that is sustainably produced? How do we to create more demand (and a fair 
market) for farmers, while ensuring food security for people otherwise 
entirely dependent on the industrial food system? These were a few of the 
critical questions on the table at Produce for the People: New Ideas for 
Local Distribution, a panel co-hosted last week by CUESA and Kitchen Table 
Talks.

More people than expected turned out for this evening conversation and with a 
138-person limit to the Port Commission Hearing Room at the Ferry Plaza 
Building in San Francisco, many people stood in the doorways to hear what was 
being said. Clearly, the conversation is an important one, worthy of further 
talks; and this one addressed the tip of the iceberg, addressing topics such 
as the history of this essential part of the food system, projects in the 
works, and suggestions for change.

The evening’s moderator, Roots of Change’s Michael Dimock, began with a 
definition of the challenge at hand. “The [food] system is incredibly 
concentrated,” he said. “That concentration has destroyed the system’s 
diversity and resilience.” Dimock briefly explained how problems arise with a 
concentration of production facilities, the increasing size of the average 
farm, and the concentration of distribution, retail outlets, and capital. One 
of the many consequences, he added, is a startling number of food deserts – 
or vast, under-resourced urban and rural areas where there is little or no 
fresh food available and the shocking reality that the people who grow our 
local food can rarely afford to buy it.

After-School Produce
The city of Oakland has many such under-resourced neighborhoods. And while it 
may not solve this problem for the city as a whole, a recent project of the 
East Bay Asian Youth Center (EBAYC) and the Oakland Unified School District, 
called the Oakland Farms-to-Schools Network, is proving successful at getting 
more local, fresh produce to families.

Christine Cherdboonmuang (pictured) is the coordinator of the network, which 
is funded by the USDA and currently runs small produce markets on the grounds 
of 12 public schools. The school district provides storage and a centralized 
drop-off point for produce and manages the accounting. The markets provide a 
range of food, including local, organic, and conventional produce; they also 
set up near the end of the school day, allowing parents to shop when they 
pick up their children.

“What really hits home for families at our markets is the freshness,” 
Cherdboonmuang said. “And the connection to the memory of growing food, which 
a lot of families have.” Because they work in a largely immigrant community, 
she added, there’s demand for foods that don’t grow year-round in this 
climate, such as tomatoes, tomatillos, and hot peppers. “The challenge has 
been to address those cultural preferences, while working with local 
farmers,” she said.

Cherdboonmuang, who worked on food access issues for the Ecology Center’s 
Farm Fresh Choice Program prior to running the Farms-to School Network, hopes 
the project can become a model for other communities looking to infuse 
under-resourced neighborhoods with fresh food quickly with very low start-up 
costs. But it also touches on a deeper set of values. “A lot of this work is 
about getting back to an economy that is about our care for ourselves and for 
one another, not cash value.”

...A Bounty of Ideas

Petaluma Bounty is another model of creative distribution; the Sonoma 
County-based nonprofit addresses food insecurity from a wide range of angles. 
Executive director Grayson James told the audience about the initial research 
phase of the organization’s development.

“I began by talking to all the folks in the emergency food network. It 
started to become clear to me that it was in pretty good shape – there’s a 
lot of food moving to a lot of people,” he said. “But I realized that we 
could multiply that by 10 or 20 times and, fundamentally, things wouldn’t be 
any different.”

This research led James to look at food security as a way to end hunger, 
“upstream of the food pantry line.” And, with an approach that sounds right 
out of a proverb, he and his staff have not only caught fish upstream, 
they’ve taught others how to do so as well. Petaluma Bounty runs an urban 
farm in the center of the city that produces a CSA, as well as a network of 
five community gardens. They offer produce they grow, and some they buy from 
area farmers, at a sliding scale; while some people pay retail prices, others 
(who can’t afford retail) pay wholesale. They also run Bounty Mobile Market, 
or what James calls, “a donated pickup truck that drives around to various 
locations” and a community food gleaning program (where volunteers provide 
the labor required to harvest food from gardens and area farms). And, if all 
that isn’t enough, the endeavor also includes a for-profit edible landscaping 
service.

...For Melanie Cheng, founder of FarmsReach, an online marketplace that 
connects farmers to restaurants and other institutional buyers, the key to 
increased distribution of local food is strategic collaboration. For a number 
of years Cheng’s focus has been on the larger challenge of engaging and 
supporting local farms online. She told the audience that, at a certain 
point, “it became very clear that one of their major problems was getting 
their stuff to market.”

Cheng and the staff of FarmsReach are building an infrastructure for 
institutional buying from local farms, and helping people on both sides of 
the equation determine fair market value. One aim, she adds, is to “collect 
data on what is being grown, so that it becomes easier over time to align 
that with demand.”

One way they’re doing this is through a new USDA/CDFA-funded project, which 
is a collaboration of 5 local sustainable ag organizations: the Brentwood 
Agricultural Land Trust (BALT), Community Alliance with Family Farmers 
(CAFF), FarmsReach, Great Valley Center and Marin Organic. It’s an exciting 
new project in that it follows new successful models of collaboration, 
including both alternative and conventional distribution partners...

(8 March 2010)
Twilight Greenaway writes about sustainable food systems for the San 
Francisco-based Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture 
(CUESA). She has also worked as an editor for Alternet.org, where she ran a 
spin-off website for young community organizers called Wiretap, and for the 
start-up TV network Current TV. Her writing appears regularly online, at 
sources such as Culinate, GOOD, and The Bold Italic.