Review of Black, White, and Green by Alison Hope Alkon

It is an exciting day for me when I finally get to read a new book from one of my favorite thinkers on the alternative food and agriculture movement, Alison Hope Alkon. The book, Black, White, and Green: Farmer's Markets, Race, and the Green Economy, is a tour de force on the most important institution in the movement: farmer's markets.

Alkon covers a vast territory in her ethnography, looking at race, class, gender, and economics in the context of two markets in East Bay.  Those two markets, North Berkeley Farmer's Market and West Oakland Farmer's Market, represent two starkly different ways of approaching the green economy, though they share a common belief in producing social change through markets.  Both markets are about the performance of black and white identities in an effort to build community around buying and selling fresh produce.

In West Oakland, the market is commonly referred to as a "black farmer's market."  Many of the events revolve around the celebration of black holidays like Juneteenth or Black History Month.  The purpose of the market is to give an outlet to marginalized black farmers and to provide healthy produce in an area that lacks grocery stores, called supermarket redlining, a process specifically linked to institutional racism.  Alkon quotes Food First! in defining supermarket redlining:

"Redlining usually evokes images of insurance companies, realtors, and banks refusing to grant fair insurance policies, mortgages, or loans to residents of certain neighborhoods.  Now these images include the decaying shells of inner city supermarkets.  The supermarket industry has drawn boundaries defining where fresh, nutritious, and competitively-priced food is and is not provided for communities throughout the country."

The West Oakland market is, therefore, perceived by vendors, managers, and customers alike as a response to institutional racism within the food system.  Alkon states that the roots of this market lie in the Black Panther Party's Free Breakfast for School Children program, further placing the market squarely within the realm of resistance to white supremacy.

In contrast, the North Berkeley Farmer's Market is rooted in countercultural notions of what Alkon and McCullen have called elsewhere the white farm imaginary.  Drawing from authors such as Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan, the performance of white identity is central to the community that is formed through the market.  The market itself grew out of anarchist and socialist attempts to create a different kind of economy in Berkeley, including Chez Panisse and gardening in People's Park in Berkeley.  Today's iteration of the market focuses heavily on environmental and economic concerns, though there are secondary concerns about equity.  The market has also become more focused on elite Northern California gourmet food and the resistance to the industrial food system through the creation of alternative, high-end markets for farmers.

One of the most important points that Alkon makes is that though both markets are rooted in radical activism of the 1960s and 1970s, all of which was specifically anti-capitalist, today's version of both markets focuses heavily on the use of capitalism to promote social and environmental change.  While Alkon stops short of criticizing this development directly, she does note that policy change and the role of the state (local or national) have effectively disappeared from the agenda of the alternative food and agriculture movement.  In fact, many are completely opposed to participation in the government.  In my opinion, whiteness and the lack of critique of the state are the two most important issues within the movement today and must be addressed going forward.

I have two critiques for Alkon, designed to be constructive.  First, the reader is left to wonder how Alkon's positionality as a white, female academic colored the analysis she produces.  She does include an epilogue that documents some of her struggles in the field, but fails to integrate this into her work.  I'm particularly concerned about a few statements that she makes in particular.  First, she argues

"At first glance, North Berkeley Farmer's Market participants seem to have a more inclusive, cosmopolitan notion of community that the multiple and contradictory definitions evidenced in West Oakland."

She then states in the epilogue that

"In North Berkeley, on the other hand, I could both literally and figuratively let my hair down."

It seems that Alkon's first impressions of the North Berkeley Farmer's Market had more to do with her own position and a white woman, and less to do with the market itself.  To borrow from my field work, a black food activist in Birmingham stated that Pepper Place is "for certain people."  It is reasonable to assume that had Alkon been black, she would have perceived the exclusionary nature of North Berkeley Farmer's Market immediately.  Now, there is nothing wrong with feeling more comfortable with people more like you, but those feelings should have been part of the analysis.

My second critique is that the West Oakland Farmer's Market failed, ultimately, while the North Berkeley Farmer's Market succeeded.  The reader needs to know more about the institutional and community reasons as to why one organization succeeded and the other failed.  Alkon makes an initial argument that conflicts about the direction of the organization led to the failure, but it also seems that there could be community reasons.  For instance, although West Oakland Farmer's Market is in a low income black neighborhood that is rapidly gentrifying, very few black community members participated, and most of the customers were relatively affluent.  About 50 percent of the customers were white.  It could be that there may have been little real community buy-in, a problem that markets face on low income communities throughout the nation.  Why is this?  What would work better?

