People Changing the Future of Food

9 People Who Are Changing The Future Of Food.

Danielle Gould
Founder, FOOD + TECH CONNECT
In 2010, when many farmers and chefs were still depending on fax machines and handwritten invoices, Danielle Gould founded the networking platform Food + Tech Connect. The goal: unite food producers with digital creators through meet-ups and weekend-long hackathons. Thanks to connections made through F+TC, more small-scale producers are selling via online marketplaces and developers are creating cloud-based systems for restaurants.

NO CHEESE, PLEASE!
How Bryant Terry, chef in residence at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora, is working to lower disease rates in food-insecure communities

THE SOIL SAVANT
A radical new approach to raising cattle helped fourth-generation rancher Cory Carman save her family’s land.

MORE WHO MATTER
Kara Goldin
Founder, HINT WATER
As soda giants grapple with plunging sales and consumers hunt for healthier options, beverage companies like Hint Water are finding ways to juice up old-fashioned H2O.

Nick Green and Gunnar Lovelace
Co–CEOs, THRIVE MARKET
Ecommerce site Thrive Market sells high-end natural products at 25% to 50% below market rates. Since it launched in 2014, it has raised $58 million in funding and attracted more than 195,000 members who pay a $60 annual fee.

Megan Miller and Leslie Ziegler
Founders, BITTY FOODS
When a United Nations report heralded insects as the most sustainable source of protein, Megan Miller and Leslie Ziegler set out to make crickets a palatable meat alternative. Bitty Foods has developed everything from cricket flour (a nutritious blend with 28 grams of protein per cup) to Chiridos, which are air-puffed chips made from crickets, lentils, and spices.

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retirement farms

Spark Architects won the “experimental” category at the 2015 World Architecture Festival, held earlier this month in Singapore.

The practice’s “Home Farm” aims to deal with two of the main issues facing cities in Asia: an ageing population and excessive food imports.

The idea is that elderly residents can occupy themselves with growing crops in “vertical farms” contained within buildings, thereby providing the city with food and themselves with a modest income.

Occupants can work as part-time agriculturalists, but there is no obligation to work.

Spark say that 90% of Singapore’s meals are imported, so action is needed to improve food security.

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mega food parks

42 mega food parks to start operations by 2019: Harsimrat Kaur Badal 

The Mega Food Park Scheme, based on the cluster approach, is modelled on hub-and-spoke architecture, which follows principles from the spoke-hub distribution paradigm.

It aims at facilitating the establishment of a strong food processing industry backed by an efficient supply chain, which includes collection centres, a central processing centre (CPC) and cold chain infrastructure. 

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mega food parks

NEW DELHI: The government is likely to soon announce allocation of 17 mega food parks, entailing a total investment of Rs 2,100 crore, to various firms for development.

A mega food park provides various facilities to food processors, farmers, retailers and exporters, helping achieve faster growth of food processing industries.

According to sources, Food Processing Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal is likely to announce next week the sanctioning of these 17 mega food parks in states including Punjab, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Telangana, Odisha, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Bihar.

The total investment in these mega food parks is estimated at Rs 2,100 crore, of which the government's contribution would be to the tune of Rs 850 crore, they added.

In these mega food parks, 50,000 people are expected to get employment while 80,000 farmers would also be benefitted.

Under the scheme (2008-09) of mega food parks, the Food Processing Ministry had sanctioned 42 projects throughout the country. Of these, 25 parks have already been allocated.

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OMA's Food Port

The enclosed program is organized by the shared needs and facilities of identified tenants. The Northeast corner of the site is anchored with retail, a coffee roastery and juicery production facilities. Aggregation and processing facilities are located at the center of the site, with a connection to Seed Capital’s offices and the kitchen incubator. The Jefferson County Extension Office is lifted to create a strong connection between their demonstration farm below, and directly connected to the Urban Farm. The recycling facility is placed at the Southwest corner of the site for ease of access. Corresponding outdoor spaces aligned with surrounding thoroughfares include a market plaza, food truck plaza, and edible garden. The efficient building plan also allows for systematic growth to allow the building and its tenants to develop over time.

