Farm Pod

“This is how you’re going to get people fed when we have no water,” said Mike Straight, chief executive officer of FarmPod LLC, who dreamed up the idea of putting a fully automated aquaponics system inside a shipping container. “This is how you get fed when you have no land.”

Straight and his fiancée, Siria Bonilla, see the pod, the Santa Fe startup’s first prototype, as a common-sense solution to food deserts. New Mexico, where many people live in remote communities far from grocery stores or farmers markets, has some of the nation’s most expansive food deserts. About 300,000 people in the state, or about 15 percent of the population, lack access to healthy foods, according to recent studies.

Inside the shipping container that makes up the FarmPod’s bottom level, fish grow in three large tanks. One tank holds koi and two hold barramundi, a mild-flavored fish, also known as Asian sea bass, that’s popular in Thai cuisine. Water containing the fish’s waste is pumped up to the greenhouse on the second floor, where it trickles down through the vertical towers, feeding the roots of young plants. The clean water circulates back to the fish.

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Brownsville mobile farmer's market

Brownsville’s first mobile farmer’s market has begun to make its rounds around the city this month.
The market rotates between the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, the Citrus Gardens, Brownsville Independent School District, Villa Del Sol, and all 10 of the housing authorities in the city.
The goal is to expose people to healthy living, said David Vasquez, mobile market coordinator.

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Mobile food cart

Students of Texas Southmost College in instructor Murad Abusalim’s class have, after two months, completed a community service project — a mobile farmer’s market.

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food deserts 2.0

The USDA estimates that 14 percent of American households struggle with having enough food for an active, healthy life. In the Charlotte region, more than 157,000 people (roughly 18 percent of the population) face food insecurity. According to a sustainability report released by nonprofit environmental advocacy group Sustain Charlotte, between 2005 and 2012, the percentage of households in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) more than doubled from 6 percent to 12.3 percent.

Across the U.S., access to healthy food is a barrier for the 23 million who live in so-called food deserts — neighborhoods where ready access to fresh, affordable food is nonexistent. Currently, the Charlotte region has 60 identified food deserts. Despite the number of farmers’ markets increasing across the county, construction costs for full-service grocery stores and limiting zoning regulations thwart improved food access.

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Food Deserts

Published this week in Health Affairs, the findings in some ways mirrored those of a few smaller, prior studies: Hill District residents did not buy any more fruits, vegetables, or whole grains after the Shop ‘n Save opened than they had before. In fact, in both the Hill District and Homewood, overall consumption of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains actually declined, for reasons Dubowitz says are unclear.

But there were also more nuanced, positive findings: In 2014, about a year after the Shop ‘n Save opened, residents consumed fewer calories overall, as well as less fat, alcohol, and added sugar. This was a significant difference compared to Homewood in 2014, where there were no significant changes in intake....

Fascinatingly, however, the differences between Homewood and the Hill District were not connected to where people shopped. Hill District residents who went to the Shop ‘n Save regularly did not decrease their sugar, fat, or alcohol intake any more than residents who kept shopping where they always had. Rather, the whole neighborhood improved together, as compared to Homewood.

“So that tells us there was something about the new store that changed these health behaviors,” says Dubowitz, “but it didn’t have to do with shopping.”

The change may have something to do with how people perceived their neighborhood. Before the Shop ‘n Save opened, about 67 percent of Hill District residents said they were satisfied, or very satisfied, with their neighborhood. One year after it opened, that rate rose to 81 percent.

Though she is still working on understanding how perceptions are connected to eating habits, Dubowitz believes it’s a pretty big deal that this relationship exists at all. “We know that neighborhood perceptions are important for overall community well-being and health,” she says. “We think that in and of itself is a large and important find for neighborhood investment in general.”

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Crowd Funded Grocery Store

Combine a powerful, supportive civic society with killer marketing chops and enlightened grassroots activism, and amazing things can happen. Case in point is the Westwood Food Co-op in Denver, Colorado, which just raised $50,000 in a successful Kickstarter campaign to fill its shelves full of wholesome, locally-grown food. With these funds, the co-op will become the city's first community-owned grocery store in a known food desert.

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Mobile Food Market

"...mobile food market ....brings fresh produce at good prices to the people most in need. Everybody pitched in; the Toronto Transit Commission donated a wheel-trans bus designed to carry people in wheelchairs, so it is accessible to everyone."
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Cape Town's Urban Agriculture Boom

In the last few years, Cape Town has witnessed the proliferation of hundreds of community gardens and urban farms. Abalimi is one organization that has worked to link the city's new micro-farmers with the types of middle-earners eager to fill their cupboards with local, organic produce.

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Urban Farms - Denver

The city passed an ordinance Tuesday designed to enable urban farmers to sell their crops from home, taking advantage of Colorado's 2012 Cottage Food Act.

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mobile produce market

"If only there were a way to get fresh food directly to these dinner-tables-in-the-desert.… That was the conversation in 2012, says Ms. Asantewaa, 45, who co-ordinates FoodShare’s Mobile and Good Food Markets, when the dream was to convert a full-sized TTC bus into a mobile produce market, just like the “Fresh Moves” program in Chicago had done. While FoodShare was getting by using a cube van, staff craved something customized for the task; however, limited real estate and a limited budget soon squashed the full-sized bus plan, and discussion turned to a smaller Wheel-Trans bus."

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Healthy Corner Stores

"Food deserts, defined by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) as ‘urban neighborhoods and rural towns without ready access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food,’ are a significant problem in North Carolina."

"According to data available from the USDA Food Access Research Atlas, North Carolina has at least 349 food deserts across 80 counties. Over 1,544,044 residents live in these food desert zones. Residents living in food deserts are more likely to suffer from obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other diet-related conditions, while simultaneously being more likely to be food insecure."

By increasing healthy food option in corner stores, healthy corner stores are created that can in fact bring change to the food access landscape. Healthy corner stores have been shown to have many benefits, including increased consumption of healthy food, changes in food shopping behaviors, and new markets for local farmers. Our hope in sharing this work is that this guide adds valuable information and replicable models for solving the complex problem of inadequate food access for the central North Carolina region and beyond. - The Community Food Lab

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Building Food

3D Fruit Printer, an machine that combines individual droplets of liquid to create convincing fruit imitations. 

I've become fastinated by this 3D Printing revolution. From building components to food. The technologies that have been designed to create our built environment are identical to the ones designing our food.

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Austin Food Deserts

Research involving data collection and visuallizing that information from UTSOA

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Coolhaus Icecream

Coolhaus Entepreneur .... and the wise words of advice of matching Food & Architecture...yet another perspective: 

"How has your architecture background played a role in Coolhaus?

It has been a massive help: architecture is a great background for creating a brand identity and using visuals to tell a story. Architecture is also client/project driven, just like the service side of our business. Also, my technical design skills and training have helped with packaging design, web design, and creating many other marketing collaterals. It has also allowed us to fold-in a whole other audience to our brand: we have a tremendous following amongst the food/ice cream loving community AND the design community. How many dessert companies can say the same?"

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The Food Access Research Atlas:

• Presents a spatial overview of food access indicators for low-income and other census tracts using different measures of supermarket accessibility;
• Provides food access data for populations within census tracts; and
• Offers census-tract-level data on food access that can be downloaded for community planning or research purposes.

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Atlanta's food deserts

The USDA scored every census tract in the country by location of grocery stores and income distribution. Metro Atlanta is no land of plenty. - 

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