Secondly, we know almost nothing about the institutional landscapes in which the farmer's market operate.  Who funds the Ecology Center, the organization that backs the North Berkeley Farmer's Market?  Why can they maintain funding for the market when the organizations backing West Oakland cannot?  Can an argument be made that institutional racism also played a role in the demise of West Oakland Farmer's Market?  What kinds of food movement programs would work in low income neighborhoods of color?  Why?  I feel like these are pertinent, unanswered questions that I as both a practitioner, activist, and academic would like to know.

Overall, though, this book is really incredible.  Comparative studies are really hard to do, and Alkon pulls this one off nicely.  She communicates with a critical voice that doesn't get in anyone's face.  She communicates in a language that people involved in the research can understand.  Spend some time with this book.

Eating Alabama and the White Farm Imaginary

 

Last night, I finally had the privilege of viewing Eating Alabama, a documentary by University of Alabama professor Andy Grace (shown above right: image via al.com). Since seeing the trailer, I have been anticipating screening it for months. It struck me as a sort of anthem for one section of the Alabama's alternative agriculture movement, and I was curious to see if Grace departed from well-traveled terrain and promoted any new views of alternative food.

Eating Alabama Trailer from Moon Winx Films on Vimeo.

In the film, Grace (a filmmaking professor) and his wife Rashmi (now an urban farm educator) eat the way their grandparents did for a whole year, consuming only locally grown, non-GMO and seasonal foods. While trying to support small farmers with their project, they find that many are struggling to survive.

Though I thought the film was artistically sound, quite stylish and funny, and included a very important critique of industrial agriculture, Grace fails to depart significantly from what Alison Alkon and Christie McCullen call the "white farm imaginary" in a 2011 Antipode article. To make the meaning of this term clear, I quote from their article at length:

"For many customers in farmer's markets we study, the markets are more than just a place to procure food.  Customers are motivated to shop at farmer's markets by ethical imperatives to 'support your local farmer' or 'buy directly from the people who grow food.'  Such phrases are common not only in the everyday conversations of market shoppers, but in the work of food writers and celebrity chefs that has made alternative agriculture so increasingly popular.  In this section, we argue that these common slogans produce what we call a white farm imaginary.  This imagery romanticizes and universalizes an agrarian narrative specific to whites while masking the contributions and struggles of people of color in food production (see also Sackman 2005).

"The white farm imaginary holds that small-scale, yeoman farmer as an American agricultural icon.  Only whites, however, were historically able to farm this way.  This imaginary ignores the justification of Native American displacement by white homesteaders, the enslavement of African Americans, the masses of underpaid Asian immigrants who worked California's first factory farms, and the mostly Mexican farm laborers who harvest the majority of food grown in the USA today (Allen 2004: Guthman 2008b).  Therefore, it is quite possible that the romantic notions of yeoman farmers and rural culture do not resonate with many people of color whose collective history recalls the racism and classism of America's agricultural past and present."

Eating Alabama reproduces this white farm imaginary quite clearly.  To begin with, there are very few blacks in the film, and the ones that do appear, appear incidentally. This alone should strike us in a state that is over one quarter black and also has a significant population of black farmers (compared to non-Southeastern states). There are also no Hispanic or Latino people shown in the film - again, striking in a state where local food depends on migrant workers and the agricultural landscape was rocked by the sudden shortage of Hispanic and Latino laborers after HB56 passed last year.

To further bolster this white imaginary, Grace romanticizes our rural agrarian past by repeatedly calling our grandparents' way of living a "simpler way of life." Certainly, in highly segregated rural areas, often policed by the Ku Klux Klan and controlled by politicians determined to institutionalize white supremacy, Alabama's agrarian past was not a "simpler way of life" for blacks, but was rather oppressive and exploitative. Sharecropping, in which both black and white farm laborers received a share of the crop for working the land for planters, can only be seen as a marginal improvement from slavery, and almost as oppressive. The film makes no mention of segregation or Jim Crow, even though many of those battles were fought in rural areas.

Grace does acknowledge that our agrarian past is associated with slavery, but then disassociates his idealized family history from it because, he says, his ancestors were too poor to own slaves. This is a trick of rhetoric used by many whites to distance themselves from the institution of slavery. Grace's ancestors may not have owned slaves, but we can be fairly sure that they supported the institution of slavery. At the time almost all poor whites did, and it directly benefitted them by placing them higher in the racial and class hierarchy.

