New Distribution Model: How to "Relocalize" Our Food and Community

One typical summer weekend afternoon, I was having a relaxing brunch with some close friends at my neighborhood's outdoor cafe in NYC.   I casually asked one friend "How is your mother doing these days?"  My friend took a quick breath and told us, "My mother in Spain is doing fine but her concern is the current state of Spain.  I, too, can't believe how bad it recently has  become"    She was clearly upset and explained how her Spain friends' Facebook updates have described their lives have gotten worse and worse and been turned upside down.   

After Spain went through the Franco's dictatorship, people of Spain finally gained freedom just a few decades ago.   I can imagine how desperate her mother and friends in Spain must feel about the country falling apart now.   Listening to her, I thought of my friends and family in Japan, who are going through a big shift right now, and wondered how we all got here.                                              

  

As a result of greed and lack of accountability in a small segment of population or, approximately 1% , we have recently experienced a financial crisis and recession that we have never seen before in history.  The crisis just started in one country and one sector, but it has had a huge impact across the globe.  The globalized economy is clearly at a crossroads. 

So, where should we go from here?  Where should we look for the "new" economy that we can trust and rebuild our life upon?  

I realized then that there is already a new movement happening around us if we look closer and connect some of the dots.

Real Food Works founder
Lucinda Duncalfe (right) and me

During a recent interview, Lucinda Duncalfe, the serial entrepreneur, award winning professional and founder of Real Food Works, mentioned that she was first inspired by Forks Over Knives, a documentary describing how a plant-based diet will prevent most degenerative diseases. Her new venture delivers plant-based foods prepared by independent local chefs to subscribed clients, and her goal is to create happiness and more energy in her clients' lives.   

I also recently attended a meeting for  "food+tech", a Meetup group whose purpose is to harness Web-based tools to communicate about food, provide information about food in a new and meaningful way.   At the meeting, a group of great innovators in food distribution were introduced to over 70 attendees.  Here are some things I learned about some of the new start-ups out there:

• Relay Foods is disrupting the largest retail category – groceries, while also efficiently connecting farm and fork.
•  Appetude is a social network that lets users discover, share, and order dishes online.  
• FarmersWeb is an online marketplace where wholesale buyers can connect and transact with local farms.
• Wholeshare helps people get access to good quality, affordable local food by organizing group purchases.

What's more, I learned these new things are not only happening in the start-up scene in NYC.   A recent Wired article reported that Mike Roberts, former president and chief operating officer of McDonald's, started a sustainable food chain called Lyfe Kitchen.   He pulled together two of Oprah’s celebrity chefs, Art Smith and Tal Ronnen and created a team for Lyfe Kitchen.  Roberts hopes to transform the way the world produces organic ingredients, promoting responsibly grown meat and veggies.  

Through their new businesses and innovations, we - consumers - are able to develop a local community and re-create the connection with food sources -- they help us "relocalize."  Because of the way we eat, we have destroyed our connection with the community, with the natural processes, with those who grow our food, and with the essence of life.   Our awareness, facing a daunting predicament with the way we’re producing and consuming our food, actually has inspired some of us to create these new businesses. 

Going back to my earlier question, Where should we go from here at the cross-roads?   The issues around the globalized economy seem to be huge and complex.  Spain's economy won't be remedied tomorrow.   Japan's issues concerning nuclear power will take decades to see any resolutions.   However, I believe that we will be able to address these global issues by bringing a new value into our daily life, such as a new way of viewing and treating our food.   

In short, we must learn how to eat seasonally and locally.  We must develop new skills and knowledge -- composting, cooking, sharing, creating communities, and relocalizing.

What do you think about local food?   What is your view on the huge shift in the world?

New Yorkers seeking locally grown apples
in Union Sq. Green Market 

'No Impact Man' in the City: Colin Beavan's Latest Challenge

A recent Facebook update from my friend who lived in NYC for over a decade and recently moved to Korea made me think of plastic bags.

According to her, no grocery stores give shoppers a plastic shopping bag any longer in Korea.  She found out later that they have to buy a trash bag that is supplied by the government and costs about $13!

Along the same lines, when I shop at Trader Joe's, my favorite store, I always choose a paper bag over plastic.  I bring my cloth bag, but sometimes I can't fit all the items into my bag (yes, I should buy just the amount of food that I can carry in one bag!).   But, in other grocery stores, I have no choice but to use plastic bags.   

Did you know Americans use approximately 1 billion shopping bags, creating 300,000 tons of landfill waste each year?    Worse, plastic bags do not biodegrade.  Light breaks them down into smaller and smaller particles that contaminate the soil and water and that are expensive and difficult to remove.  Perhaps not surprisingly, less than 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled each year.

And recycling one ton of plastic bags is not cheap either: it costs $4,000.  So, actually the Korean government is giving people a break since the recycled product can be sold for $32, according to the report "Why Plastic Bag Fees Work" (May 2009) by the Clean Air Council.

NYC itself creates enough garbage to fill the Empire State Building each day.
That means New Yorkers are filling up a space that is 37 million cubic feet in size!

