Sunday, March 21, 2010
Packaging Idea
From Inhabitat:
" Yes, [artist] Rodrigo [Piwonka] took a bagel sandwich and put it in an old CD spindle case, thus giving the case a new life as a reusable bagel sandwich container."
As Evan noted earlier in some photographs, many vendors selling produce use baskets to display their food and refill them after the produce is bought. A vendor could gain some interest by using less conventional vessels to store and sell their food in. What do you think?
From Inhabitat: A Barcode that Recedes with a Veggie's Freshness
Inhabitat
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
Monday, March 15, 2010
Farmers Market: Saturday, March 13
Evan's notes from Friday, March 12
Four discrete/concrete ways that I see my project being able to advance in response to the work completed Friday:
oneA central issue we saw as an overlapping thread in our projects was the element of process and how to express the processes of food to customers. We discussed how wanting to understand where your food comes from is a large part of the reason that people go to farmers markets. If you didn't care about the process in which your food came into your possession, you'd probably go to the supermarket.
twoLinked identity. We noted how many successful farmers markets have united identities; they may not all look the same, but within the market they have a similar feel. The cleanliness of Ithica, and the trash of Boston are two great examples of this. This is partially a cultural identity, but also a strong marketing system, partially based on rules and expectations between the market vendors and market administrators. The Syracuse market administration has a strong potential to influence the linked identity of the vendors who sell at the market.
threeAnother big issue we talked about was that of movement and flow to and within the market. By understanding how customers get to and move through the sheds could affect how the vendors sell, and how they are organized spatially by the market administration. A logic to where vendors are located might emerge from understanding traffic flows.
fourWe should also think about children in our design. The market can also be a powerful tool to educate children about food issues. Also, keeping them interested in the market is an important way to cultivate future customers.
Consumer Ed
Evidently there's not a lot of subsidies for produce
IMAGE
GOOD Competition
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Young Producers
by Good
Scenes from the Haymarket, Boston
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Urban/Community Gardens
I'm working with gardens in another class, but maybe, somehow it will swing full circle.
Urban Gardens Blog
and
THE community garden website
(the link page, which I thought had good resources)
Edible Gardening Central New York
...its about food
well, more about education and food. Maybe more useful for consumer education, who may be dealing with schoolchildren.
Friday, March 5, 2010
CarrotMobs to Crop Mobs: Making a Difference with Mass from Worldchanging: Bright Green by Sean Conroe
[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.
Watch the video!
USDA Dedicates $5 Million for Farmers Markets
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