Comments on: Has “Locavore” Jumped the (Sustainably-Raised, Organic Chum-Fed) Shark?

By: gp

gp — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 23:13:09 +0000

NY times.. .re-invents the wheel.. yet again

gp in montana

By: phyllis

phyllis — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:27:24 +0000

i think whatever gets people in the door…so be it.

By: Kerr

Kerr — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:22:38 +0000

Well, some people aren’t going to plant a garden themselves because they don’t know how and it seems like too big a risk to invest all that time and money with no prior experience. Gardening can be expensive to get started, even just to do it on your own, especially if you include labor. If you’ve never done it before, you have no idea how it will pay off. You can tell some people over and over “rip up your lawn! plant vegetables!” but to them it’s like saying “quit your job and paint a masterpiece!”

When it’s happening in their own yard, most people will have no excuse not to get involved, and they’ll learn how to do it themselves almost by accident. It will be much easier next year to be doing it on their own. And in the meantime they will probably have provided some of their crops to the MyFarm CSA, which will help other people who don’t have land to garden in.

This is distributed farming, like SETI@home is distributed computing, and I’m surprised if this is the first example. It really irritates me that many people are characterizing the people who would use this service as lazy yuppies. Maybe some of them are. But we’re not characterizing all CSA members as lazy yuppies, and probably a lot of us are, too. It’s one more way the vast majority of people in the industrialized world pay other people to do the farming for them, but at least it’s probably a more equitable arrangement than the other lazy yuppies among us who get our “organic” tomatoes from Florida via SafeWay or similar.

Now, I could wish they were doing it as a non-profit, but that’s because I’m a non-profit geek and think that asking people to volunteer for a for-profit business is a little suspect. On the other hand I suspect these folks would rather dig than write grant applications, and I don’t blame them. If it’s as hard to monetize as I suspect it will be, they may end up going to a non-profit anyway… but maybe they’ll get rich and people in major cities everywhere will start imitating them, which can only be a good thing.

By: Asher ben Avraham

Asher ben Avraham — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:35:48 +0000

Rich white people paying others to feed them and tend their properties. What’s so new about that? The NYTimes specializes in reporting on and for this demographic, so we shouldn’t be surprised they ‘discovered’ the locavore movment (even if it is not new at all.) Nonetheless, it’s a great idea. it will provide jobs for some people with gardening skills and perhaps encourage others to rethink their backyards or rooftops or patios. Of course, its all good until the lawsuits start happening - “you promised me 2 bushels of tomatoes and kale til November and all I got were these wormy radishes!!!”

By: Simcha Daniel Burstyn

Simcha Daniel Burstyn — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:38:55 +0000

Sign me up!

As long as there is a money economy, this kind of service is almost the best we can hope for.

I can make one suggestion - make it a co-op/CSA style thing, where members can volunteer their time and help in each others’ gardens. To maintain the business model, there would nevertheless have to be a base fee, so that the volunteering can only pay for up to 10-15%.

By: Melinda

Melinda — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:27:31 +0000

I don’t think what’s going on with the Times is “discovery” as much as it is reporting on the yuppification of the food movement. And I do think there’s a story there - certainly as a rural dweller some of what’s been going on in the cities does surprise me and I wouldn’t have known about things like people hiring gardeners to put food plots in their backyard if it hadn’t been for their reporting.

As for whether or not it’s a good thing, I figure most of these people wouldn’t otherwise be gardening for themselves, growing veggies is better than growing lawns, and basically if these people are going to conspicuously consume something, better it should be fancy vegetable gardens for landscaping than any number of other things I can think of.