The Food Port provides a comprehensive survey of the food industry and its processes while relocating many food programs typically separated from the buyer back into the heart of the city. It defines a new model for how the relationship between consumer and producer can be defined and addresses uncaptured market demand and inefficiencies within the local food industry.

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UT Food Lab

The Food Lab (TFL) is based in The School of Human Ecology, College of Natural Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). The Food Lab provides awareness of food issues, encourages and motivates students to engage with innovative food systems research, and provides support to startups that leverage university research. TFL is a catalyst for scientific and cultural exploration, experimentation and innovation in the food system.

We thrive on unexpected connections between all disciplines and support collaboration at UT Austin nationally and internationally. On this site you’ll find more about the TFL’s existing initiatives and research projects, information about events for further learning, and resources for those pursing food related start-ups.

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Robyn Metcalfe: The Food Lab is a project currently located in the College of Natural Sciences within the School of Human Ecology. It’s really a project that engages broadly across the whole campus within a wide range of disciplines including history, engineering, architecture, anthropology, American studies and the sciences. It really engages the university in a conversation about the future of food. We have a couple of projects. One is the food challenge prize that took place Feb. 14. We are also doing some research on the relationship of cities and food and how food travels around the world — food logistics. We have a website and online magazine related to that. 
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food and race

Titled the “Race and Food Justice Panel,” Monday’s lecture examined food and agriculture in terms of their historical and current impacts on the city. The lecture also explored how food helped shaped present racial relationships within the city.

The panel included local activist Oya Amakisi; Kami Pothukuchi, professor of Urban Studies at Wayne State University; and Anthony Hatinger, garden production coordinator for the Central Detroit Christian Community Development Corporation.

Sucher said the panel aimed to look at social justice from a unique lens and to push students to look at race and hunger in Detroit from an angle they might not have thought about before.

“We just really wanted to focus on different areas of food justice,” she said. “Social justice doesn’t just happen one way, you can look at the same problem and have a lot of different solutions for it.”

...Pothukuchi, who was raised in Mumbai, India, employs her work in architecture and community planning to find links between communities and their food systems. Similar to Hatinger, Pothukuchi noted the importance of addressing Detroit’s larger problems including water shutoffs, housing shortages and poor land quality.

“We don’t really plan for food, that thinking is shifting partly due to the work my colleagues and I have done in raising awareness between the links between community planning and food systems and how integral those links are and how many community goals you can advance by intervening in the food system,” she said.

The dialogue brought in the panelists’ backgrounds and their wide array of experiences to help explain barriers to food accessibility within the city.

Hatinger said power-holders like politicians and corporations oppressed residents by controlling the distribution and access to food and thus limiting the resources of the general public. He added that learning about the dynamics of power and giving food resources back to the people is what propels him to do his work with agriculture in the city.

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Food Hub Management Certificate Program

Food Hub Management Certificate Program
UVM’s Food Hub Management Professional Certificate Program – the first of its kind in the country – is an innovative blend of hands-on, community-based, online and on-campus learning that will prepare you for effective management of food hubs and provide you with essential tools to advance your career in food systems.

Develop Essential Knowledge & Skills

Business Planning & Assessment
Market Development & Value Chain Facilitation
Product Development, Marketing, & Sales
Purchasing & Supply Chain Management
Processing and Distribution
Facility/Warehouse Management
HR, Staffing, & Communication
Food Safety and Risk Management

Who should apply?

Individuals planning to create, lead, and/or manage a food hub.
Those with food hub experience and passion for a career in food systems who are looking for their next step.
Professionals seeking to enhance or change their career to a focus on the sustainable food market.
Staff members who are poised for leadership development within enterprises meeting the increasing demand for regionally sourced good food.

