• Price of a Farm Aid Ticket: $52 (+ ticketmaster fees)

• Price of Fung Wah bus from Boston: $15

Standing among a crowd of New Yorkers, surrounded by equal parts marijuana haze, “Stop Factory Farms” t-shirts and average New Yorkers here to see Dave, Neil & the Allman brothers, listening to a Hasidic reggae artist talking about the taste of an unbelievable tomato and getting one’s hands back into the dirt to refresh the connection between humans and the earth: PRICELESS

For me, that was one of several exciting moments during yesterday’s Farm Aid concert, which, as the NYTimes noted, was u.nique in its ability to draw in average-Joe New Yorkers, just in it for the music, organic junkies, and farmers from across the country. Another was actually taking a photo with my co-workers in our new matching “Farmers Kick [Donkey]” t- shirts.

As a representative of a group who spent much of the concert inviting concert-goers to sign up for email action alerts about the Farm Bill, I think this was an amazing opportunity for the burgeoning food movement to move beyond its original supporters. What I told Max Fraser of The Nation yesterday, was that I hoped all of the excitement and publicity around Farm Aid would get concertgoers and other citizens more engaged with food policy i.e. the Farm Bill. My only wish is that I hadn’t seen the box of Sysco potatoes used to make the french fries I bought from one of the “all local, sustainable, organic” food vendors.

Update 09/19/07: Apparently Alice Waters also noticed the Sysco products (as well as the Silk, Chipotle and Horizon booths), and this yielded a panoply of comments on the NYTimes Diner’s Journal article on Farm Aid. Tuesday, Alice responded that she wasn’t intending to diss Farm Aid, but only to dream of how things could be in an “edible utopia.”