Eating Alabama therefore has the unfortunate quality of erasing history in order to promote a romantic, whitened notion of how the food movement should organize based on a mythical past.

"An unsustainable model for sustainability"

Grace knows all this, or at least, has reservations about the romanticization of rural culture and yeoman farming. Throughout the film, he constantly asks himself "am I being naive?" and "why am I romanticizing?"

While Grace's film depicts his year of pursuing this white farming ideal, he remains ambivalent about its viability as an alternative to the current industrial food system, leaving it up to the viewer to decide whether he is, indeed, romanticizing. At one point he asks whether his lifestyle experiment is "an unsustainable model for sustainability."

Unfortunately, Grace fails to pursue his doubts to what could have been a different conclusion - that while his year of "living sustainably" may not be viable for most people, it is also not the only alternative to industrial food out there. Grace and many other local food advocates fail to see that many of the people who have always been systematically excluded from industrial agriculture have already evolved alternative institutions to aid and promote the well-being and economic security of small farms.

Viable alternatives

Blacks have never been included in industrial agriculture.  The recently concluded Pigford v. Glickman settlement says as much.  As I mentioned in a previous post, black farmers have therefore developed alternative institutions to bolster small farms. Tuskegee University, founded in 1881, has been aiding small farmers for over a century.  Alabama A&M, a historically-black land grant university and one of the so-called 1890 schools, has also been at the service of the small farm for many years and is the host of the Small Farms Research Center.  And finally, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC) has been fighting for small farmers since 1967.

A cooperative is a method of organizing farmers which allows them to build economies of scale to ensure economic security and sustainability.  Basically, in a cooperative, groups of farmers come together to market collectively, all sharing equal ownership in the business.  Instead of just serving local markets, they can access regional, national, and even international markets, all while preserving the viability of the small farm.  This is a more practical, real-world alternative to industrialized agriculture than the white farm imaginary, and should serve, at the least, as an organizing principle for the alternative food and agriculture movement.

I recently had the pleasure of attending the FSC's 45th anniversary celebration. What was clear to me throughout the evening was that the members of the Federation have a deep and abiding sense of social and economic justice. They serve limited resource and minority farmers to keep them as viable business entities.

The white faction of the alternative food and agriculture movement can learn a lot from this practical, pragmatic, and serious dedication to the oppressed and exploited. The FSC grew out of the Civil Rights Movement, and they see themselves as carrying on that tradition. Isn't that a better story to tell about food and agriculture?

I am a White Male

I believe that it is time that I say a little about myself, who I am, and why I do what I do.  First and foremost, I am a radical scholar-activist.  I am currently in school at the University of California, Berkeley, pursuing my PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management.  I am also a Southern white male, which places me in a very particular position to comment on social phenomena in the South from an insider's perspective.  As a Southern white male, my first education was that of a white supremacist.

A point of order; while this is my personal story, I am not saying anything that people of color haven't been saying for centuries.  100 years ago, W.E.B. Dubois talked about the "psychological wage" of whiteness, which is essentially white privilege.

I learned early in life about white privilege, the structural characteristic of whiteness that causes whites to have an entitled approach to living and interacting with others.  An example of white privilege is that whites believe that if one works hard and follows the rules, the system will provide benefits, a life, and a living to them.  Of course, people who aren't white men recognize instantly that all manners of glass ceilings exist that impede this upward mobility, but this belief in upward mobility is a hallmark characteristic of whiteness and white privilege.

Back to my life.  My earliest memories were from Fairfield, Alabama, an older industrial suburb of Birmingham.  At 5, this area was transitioning from a white neighborhood to a black neighborhood, owing to white flight.  My family was poor by any measure of income, but my parents put me in an all white private school because the black public schools were "bad."  While the purported quality of schools may or may not have been true, what is undoubtedly true is that being put in private school was the first inculcation of my white privilege.  Other instances from my life, further conditioned me to accept white privilege as both natural and the normal mode of living.

I began to defend that privilege vigorously at about 10 or 12 when I started to listen to conservative talk radio.  I held Rush and Hannity to be among the most important prophets of the time, and even won caller of the day on Hannity's talk show when it was in  Huntsville.  The specific reason that I won caller of the day was because I railed agains the Black Coaches Association for defending athletic scholarships.  I made some ridiculous comment that basically amounted to "whites are smarter than blacks," though it was highly coded, showing how at a young age I understood how to use racially coded language.

