Story & photograph: Russ Grayson Behind the supermarkets, beyond the corner store there is hidden a growing community food system. Through Australian Community Foods, John Brisbin is working to make the hidden visible. This article first appeared in The Planet. Australian Community Foods: communityfoods.com.au

PEOPLE making a difference...

Online Media Makes Local Food Easier to Find

John spoke to Russ Grayson about his ideas on blending local foods with online media...

Russ: How did you first become interested in farmer’s markets and other community-based food enterprises?

John: Well, I’ve always been an avid eater... at two metres and 110 kilos, I’ve been very successful at that. It’s led to a deep appreciation of food, and especially home grown, home cooked food.

Both of my grandmothers come from farming families and as a child I have very happy memories of big dinners where the whole clan would come together for a day of harvest, cleaning, peeling and cooking. Everyone joined in the event. It was food that we gathered round.

So from that background, I’ve always had an attraction to ‘real’ foods like you find at a farmer’s market. It’s fun to pick among the zucchinis and test the heft of a mighty cabbage, appreciating what a miracle it is for these things to unfold themselves from the living soil. You feel that somebody has actually paid a bit of attention to this bit of natural wonder. . . and maybe a couple of those cabbages were held back for the farmer’s dinner too. I find there’s a great people scene at the markets. It makes for a nicely connected experience, and the best part is that you get to eat it!

Russ: What is the potential of farmer’s markets and other community food enterprises in a society in which most people’s food comes from the supermarket?

John: Actually, I think supermarkets serve a very useful purpose in today’s world. Don’t get me wrong: I loathe the places... from the fluoro lights and Beatles remixes to the appalling off-gassing from pesticides, cleaning chemicals and perfumes. And that’s before we even get to the disturbingly plasticised food itself!

But despite all that, it’s important to recognise what supermarkets do well. You have to remember that most people out there are trapped in compromise and are dealing with a lot of stress. They have important problems to deal with: two car payments, a mortgage, who knows how many credit cards, workplace tensions and the never-ending absorption of raising children.

In a situation like that, it’s natural for people to take shortcuts and conserve their energy wherever they can. Let’s face it, the alternative food supply chain - and here I mean things like food co-ops, farmers markets, home delivery services, and the like - take extra time and effort to deal with. In a sense, supermarkets are ideally designed for the harried wage-slaves that much of our society has become. I’d be the last person to suggest that someone give up time with their children so they can give more attention to detail in their shopping. Yet we can all agree that there’s something terribly wrong with supermarkets, and that presents a paradox. How can we truly engage with people who haven’t got the time to consider healthier options in the first place?

It’s like the situation with Western medicine. Its focus is on healing sickness in contrast to traditional systems where the focus is on promoting health. I sometimes look at the distracted, stressed out people shuffling through the corporate supermarkets and realise they’re doing this because they really have no other choices at a practical level.

So for me, your question really goes to the heart of the futures we’re building for ourselves. For people to have time to deal with farmers markets or food co-ops, they need to have more discretionary time and the motivation to make better food choices. That means their employment and lifestyles need to be in better harmony, requiring less consumer spending. That runs flat in the face of today’s consumption-based economics. Until this basic orientation is changed, I think the farmer’s market and other alternative food chain systems will be just that: marginal alternatives with a mere fraction of the mainstream volume.

But positive change is already happening. You can see a small but steady stream of people hitting the eject button and choosing saner lifestyles, despite the initial difficulties. Out on their own, with more time to make good decisions, these people naturally tend to gravitate around highly nourishing food and the communities that are associated with them.

So there won’t be any overnight booms. I think we’ll see a slow, steady increase in business for the markets as long as dedicated growers and market operators are willing to get in there and keep up with the demand for high-quality produce.

Russ: What specifically do local food networks offer the urban consumer?

John: I guess the main goal is to get healthier, more localised food into the mouths of city dwellers. We want to reduce the overall ‘food-miles’ involved and try to stick with eating in season. Local food networks encourage growers and consumers to build relationships for this purpose.

