GUD FEATURE ARTICLE

Making Good Food Work

Conferences are generally about listening.  At good conferences, one listens and learns.  At bad conferences, one listens a bit and then watches the person one seat away play Angry Birds.  Either way, “participants” are largely passive, absorbing knowledge through digesting lectures, presentations, and panel discussions.

Making Good Food Work was different.

Designed as a participatory conference, hosted in Detroit on April 19 through April 21, and organized by Neighborhood Noodle founder and Michigan State University Ph.D. student Jess Daniel, Making Good Food Work (MGFW) brought together food entrepreneurs, business owners, farmers, and other experts to work on projects and ideas that could shape the future of regional food systems.

While participants came from all over the country, not just Michigan, MGFW still felt like a Detroit event:  After all, only in our uncommonly small, familiar community could an amateur like me learn about an event this specialized and actually attend alongside practitioners with interesting ideas for viable food alternatives.

The conference was purported on its website to be “a creative incubation laboratory, designed for doers.”  After three days of working, talking, typing, thinking, collaborating, researching, and writing, I was exhausted. No Angry Birds, no checking email during lectures, no sitting in the back of the room bored. Just work.

Designed for doers, indeed.

Projects & Personalities

Things began in the ballroom of Detroit’s Atheneum Hotel exactly as one might expect: Introductory remarks, a few well-orchestrated exercises designed to break the ice, and plenty of hotel coffee.  Where things began to diverge from the norm was when we really dug into this “incubation laboratory” concept.

Thirteen team leaders – all who previously had submitted business concepts, ideas for white papers, and projects of all sorts – took to the stage to pitch their initiatives. Each hoped his or her project would resonate with the right people, drawing them to participate in actually developing those initiatives over the next two days.

The 200 attendees split themselves into these teams to begin work.  There were a set of teams dedicated to issues – creating toolkits for general use across the country, for example – but among the seven teams working on defined businesses, hubs, and co-ops were:

• COLORS of Detroit, a soon-to-be worker-owned restaurant in Harmonie Park that’s an extension of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC), which helps train restaurant workers for better positions in the industry.  The restaurant will be both a training environment and a working restaurant featuring local foods.
• Delridge Produce Cooperative, a neighborhood food co-op that provides fresh, locally sourced, sustainable food to under-served, generally lower income residents in southwest Seattle
• The Arcadia Center, an effort to bring local, sustainably raised food to people via a mobile market near D.C in Alexandria
• Colorado Schools Food Hub, a project in which healthy, local food ends up in school lunches

As a newcomer to food systems discussions but a seasoned practitioner of the black art known as marketing, I chose to work with COLORS since they were looking to draw customers and attention to their restaurant, due to open this fall.

Brief introductions were all I needed to see I’d be working with an interesting team: Angela Newsom from Detroit Evolution was experienced in the local food market and insightful with regards to the Detroit customer base.  Channon Mondoux of the Eclectic Kitchen in Kalamazoo was a chef, educator, and businessperson.  Brother Barry Crumbley served as a farmer, activist, and food policy advisor.  Kathe Piede worked at a co-op outside New York. Add to that another half dozen event planners, community organizers, and community garden workers.

Led by Minsu Longiaru, the project leader, and Cheryl Danley from Michigan State, our team facilitator, we had a great group. I didn’t get much exposure to other teams, but if they were anywhere near as diverse and brilliant as the folks I met, I’m sure every project leader went home with a suitcase full of ideas.

Before we really started to discuss the project and our team leader’s goals, though, we were treated to lunch – and a few guest speakers.

Dr. Kathleen Merrigan is the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and as one of the keynotes, she talked generally about the importance of local food systems and some of the challenges the effort faces.  She has been the person behind “Know your Farmer, Know your Food,” which illustrated to me a sad truth about our government and our food. Merrigan clearly has been an advocate for alternative food systems, but she also noted – mostly when answering pointed questions from an expert audience – that there are times when the USDA is obligated to allow certain foods (e.g., genetically modified alfalfa) to market unless it meets very strict legal criteria.

What went unsaid was that none of those problems will ever change until the massive amounts of money invested by companies ranging from Monsanto to McDonald’s gets out of government.