My racist racial theory began to fall apart when I entered the blue collar world, where for the first time I was really exposed to black people.  Most of this transformation was non-conscious as I started to assimilate new information.  I entered the blue collar world because I refused to go to college, much to my parents dismay.  There I saw blacks in much the same position as myself, struggling to survive on meager incomes.  The work was long, brutal, and oppressive.

My new anti-racist perspective arose out of my engagement with anthropology after abandoning my blue collar career for an opportunity in higher education.  Through anthropology I learned the concept of cultural relativism, the idea that one's culture must be judged by its own criteria.  I began to try to understand others around me from their own perspective and even looked back to my experiences as an auto mechanic and warehouse worker with new-found clarity.  The anti-racist perspective began to crystallize in graduate school when I was introduced to different aspects of critical race theory.

My rudimentary understanding of the anti-racist perspective basically entailed the mainstream liberal solution to racial animosity - that everything can be solved by constructing a diverse community.  While this is a start, it still entails one of the hallmarks of whiteness - universalism.  When whites talk about community, they do so from a perspective that entails adoption of their colorblind values.  However, colorblindness is in itself a racist ideology in that it denies the real differences in history and experiences between whites and people of color.  As I learned to recognize those differences, I saw that constructing a community isn't enough, it must be the construction of a community underpinned by anti-racism, the belief that our society, and even global society, is organized unequally on the basis of race, and to actively work in one's everyday life against that inequality.  This entails as much fighting our own individual racist demons as it does reaching out to try to change the world around you.  The two are mutually determined.

I've learned that I still have white privilege in spite of my desire for that to disappear.  I've learned that I'm still a racist in spite of the fact I don't want to be.  And I've learned that this is all a result of white supremacy, the name of this organizing system.  To change this system, we must first fight white supremacy within ourselves and then reach out to the world to share that fight with others.  This is how change happens.

White Heroes, Racial Purity, and the Media

A previous version of this blog post stated that no blacks were interviewed.  This was incorrect, as Mark Bowen is African American.  The error was regrettable.

Apologies to my few readers for not posting sooner, but I'm 5 of 6 chapters down on my dissertation and we have a paper ready for publication.  I have been working.

But, something caught my eye today: an article in Grist on local food in Alabama.  I found this to be amazing piece that really captures how whiteness is reproduced in the media.

First of all, one of those interviewed and none of the organizations covered are black.  This gives one the impression that local food is a solely white affair in Alabama.  But, this is clearly not true.

The Federation of Southern Cooperatives, which saves black land and organizes mostly black cooperatives of small family farmers, has been in operation since 1967, and grew out of the Civil Rights Movement.  Alabama has not one, but two HBCU agricultural universities, Tuskegee and Alabama A&M.  So, clearly the fight for the small farm has been in existence far longer than Jones Valley Urban Farm, the Front Porch Revival, or Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network.  In a fine example of how whiteness distorts reality, a fight that has been led for over forty years by black-run organizations is transformed into a fight led by trendy white heroes.

Furthermore, the claim that somehow the white side of the local food movement doesn't appeal to the white bourgeois is suspect at best.

Food has always been a way to affirm and reproduce identity. During Jim Crow, food practices acted as a way to reproduce white racial purity.  In her dissertation To Live and Dine in Dixie: Foodways and Culture in the Twentieth Century South, Angela Jill Cooley argues that because food was ingested and literally became to body of the consumer, it was strictly policed by racial mores.  Eating the right food was paramount to reproducing a healthy, pure, white body, and therefore part and parcel to the culture of Jim Crow.

Today's healthy lifestyle justification for local food is a similar purity narrative.  Propagated by elites and cultural producers, healthy lifestyle similarly reproduces white purity by relegating alternative food practices to marginal status.  As one member of the Health Action Partnership stated to me, "even when (black) people have access to good food, they don't know how to cook it.  They cook it with too much oil, and it cooks all the nutrients out of it."

