Chicago Market is a food cooperative project that just launched its first major public ownership/fundraiser campaign on Sunday. And no one can say that the co-op supermarket, proposed for the city’s North Side, is trying to elbow its way into an overcrowded commercial sector.
[This article was also published on the Huffington Post website on May 14, 2014 and was co-authored by Bob Benenson.]
Building the Good Food movement is the core of FamilyFarmed.org’s daily work. So a discussion on the future of food was, shall we say, organic when FamilyFarmed President Jim Slama convened a group at his home on May 12 to participate in The Chicago Community Trust’s “On The Table 2014.”
As a pioneering organic farmer, an academic at Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, and president of New York’s Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Fred Kirschenmann is both a practical and intellectual leader in the Good Food movement. In the second of our two-part q-and-a, Kirschenmann discusses obstacles to change in our industrial food system as entrenched interests try to hold their grounds, and why he is hopeful that the rise of “food citizens” will bring change nonetheless.
Food hubs, which provide aggregating, marketing and distribution services to regional food producers, are growing in numbers and influence, according to a survey report released Sept. 19, but still face a number of challenges.