There’s a great piece on one of the Wall Street Journal’s blogs about food economy: It’s the (Food) Economy, Stupid. Clever play on the Bill Clinton catch phrase. The research behind the blog post is courtesy our of our local University of Washington Center for Public Health Nutrition.

The main thrust of their research found that…

“Having a grocery store nearby doesn’t guarantee purchases of fresh produce or other more healthful foods, the report found — those decisions are often driven by economics.”

Not that proximity of available fresh, nutritious fruits & vegetables isn’t important — it’s just there are other factors at play. One other driver is also the relative price within the store itself. Makes sense. As they write in the blog post: “Money matters”.

Only related by topic, I found this short series about Food Economy and thought it interesting. There are three videos so the entire thing is a little long, but educational.

One of our board members attended a workshop by the Western Washington Fruit Research Foundation and was just blown away by their “seriousness” and the depth of their knowledge!

To educate yourself more about your fruit trees, to find information on problems you may be having, be sure to check them out. Let us know is you need further help…we love your trees

A new report by the King County Council, the Farmers Market Report, calls out many of the challenges farmers markets face in achieving financial viability and offers up some solutions that might help.

The questionaire was sent to the managers of the 39 farmers markets in King County (up from 9 about 10 years ago) and 29 responded — which is a good 75% response rate. In addition there were a bunch of discussion groups with farmers and farmers market managers.

A few of the key findings the report tries to address:

• There are significant differences among farmers markets in the county which impact a market’s ability to attract the best combination of shoppers and vendors.
• All of the markets in King County, regardless of size, depend on some form of public and/or community financial support.
• Programs and efforts to support farmers markets must be matched with support for family farms in order for both to be successful. It will take resources from a broad network of organizations, local jurisdictions and community supporters.

For those of you interested in where all the farmers markets are, here’s a map.

You can download & read a full version of the report here.

We reported a couple weeks back that the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) approved the creation of a Regional Food Policy Council.

I’m taking this online course via the John’s Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and stumbled across this research from Food First, published in December 2009, that specifically looks at Food Policy Councils — the history (The first Food Policy Council started in 1982 in Knoxville, Tennessee), how they’re formed, some trends, common first steps, and some recommendations.

There is an executive summary and then the full version, which is much longer (still making my way through it). A few of the highlights:

Challenges

• Achieving and working with diverse membership and constituencies
• Working in complex political climates
• Designing an effective organizational structure
• Obtaining adequate funding
• Balancing focus between policy and program work and between structural and specific foci
• Adequately evaluating a council’s impact

Recommendations

• Engage members across different sectors of the food system and from different socio-economic backgrounds and draw from a diverse, but organized base
• Establish priorities and agree on some kind of a strategic plan from the outset
• Establish clear structures for decision-making, communication and evaluation from the beginning
• Examine structural trade offs between being within or independent of government, how the council is funded, and what issues the council chooses to prioritize
• Include elements of self-education (for members) and the public
• Diversify political and internal leadership support
• Evaluate and monitor the effects of the councils’ policies and/or activities

As the newly formed regional council gets going it will be interesting to see how they proceed & manage some of the challenges outlined in the paper.

I’ve been reading Ellen Ruppel Shell’s book called Cheap: The true cost of discount culture. It’s a great read and I highly recommend it to everyone. Here’s a quick video that outlines what it’s all about.

One of the chapters of the book is completely dedicated to food. A few of pieces of info that stand out:

• Small subsistance farmers make up 75% of the world’s poor.
• In 2008, the U.N. estimated the number of hungry people in the world at 925 million.
• In 2000 the USDA tracked disease on 895 large hog farms — three times as much as smaller farms.
• About 76 million cases of foodborne disease occur each year in the U.S. — requiring 325,000 hospitalizations and resulting in 5,000 deaths.
• In 2005, the world market price for rice was 20-34% less than what it cost the average U.S. farmer to grow.
• The FDA inspects less than 1% of food imports, even though in 2006-2007 they rejected over 1,900 food shipments from China, 1,787 from India, and 1,560 from Mexico.

Ok, enough facts.

Shell goes on to describe how worldwide food policy and large industrial mega-farms have skewed the price of food so much that even when countries are in the midst of horrible famines (think Ethiopia, Sudan, and Ireland during the potato famine), the subsistance farmers continue to export food while people in their country starve to death. As she puts it, that action “…stemmed not from a food shortage but a shortage of food deemed cheap enough to feed the poor.”

She doesn’t stop at the policy & mega-farms but also talks about our “cheap” culture. Americans spend less than 6 percent of our income on food typically — that’s less than half of what the Japanese or French spend. And yet we still feel as though we pay too much for food. So often times we’re willing to look past the quality of the food in order to get it cheaply.

Research paper on urban food systems.

The Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture & Food Security have research paper out titled Food Urbanism: A Sustainable Design Option for Urban Communities. It’s 92 pages, so somewhat more than just light reading. But take the time to read through it. There is some great information in here — some highlights:

• In the U.S. we have 4 million fewer farmers than we did in the 1930s.
• In the next 20 years, the U.S. population will be 60% urban.
• On average food travels 1,500-2,500 miles from source to plate.

The report goes on to look at a very in-depth case study of Ames, Iowa — how it exists today and what it could look like in 2025.

In addition to this, RUAF Foundation has a call out for submissions to thier Urban Agriculture Magazine June 2010 issue. They’re specifically looking for articles related to developing urban market chains for urban grown food.