The healthy lifestyle argument for local food is more about reproducing the status of those consuming it than about the actual health of the consumers. (One thinks of the numerous fundraising dinners with Frank Stitt or Chris Dupount and how their highly unhealthy food all of the sudden becomes healthy because it is fine dining).  Under both Jim Crow and modern food ways, the "pure food" is backed by the perceived legitimacy and objectivity of science, with whites using science to validate their foodways as objectively superior.  The white side of the local food movement, with its overarching focus on health and purity, is absolutely an elitist endeavor.  (I love how they talk about it not being elitist and then talk about Frank Stitt and Chris Hastings as the "original local food revolutionaries" three paragraphs later.)  Anyone who argues otherwise is selling something.

So what does all this mean?  Well, it means that there are deep racial divisions within the local food movement, divisions that are reproduced by media outlets, and which are reflected in the broader culture.  There are divisions in the local food movement because there are divisions in the local culture.

What can be done about it?  One thing is to hold media outlets like Grist accountable for their product.  What Grist did was simply lazy, but it had the unfortunate quality of marginalizing the groups that have led the fight for the small farm for decades.

Another thing that can be done is to host anti-racist workshops like the one Magic City Agriculture Project is hosting beginning next week and continuing for six months.  This Allies training will focus on cultivating resistance to white supremacy and building community around this resistance.

Birmingham enters the 1980s: Gentrification, Hipsters, and the New Middle Class

I recently attended the PostScript blog launch party at 55th Place in Woodlawn.  The event was well attended by Birmingham's cadre of hipsters and showcased musical talent from across the country.

What is so interesting about the event is that while almost all of the attendees were white, 70% of the neighborhood of Woodlawn is black.  This immediately raises interesting questions like why are whites drawn to an event in a black neighborhood?  What are the promoters of such an event trying to accomplish by hosting a trendy event in a black neighborhood? And why did blacks not attend the event?

The crux of the answers to these questions lie in the idea of taste.  Bourdieu argued that taste is socially constructed by struggles among the upper classes over what is legitimate.  In other words, art considered beautiful, food considered delicious, and books considered profound are not so because of their inherent quality but because of the struggles of taste-makers over these works.  Gentrification, or the return of whites to inner city neighborhoods, is a similar field of struggle.  Young, trendy, up-and-coming individuals struggle to produce a neighborhood as a trendy (or tasteful) destination by hosting events like the one I attended Sunday night.  They work to remake the neighborhood in their image, and the desire here is for Woodlawn to become an artists hub.  But this is not the end of the story.

Main Street Birmingham has worked tirelessly to remake Woodlawn in this image.  They have promoted 55 Place Arts which is next door to Main Street Birmingham's main office.  They have promoted local food in stores in the neighborhood, and they have marketed the area as a magnet for arts and entertainment - consumption-side development.  Gentrification requires both the trendy hipsters willing to invest time and money into the neighborhood and government or quasi-government institutions backing neighborhood transformation.

All this seems well and good.  A depressed neighborhood receives investment, whites move into the neighborhood, schools get better, jobs are created, and everybody lives happily ever after.  However, what this story doesn't tell is that the people who pay the costs of this development are blacks, many of whom have lived in the neighborhood for years.  In 2000, Woodlawn was 77 percent black and 17 percent white with populations of 9,657 and 2,086 respectively.  In 2010, Woodlawn was 72 percent black and 23 percent white with populations of 8,284 and 2,656 respectively.  Woodlawn lost almost 1400 black residents during the past ten years, meaning that many blacks were displaced by the white invasion, rising property values, and rising property taxes associated with gentrification.  So while a Sunday night meeting of hipsters in a black neighborhood seems innocent enough, it is part of a larger process with dire consequences for blacks and black communities.

The Birmingham-Jefferson Food Policy Council: New Opportunities, part 2

Birmingham-Jefferson Food Policy Council Formed

The preceding article appeared today, two days after my blog post on the BJFPC.  I am assuming that it is at least in part a response to this post.  The article basically states that the committee that chose the council took into account race and made a push for diversity, and that the agenda for the council is to address food deserts.  I will address both topics beginning with the agenda for the council.

The council has not had a formal meeting (a retreat, but no official meeting, the first one is in March, tentatively) and therefore has had no opportunity to form an agenda.  If the agenda is formed by the Health Action Partnership, this diminishes the council's independence and autonomy. With all the new faces at the table, the council must be given time to form its own agenda, seeking input from throughout Jefferson County.  If not, it will just be the policy arm of the HAP and not representative of the larger community.  If the council choses to address food deserts, it should do so independently, drawing from multiple perspectives and multiple social locations.

