On Wednesday, The Kojo Nnamdi Show had a great example of how understanding actors & their ecosystem can be crucial for pushing the economy towards our values.
Today, middle-class professional folks like myself can get great tasting local organic produce from farmers markets, CSAs, etc. for a good chunk of the year. But for many folks, local organic produce is still too expensive — and if you live in the Hood in most cities, it’s both expensive and time-consuming to actually get to where the produce is being sold.
In the long run, we’re going to have to change the way we subsidize food. Taxpayers shelling out cash to make Twinkies less expensive (by subsidizing sugar & corn prices) instead of making local, organic fruits & veggies less expensive is just stupid. Why should that matter to us? If we can get more folks to eat more fruits and veggies, we could put a serious dent in healthcare costs — the one thing research studies agree on is that eating more fruits and veggies reduces the risk of everything from heart attacks to diabetes to some types of cancer. And if we do it right, it’ll also help revitalize local rural economies by creating more good jobs in sustainable agriculture.
But that’s a tough, long-term fight. What can we do in the meantime?
Turns out that if you take a close look at how local organic farming works, you can find unexpected ways to lower the cost of produce. An awful lot of fruit and vegetables don’t make it to your local farmers market — let alone to grocery stores that use local produce — because it isn’t pretty enough or perfect enough for what consumers expect. So farmers don’t usually turn much profit on that less-than-perfect but still high-quality produce.
Michael F. Curtin, Jr., Chief Executive Officer of the D.C. Central Kitchen, gave the example of a farm that wasn’t able to pick all of its cabbage quickly enough. As a result, many cabbages became so big you needed two hands to hold them. Curtin said grocery stores won’t accept these big, high-quality cabbages because most shoppers expect to be able to pick up most grocery store produce with one hand. So the DC Central Kitchen was able to get a really good deal from the farmer for those cabbages, and the farmer made a little money than they would otherwise have.
There’s another interesting side benefit. DC Central Kitchen operates on a large scale — they produce over 4500 meals for the hungry every day — so it’s worth their while to send their little fleet of trucks out to farmers to pick up the high-quality but not perfect produce that would otherwise go to waste. In turn, they are now able to transport some of this great but not perfect produce to local restaurants who can’t afford to regularly drive out to farmers, generating revenue for farmers and for themselves. In short, by targeting this overlooked produce, they are beginning to turn into a de facto regional produce transit network. Over time, this transportation network might open up new opportunities to get fresh, locally grown organic produce to people who don’t have access to it today.
None of this is a perfect long-term answer. But it shows how getting your hands dirty — really understanding how actors & their ecosystem operate — can open up new opportunities to push the economy towards our values.