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retirement community + farming

TRFW News) A new retirement community, planned for the city of Singapore in the near future, will be combining senior living and urban farming. Homefarm, will not only support the aging population of Singapore, but will also help seniors continue living an active lifestyle in the comfort of their own residences.

SPARK, a global architecture studio with offices in Singapore, London, Beijing and Shanghai is responsible for this new endeavour and recently announced their plan for the new development to the public. (1,2,3)

Ninety Percent of Singapore’s Food is Imported
The new urban retirement housing will have a huge positive impact on Singapore’s food conditions. Currently, 90% of food is imported from over 70 different countries. In addition, twenty percent of Singapore’s population by 2030 will be older than 65.

Homefarm will not only provide local food to the population but the seniors, who will be living in the retirement community, will not be forced to work elsewhere. They will have the opportunity to contribute work towards their living expenses by farming. They will get a chance to plant, harvest, package, clean, sort and deliver produce. The gardens will be conveniently located in an assortment of various designs throughout the retirement community.(1,3)

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Food Hubs

Food Hubs, a topic of recent inquiry. The design of our food system to utilize, process, distribute, share and educate. This example comes from Louisville KY, and the Seed Capital Kentucky. 

"Seed Capital Kentucky released master plans for the food marketplace last week. Netherlands-based architect OMA worked alongside GBBN Architects of Louisville to design a campus where local farmers can package, distribute and sell goods."

"The project aims to reduce the amount of travel, money and time that goes into local food production, while making consumer access easier.

"Our vision for this project is one that collapses a lot of those middle men and transactions into one place where they can all work together to help create more fresh, regional food and help our region feed itself more sustainably," said Seed Capital Kentucky founder Stephen Reily."

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Food Webs

"Dr. Samuel Johnson, from Warwick’s Mathematics Institute, explains: “Buildings require structural supports, such as the metal or timber frames around which they are then built. For the building to remain standing, though, these supports need to comply with the laws of mathematics and physics; if the roof is too heavy for the frame, the building collapses. The frames also need flexibility to adapt to conditions, if they are too rigid they become fragile and, for instance, unable to cope with difficult weather.

“The same is true of natural ecosystems; they need support and structure. Trophic Coherence seems to play a similar role in ecosystems as supporting frames of buildings — it is a structural property that helps ecosystems survive, and is common to all the ones we have analyzed. It provides them with essential support and structure.”"

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Visual Complexity

Policy Database

The Growing Food Connections Policy Database is a searchable collection of local public policies that explicitly support community food systems. This database provides policymakers, government staff, and others interested in food policy with concrete examples of local public policies that have been adopted to address a range of food systems issues: rural and urban food production, farmland protection, transfer of development rights, food aggregation and distribution infrastructure, local food purchasing and procurement, healthy food access, food policy councils, food policy coordination, food system metrics, tax reductions and exemptions for food infrastructure, and much more.

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Edible Geography

Edible Geography is a blog written by Nicola Twilley, a freelance writer currently based in New York City.

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Open Food Booklets

OPEN FOOD booklets promote participation in local and urban food systems. 
Each booklet in the series introduces a different slice of local food, opening eyes to the importance and possibility of becoming a part of your food system.  

#1. Farms & Gardens Build Urban ValuePublished March 2014
#2. Landscape to Table: a guide to edible outdoor spaces
Published July 2014

By The Community Food Lab

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Community Food Lab

Community Food Lab provides services such as community engagement, mapping and assessments, urban and project design investigations, charettes, trainings, and feasibility studies. We bring value to clients and partners in the form of realistic design recommendations and collaborative capacity building that deliver the multiple benefits of local food systems.