What I would really like to address is race.  Let's be plain.  While the HAP may have worked to be inclusive of different races and class positions, it did not succeed in creating a racially and economically diverse body of people.  The group is overwhelmingly white and professional.  This in and of itself need not impede action, but the members of the council are going to have to think long and hard about their social position in a place as segregated and unequal as Jefferson County.  To the point, the council should not devise interventions without the partnership of the communities in which these interventions will take place.  Showing up at these communities with grand plans to solve big problems is likely to meet with skepticism and mistrust, as there is a long history of white dominated organizations promising the moon and delivering little.  Furthermore, the interventions designed by the white dominated BJFPC will likely be inappropriate without the input of the communities that are targeted.  The BJFPC, if it is to be successful, must refrain from developing agendas and programs without first doing the arduous work of listening to the communities targeted by these programs.  In other words, programs must be developed in partnership.

Finally, white people going into food desert neighborhoods, which are mostly black, to save them from a broken food system fairly wreaks of a missionary mentality.  Whites must understand that they are in a privileged social position vis-a-vis blacks and must wrestle with what this means and how this affects their interpretation of reality.  This is why listening is really hard work.  Whites not only have to listen to the words that blacks have to say, but also must understand their perspective, where they are coming from, requiring one to really step outside oneself to see how society distributes benefits and disadvantages solely based on race.

I want to reiterate that I am engaging in this dialogue because I want the Food Policy Council to work and work well.  I hold no ill will towards whites or members of the Health Action Partnership.  I would like for this discussion to continue in hopes that we can adequately address food system issues.

The Birmingham-Jefferson Food Policy Council: New Opportunities

I apologize for ignoring this blog for so long.  Since October, I've starting writing my dissertation, and most of my writing energy is taken up there.

 I do, however, want to weigh in on the creation of a new food policy council, a process which I have observed rigorously and hopefully played a minor role.  The food policy council is a great idea and I sincerely hope for its success.  FPCs tend to run the gambit from completely independent of any government entity to completely run by departments of health.  The BJFPC is a public-private partnership, which bodes well for both independent thinking and actually influencing policy, provided it doesn't devolve into gridlock.

As the agenda is not set, I wanted to provide some directions for the food policy council to take in hopes to that it will contribute to a more robust, diverse discussion of the food system in Jefferson County.


1.  While the food policy council pulls from a diverse cross section of the food system, it lacks racial and class diversity.  Only 5 of the 21 members are people of color and all of the members are professionals - it lacks representation from the working class.  Because of this, the council will be significantly limited in perspective.  To rectify this, the council must develop a strong relationship with the neighborhood associations in Birmingham and with black church leaders throughout the region.  It also must adopt anti-racism as a stated goal.

2.  The largest problem facing urban farms and community gardens in the region is lack of funding.  Few national foundations fund urban agriculture programs, and local funding is a very small with many feeding at the trough.  The council must devise programs that can be passed by local municipalities that will help fund these struggling farms.  Most of these farms and gardens are trying to provide green jobs in areas that have little employment opportunity, which can be an important selling point to local politicians.

3.  One way to fund such a program would be the creation of a soda tax.  A rough estimate of revenues from a one cent soda tax in Jefferson County is 25 million dollars.  This would be more than enough to fund urban agriculture and recycling, both dire needs in the region. Developing robust ties to low-income and communities of color would be even more imperative, given that pushing a soda tax would be initially unpopular.

And here are the things that it should not do:

1.  The focus on health falls on deaf ears for many in the region.  I have critiqued the discussion of obesity in a previous blog and I believe this to be a highly depoliticized and extremely problematic approach to the food movement.  Everyday people in Jefferson County's communities are focused on getting grocery stores and creating employment, not on issues that demean their body-type and lifestyle.  The obesity discussion is unfortunately highly evangelical.

2.  The BJFPC should also avoid solely focusing on creating profitable markets for rural farmers, though this is important.  Jefferson County is largely an urban county and the BJFPC should reflect the needs of an urban county.  While delivering fresh, healthy food is important, job creation is more important.  The fastest way to get someone to eat better is to give them a job or a better job.

3.  And please, please abandon any discussion of food labeling.  It costs money, has virtually no effect, and shows a very rudimentary view on how to change behaviors.

I sincerely hope that my suggestions don't fall on deaf ears, and I wish the BJFPC the best of success in the future.