Guest Post: Local Food Victories Continued

We now return to our regularly scheduled program

After a quick cup of Joe, we're back. Local food victories of the present include several organizations categorized into victory groups, all of which are "working toward goals larger than themselves" according to the speaker. These include improving health, building the economy, creating community, and imagining the future.

These organizations all share the drive to bring locally grown foods and food products to local markets in economically and environmentally sustainable ways. From the sheer number of participating organizations' successes, I'd say these victories were well worth the time and effort these businesses and volunteers have put in.

Several pitches were made to the audience as part of the search for local food victories of the future. They had one minute to tell us about their plans for making a business or organizing a program. If I could say one thing about them, it would be that their forward-thinking ideas are, for the most part, brilliantly small in scale and tightly bound to the community. Not only does that make most of their ideas possible, it also makes the rewards that much more pronounced and effective within the community. They all shared a theme of bringing some value to the public at large, starting locally, and resulting in health, economic, community, and future victories.

I'll be back to cover the breakout session titled "Scaling Up Local Food Access" after lunch around 1pm.