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Urban Farm

Nicely stated: Urban Agriculture project: "The Urban Farm Project aims to create an agricultural food hub in the heart of the city. Its story is centered on local food production, distribution and education. It is a shared vision to strengthen our city’s food strategy and bring local food issues to the forefront. The proposal’s multi-story tower and landscaped podium showcases a unique mix of programs centered on food that includes a new space for the Greater Food Bank of Vancouver, a vertical urban farm, a farmers’ market as well as academic and research spaces related to food science. In whole, it serves as an organized central hub that aims to improve local food issues such as distribution, equity and education. The synthesis and organization of this complex program and the requirements of multiple stakeholders were central to MGA’s initial work task."

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urban informatics

"The N.Y.U. researchers see an opportunity to take a quantitative, comprehensive look at a community, run experiments, and make discoveries. Dr. Kontokosta observed that the concept of “sustainability” has been narrowly defined, mostly focused on water and energy consumption so far. “Sustainability has really been a measurement problem,”he said.

But with a broader array of measurements in a community, he said, a far wider range of observations becomes possible. An example, Dr. Kontokosta said, might be measuring noise, air quality or social interactions, and seeing how those correlate with educational achievement.

Combining measurements of the environment, physical systems and human behavior, said Steven E. Koonin, director of the N.Y.U. center, will open the door to understanding and modeling communities in new ways. “The real gold will be in combining the data science and the social sciences,” Dr. Koonin said.

One result, he said, will be to change traditional disciplines. Civil engineering, he said, has traditionally centered on physical systems rather than human behavior. In the future, Dr. Koonin said, there may be careers in “human-centered civil engineering” or “civic engineering.” Architects and interior designers, he said, study how people interact with buildings and rooms, but without much quantitative information. “Quantitative design,” he said, may be a career of the future."

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Situating Food: Planning and Design for New Urban Food Systems
November 8, 2013 - 2:00pm to November 9, 2013 - 8:00pmABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM
OBJECTIVE

Situating Food: Planning and Design for New Urban Food Systems will identify models and foster innovation along with criticism of issues that impact food security, food justice, production, access and cultural awareness, especially as they influence trends in urban revitalization.

Champions of the local food movement have held it up as a potential economic boom to urban populations, a step toward the true reformation of the industrial food system and catalyst for neighborhood identity, social cohesion, and urban resilience or rebirth. Simultaneously, emerging critics have decried such efforts as a paternalistic attempt to 'save' central city populations as gentrification displaces current residents and property values increase. Divergent discourses on the subject make the topic of local food a socially, politically, economically, and ecologically charged topic in need of discussion and healthy, inclusive models.

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NYC - the garden

What if NYC grew all it's own food? A project by Terreform Research Group visualized just that question. These visualizations look at what the city would look like if it grew all it's own food. These questions of what urban agriculture would look like have been in the design consciousness for some time now. The argument still stands, and logistics are far from a reality, but really, can we do it, should we do it? The current model of urban and rural, suburban are not contributing to this issue.

Some questions: What are our current eating habits? How have they changed in the past 100 years? What could the next 100 years of eating habits look like? What is a gluten-free-paleo city?

What infrastructure of CSA's and community gardening efforts look like and what systems already feed into the city that could link up (ie, Amtrack, MTA, cargo ship?). Sexy images are fun to share and imagine...but that arugula sprout on 147th street?

How about a library of what can be grown, when it can be grown? Getting more specific with the food item and the diet and the climate...perhaps that could inform the new green city.
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Food Growing Connections

Communities looking to broaden access to healthy food and sustain local farms and food production have a new resource: www.GrowingFoodConnections.org, a repository of information on food systems planning.

The site is run by Growing Food Connections, an initiative to strengthen community food systems nationwide, and will grow to include such resources as a Community Guide to Planning for Food and Agriculture.

Led by the Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning in partnership with Cultivating Healthy Places, Ohio State University and American Farmland Trust, Growing Food Connections will target 10 "Communities of Opportunity" – communities poised to tackle their food access challenges and agricultural viability – with an intensive program of education, training, technical assistance and extension activities.

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