In any case, so, a country like Korea implements a drastic regime that encourages people not to use plastic bags.  But really, what can we do about changing our casual sense of using a plastic bag or reducing garbage in our everyday life?

Colin and me at the private showing
of No Impact Man

Last week, I was invited to a private viewing of a film called No Impact Man at OMEGA, a nonprofit educational center offering programs for wellness and personal growth, in Hudson Valley, NY.

The film is a 2009 American documentary directed by Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein.  No Impact Man, which premiered Sept. 4, 2009, follows Colin Beavan and his family during their year-long experiment to stop a consumption lifestyle and have a sustainable zero impact on the environment out of their 5th Ave. co-op apartment in NYC.   

I had the fortune to meet with Colin Beavan, the main character of the movie, at the viewing.  He mentioned that there was much criticism of his choices, including that his new life-style was a publicity stunt.  He explained that it was not meant to be a publicity stunt, but, sometimes we may have to utilize that to make an important statement -- in this case, changing our consumption-based life-style choice. 

What I was intrigued by the most during their experimental year was a change in the family dynamics.  Michelle, Colin's wife, and their two-year-old daughter are dragged into the fray unwillingly.  Zero impact on the environment is not easy task to achieve in Manhattan.  But she gradually changed her attitude toward her husband's attempt. 

Overall, I found the movie an incredibly compelling story about one New Yorker family's struggle to change their view of the world.

Now, Colin is running for the US Congress, representing central Brooklyn.  He said that he is doing this not only to win, but, to make a strong statement.  His aim is to create an engaged and opened community that I support.   If he survived during the experimental year, I believe that he can excel in this new challenge, and I am curious to know what comes out of his trial this time.

How do we minimize our trash?  What do you think about No Impact Man?

A good source of statistics about our waste:
http://www.cleanair.org/Waste/wasteFacts.html

No Impact Man trailer:
http://www.noimpactdoc.com/trailer.php

Composting in NYC – Charlie Bayrer’s Earth Matter

Like many New York women, I have this favorite hand-bag that is a perfect size to carry when I travel abroad, and this hand-bag has traveled with me everywhere from Cambodia to Colombia in the last several years. 

It's leather and is becoming dirty, so I decided to get it professionally cleaned.  But, I was surprised to find out this week that cleaning my hand-bag costs over $140!  I thought, how easy to replace old things by new ones, and how often we throw away the perfectly functioning things in our lives.  

Something is fundamentally wrong with this picture.

To put this in perspective, there was recently an article in the New York Times introducing the "Repair Cafe" in Amsterdam.  The Repair Cafe provides a place where people can bring in whatever they want to have repaired, at no cost, by volunteers who just like to fix things. 

The Repair Cafe Foundation has raised about $525,000 so far, and it's spreading across the Netherlands.  As part of a counter-movement against the "throwaway culture" that we have blindly enjoyed for a long time, the Repair Cafe has taken off as a way to help people reduce waste.

A founder of the Repair Cafe said, “It’s a shame, because the things we throw away are usually not that broken. There are more and more people in the world, and we can’t keep handling things the way we do.”

Unfortunately, we have a tendency to see no life or value in things once they serve us their primary purpose.  But, I believe that there is still life and meaning in a thing after it serves its initial purpose.

Compost Learning Center's Entrance

Obviously, I am not the only one who believes in that.

I met a unique group of people this week who believe that things, food in particular, will take different forms and continue serving a purpose.  The group of people are a part of Earth Matter, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the art, science, and application of composting in and around NYC.  Earth Matter runs the Compost Learning Center  on Governors Island, a military base turned public park in New York harbor just off the southern tip of Manhattan, open every summer weekend.

What is composting?  Composting is the process of creating the ideal conditions for the rapid decomposition of organic materials. You can imagine composting as the speeding up of the way nature recycles food.
 

Volunteers working
on food scraps

Under the strong summer sun, several volunteers were working diligently when I visited the center.  Earth Matter volunteers and employees take food waste from food vendors and resource recovery stations throughout the island, to the Compost Learning Center, where it is processed.

I had the fortune to speak to Charlie Bayrer, the co -founder and, the Operations Manager and Director of Earth Matter.  He explained that food scraps being gathered at over 30 locations across NYC's green markets come to the center, and they also sort out the food scraps.

Later I learned that Bayrer is the driver behind a growing grassroots composting program that diverts 1,500 pounds of food waste from landfills each week.

Bayrer, a longtime community gardener and composter in Brooklyn, was instrumental in founding the Fort Greene Composting Project in 2005. That project collects food scraps from shoppers at the Fort Greene Park Farmers Market and distributes them to local community gardens and to a larger community farm in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Bayrer obviously cares about more than composting and enriching soil -- one article about him said that "he wants people to see the big picture of how what we eat (and what we don't) affects the environment around us."  Through his openness to talk to us about the Learning Center's mission and operation, I felt his genuine concern about how we handle food and, perhaps, ourselves. 

Do you compost?   What do you think of our throwaway culture?

Charlie Bayrer,
Co -founder, Operations Manager and
Director, Earth Matter