After Merrigan finished her interactions with the crowd, Senator Debbie Stabenow delivered a thoroughly generic address and left without taking any questions.  It was nice of her to show support for real food, but as it turned out, the extra half hour would have been helpful in working on our projects.

We closed the first day defining some parameters for our project with COLORS, including the need to create a marketing plan.

Getting to Work

Obviously, one of the advantages of being a marketing guy was that I had a few consulting documents and marketing plans I could use as templates. I pulled one out and started re-writing it with COLORS in mind, incorporating the ideas generated by my teammates as I went along. 10 pages, 20 pages, 30 pages. We were machines.

Something that should have been immediately obvious eventually struck me as the discussion evolved: We all shared a love of good, honest, real food. Admittedly, my interests have been rooted in hedonism and an intellectual love of the historical and cultural aspects of cuisine, tea, wine, beer, et cetera. And theirs were rooted more in economics, social justice, policy, agriculture, and business.

Nonetheless, that shared love should elicit smiles from anyone interested in food – because it illustrates something that I think a lot of people don’t understand about food as a hobby or even as a profession.

Specifically, being a “foodie” isn’t just about watching Iron Chef; it’s about understanding and intellectualizing something vital to our existence.  I might be more interested in reading about famed bartender Jerry Thomas than I am about the particulars of what House resolution is up for a vote or what the latest heirloom seed protected by the government might be, but at the core, it’s more or less all the same. It’s recognizing that there’s more to food than swinging through a drive-thru and shoveling fries into one’s face.

Hobbies and jobs are ways of focusing our minds, challenging ourselves.  Food is a necessity.  And a business.  And a hobby.  And an area of public debate.  And a key component of every culture.  It touches everything around us.  So in many respects, is there any more interesting, holistic hobby?  Is it any surprise that being a “foodie” has become so popular?

From the most basic cooks to those with a library of historical food texts, anyone can relate to some component of food.

So working with the COLORS team became a real pleasure as we dug into not merely our task but our shared passion.  I learned a lot, and the second night, a big group of us went to Slows BBQ to hang out.

But mostly, we worked.

Some of us left the group for an hour or two to chat with experts or to attend workshops on topics like packaging, food hub start-ups, and finding capital for new food businesses.  But more or less, we dug in around a table, talking, thinking, and typing. Two days later, we had a 30-page marketing plan, an event planning guide, a concept for empowering workers to promote COLORS via social media, and a host of other ideas.

Winning: The COLORS of Money

What some of us didn’t realize was that there were financial awards available.  Our facilitator, Cheryl, did a fantastic job of guiding some answers to questions that would be judged by a panel on the third day, and Minsu worked with the team on a presentation that highlighted our accomplishments.

We were thrilled to see the results: COLORS won second place among the judges and also won the “people’s choice” award, the combined total for which nearly doubled Minsu’s initial marketing budget.

Obviously, I was pleased to see such tangible results for the project we worked on – but there were other amazing ideas presented that day.

The Delridge Produce Co-op mentioned earlier elected to move to a stand-based concept to lower costs and put together a plan to make it happen for the residents of southwest Seattle.  The Farm to School Hub in Colorado is launching two pilot projects aimed at 14 school districts and over 100,000 children served real food.  The Village Marketplace in Los Angeles (pictured below) learned how to scale their business up and clearly received very practical advice regarding equipment and processes to make the expansion sustainable while paying a very decent living wage to their soon-to-be new employees.

So here was my big takeaway: Living up to it’s name, the conference proved that it is indeed possible to make good food work.

As a society, we may be limited by the bureaucracy and lobbyist-fueled big agro machine that wants us to eat genetically engineered corn-fed beef burgers on corn-based bread and wash it down with a corn syrup laden drink.  But as individuals, we all have interests and ideas.  And we have the power to choose to act on those interests and ideas.  Not everyone can open a community kitchen or a food hub or a stand at a farmer’s market.  But anyone can shop at one, volunteer for one, support one.

So make good food work for you.  It’s not always simple, but it’s never all that hard.

Posted on 2011.05.04 by Evan Hansen at 6:32 pm
This entry was posted in Features and tagged farming, food, food systems, Inside Detroit, local, Michigan, sustainable. Bookmark the permalink.

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