Walking through the produce aisle shouldn’t be as mysterious as the ingredients on the back of a bag of Cheetos, but sometimes picking out fresh produce can be a befuddling task even for the most seasoned herbivore. Fresh Code, by designers Sisi Yuan, Yiwu Qiu, Lei Zhao, Qiulei Huang, Lijun Zhang & Weihang Shu is a straightforward solution developed as an intelligent barcode not only able to price an item, but also indicate the freshness level of the produce on which it’s affixed. Each bar code uses a special ink that recedes in correlation with passing time and a percentage graph indicating the remaining life of the veggie at hand. So is it time to cook it or compost it? This cabbage looks like it’s on its way out!
Via Yanko Design
Floor Potatoes...in nice baskets
In our meetings on Friday, we were talking about making the process of how the food came to be at the market visible. Wanting to know where the food comes from is a big reason people go to a farmer's market instead of just popping into the supermarket. Evidently, understanding where your food comes from makes a difference. The study explains how when college freshmen were taught about where their food comes from, rather than the dangers of obesity, they tend to make healthier food choices.
Look! there's a competition to create a better system of using EBT. They're saying that there's not yet a good solution to farmers buying expensive EBT reading machines, but I think the Syracuse market has that figured out already with the tokens you can get at the kiosk.
This is about how there are many young people interested in farming, but they lack the education and resources to do it.
These people were really hard to interview. And I didn't get much info from them at all. I did get some globe grapes, which were very tasty.
[from WorldChanging.com]
How can we support local business owners who want to make bright green changes? The CarrotMob!
Using social networks, CarrotMobs coordinate with the store and each other to show up and make massive purchases to reward the business's proactive green steps. In Seattle, for example, a CarrotMob arranged a deal with the Pike Pub & Brewery. On Earth Day, the CarrotMob showed up for food and drinks. In return, Pike Pub put 25 percent of all sales back into providing a mini-energy retrofit and other improvements for the location.
What is great about this effort lies in the connections being made between those involved. Farms receive extra hands to help out in the fields, and volunteers take away knowledge on sustainable farming practices. With the average age of today’s farmers on the rise, crop mobs exemplify simple, unique ways to help on ways to diversify the field of agriculture by intimately involving the next generation of farmers.
Farmers markets are growing by leaps and bounds: A 13 percent increase between 2008 and 2009 shows that interest in fresh, local food is skyrocketing. The number of farmers markets in the U.S. has just about tripled in the last 15 years. You'd think that the federal funding to help them thrive would be skyrocketing as well. And while you'd be right that the funding's increasing, the dollar figure the public assistance has jumped up to isn't exactly astronomical.
The USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service has announced a $5 million allotment for grants through the Farmers Market Promotion Program (FMPP) for fiscal year 2010 (PDF).
As the Atlantic points out, $5 million is peanuts compared with the $35 billion in subsidies that goes to big industrial producers of corn, wheat and soy.
But when you realize that the USDA disbursed only $10 million in FMPP grants over the last four years combined (since the beginning of the program), it is clear that farmers markets are coming up in the world little by little. Not only that, but $10 million in grants will be available for each fiscal year of 2010 and 2011.
Another change this year is that the grants are targeted toward needy small farmers just starting their operations, an important demographic. We need as many successful new farmers as we can get.
So while even this year's higher numbers are chump change compared to the subsidies that go to Big Ag, at least there's some money out there for this worthy cause, and it's being directed to those who need it most.
Photo: Robert Couse-Baker on Flickr
