GROWING CITIES is a feature-length documentary that examines the role ofurban farming in America and asks how much power it has to revitalize our cities and change the way we eat.The film follows two friends on their journey across the country as they meet the men and women who are challenging the way this country grows and distributes its food, one vacant city lot, rooftop garden, and backyard chicken coop at a time.
Real Time Farms tells you exactly where your food came from | Grist
Real Time Farms is a “crowd-sourced online food guide” that tells you exactly where the meal on your plate came from.
As crazy as it sounds, our vision is to collectively document the whole food system.
That does sound crazy, but so does the notion that a bunch of volunteers would build the most comprehensive and frequently updated encyclopedia in human history. And that one seems to have worked out okay.
Real Time Farms is in its early days, so only a tiny fraction of restaurants, farmers markets, and their fans have imported data on where ingredients are sourced. It feels like the kind of thing that will require a really big technological solution at some point in the future, like DNA barcoding of food or super cheap RFID tracking of crops from field to fork. Or maybe just more of us moving to Portland.
The Food Deserts Locator.
Part of the First Lady’s Let’s Move! initiative, the proposed Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) will expand the availability of nutritious food to food deserts—low-income communities without ready access to healthy and affordable food—by developing and equipping grocery stores, small retailers, corner stores, and farmers markets with fresh and healthy food. The HFFI is a partnership between the Treasury Department, Health and Human Services, and the Agriculture Department (USDA). An Interagency Working Group from the three departments, along with staff from the Economic Research Service (ERS/USDA), developed a definition of food deserts to be used in determining eligibility for HFFI funds.
This thing is amazing! I think it’s amazing step for the Let’s Move Campaign and for the health of people everywhere. If you’ve ever driven through the US, it is ultimately the most frustrating thing that the only thing you can find to eat is potatoes and hamburgers.
Access to healthy food is so crucial and so spatial. A lot of supermarket chains avoid these lower-income, ethnic neighborhoods because they are perceived as “higher risk”. What you get instead are swaths of neighborhoods that have unlimited access to fast food and liquor shops, because that’s their proper “target market”.
Let’s make it better!
From Slate: Food Deserts in America
A 2009 study by the Department of Agriculture found that 2.3 million households do not have access to a car and live more than a mile from a supermarket. Much of the public health debate over rising obesity rates has turned to these “food deserts,” where convenience store fare is more accessible—and more expensive—than healthier options farther away. This map colors each county in America by the percentage of households in food deserts, according to the USDA’s definition. Data is not available for Alaska and Hawaii.
Only four counties in Arkansas fall into the lowest tier: Benton, Craighead, Sebastian, and Washington (where Fayetteville is located). Of those four, Washington County fares the best, with only 1.83 percent of the population living more than a mile from a supermarket while lacking access to a car. Phillips County fares the worst, with 14.76 percent of its population lacking easy access to healthy options.