There are lots of simple things that can be done to bring food into our cities from nearby growing regions. For example, there was an organic supplier on the NSW South Coast that was organising a weekly food drop to about 40 employees at a single office tower in the city. They got their order together during coffee breaks and simply picked up the produce from the mailroom when it came in by courier later in the week.

Currently, community food options are scattered, limited, and largely invisible to both consumers and growers. If you’re a committed, independent type with a bit of sunlight, you can grow a surprising amount of produce on a balcony, plus there are any number of community garden projects happening in urban public space.

We recently toured the community garden projects around Havana, Cuba, and were impressed at the long corridors of farmland that had been reserved right up into the city, like living spokes wheeling in to the city centre. No matter where you live in Havana, you can pretty much walk right out to a production garden and get involved.

A strong local network supports all these options, and that’s what we’re establishing with the Australian Community Foods gateway.

Russ: How will your website assist the development of these enterprises?

John: We’re designing a pretty advanced sort of facility that has the capacity to grow and adapt over time. In this first stage, the site will include a range of community-building tools and services that were largely developed through our work with leading edge technology developers such as Social Change Online and MajorPortals, who are active supporters of the project.

The site is set up to deliver information to growers and consumers at the top level, and then provide networking tools and hosting services to people running local food networks, farms, and food co-ops.

On the grower side, we are providing a set of promotional tools and farm management services that will expand as demand grows. The goal now is to establish a service for small operations that need a website as an administrative tool, cutting the overhead of running a group by putting a lot of the basic stuff online so people can self-serve. Nothing will replace local, personal, human connections, but, increasingly, the web can be a very useful tool for reducing the amount of time needed to run a transaction space between producer and consumer.

In terms of helping growers find useful information and case studies relevant to community food systems, we’ve established a resources library that allows anyone to add a link or upload a useful file.

We’ve also set up a hosting service where growers or food co-ops can manage their own site. Currently, we have one CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) site up as a demonstrator - Primrose Hill Farms, managed by Nick Pook and Peter Kenyon. You’ll see quite a bit of content that they have published themselves using simple copy and paste techniques, no special HTML skills required.

By selecting some preferences, an eater can choose to receive notifications when growers in their area are registered, thus keeping them alerted to a full range of local food options.

Russ: In setting up the website, what difficulties have you found in locating community food initiatives? Are they out there and hidden or are they easy to find?

John: One of the things we wanted to be very careful about was to avoid duplicating what’s already out there on the Internet. But I’d have to say that, generally, it’s not that easy to locate the full range of food networks through web-based searching.

My guess is that 90 per cent of these networks are publicised through traditional media. Ads in the local paper, postings at the library, flyers at the show, that sort of thing. This is the best way to promote your network today, and probably will continue to be the best way for years to come. What we’re doing with Australian Community Foods is creating a parallel version of all this activity so that people can also get the information off the web.

Australian Community Foods is not about to take on this challenge by ourselves. This is a community service toolkit. What we’re looking for are people who are already organising directories, calendars, and local guides who want to take advantage of the Australian Community Foods toolkit to make their online work easier. With a sufficient number of these people involved, the job of maintaining a locally relevant, up-to-date gateway becomes practical. Currently, community food options are scattered, limited, and largely invisible to both consumers and growers. Cooperation in the form of co-promotion, comprehensive directories and the like are really important right now. As this alternative food supply chain matures, there will be more advantages in competition and emphasising points of difference.

Specifically, it would be great if, as a consumer, I could simply locate all the growers and markets within ten kilometres of where I live and find out basic information about their services and general prices. This is a shared public directory service, and it is an essential component of getting local food networks nudged into the public consciousness. Such a directory will deliver benefits for everyone concerned.

On the other hand, once a network is established and has a financial equation in place, it’s natural to think that there will be some services that they won’t want to share with other networks except on a commercial basis. When we reach that point, I suggest that a lot of what the Australian Community Foods project hopes to achieve will have been achieved. There will be hundreds of food networks to choose from. We’ll be eating healthier and living saner lives. The world will be a better place!