If farmers are the rock stars of the sustainable food movement, does that make last weekend’s FamilyFarmed Expo its Pitchfork? Hosted by FamilyFarmed.org, an organization devoted to connecting local food producers with local distributors and consumers, the expo ran Thursday through Saturday at the UIC Forum and was lousy with not just farmers but chefs, grocers, community gardeners, beekeepers, chicken enthusiasts, activists, food bloggers, and policy geeks of all persuasions. One local speaker, whose panel was up against both a cooking demo by Rick Bayless and another panel featuring Paul Kahan, conceded defeat: “I’ll be lucky if I can get my family to come. I’m like the Celtic music off in the corner of the park.” Over three days I sampled a host of workshops and panels, some convened as part of the fifth annual Chicago Food Policy Summit, which shared the forum’s meeting rooms on Friday.
It’s so simple, could it work here? Several people from City Hall snuck into the lunchtime follow-up (as did USDA deputy secretary Kathleen Merrigan, who sat right behind me). Given the city’s track record with elote vendors, it seems a stretch—but stranger things have happened.
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Community Food Security In the hierarchy of issues that resource-strapped resettlement agencies like the Heartland Alliance are dealing with, community food security—the access to affordable, nutritious, culturally appropriate food—isn’t high on the list.
Factor in a general lack of familiarity with Western industrialized foods, and things can get blackly comic. In one instance, said Eichberger, she discovered a refugee client was using the cans she received from a food pantry to decorate her apartment—she didn’t realize they actually contained food.
Shared-use kitchens (there are three in Chicago) are examples of a new concept that dovetails perfectly with the needs of a food scene increasingly geared toward locally sourced products and small-batch production. They allow artisans and other entrepreneurs to ramp up their businesses with a minimum of risk. As food systems advocate Jim Javenkoski, who also sat on the panel, pointed out, they can become economic engines for a city, strengthening the infrastructure of the local food system by helping small entrepreneurs become viable.
Whole-animal cooking, the panel pointed out, is sustainability in action. “Everyone wants a pork tenderloin or a boneless, skinless chicken breast,” said Gunthorp, who raises pastured pigs, chickens, and ducks in LaGrange, Indiana. “But you take a pig carcass that weighs 200 pounds and maybe three pounds of that is going to be tenderloin. So there’s a huge percentage left over that a farmer like me needs to figure out how to deal with. It’s not a sustainable process to just sell those three pounds of tenderloin.”
In 2007 an amendment banning city chickens was proposed in City Council, but—thanks to some quick action on the part of Boyd and other pro-chicken advocates—it didn’t go anywhere, although, notes Boyd, they’ve got some policy suggestions drafted and ready to go should the subject pop back up.