Michael Pollan, author and professor of journalism at UC Berkley, is often credited with igniting the local food movement with his 2004 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Building off the work of early big agribusiness critics like Eric Schlosser, who penned Fast Food Nation three years earlier, Pollan used a tale of four different meals to expose the often-ignored realities of the post-1970s corporate food chain and offered his readership an alternative: local, organic food.

For many of you, this isn’t anything you haven’t heard before.  Heck, many of you are already arm-deep in compost, installing urban gardens in the forgotten corners of town, raising chickens, and luring farmer’s onto store shelves and weekly tables at markets, thanks to that little black book.

But Omnivore was published six years ago, and the food movement today struggles more with fusing the many thought-segments of the movement, than convincing enough average citizen that she should care more about the true “cost” of a corn dog.

Pollan’s follow-up books have dealt largely with transposing his Omnivore arguments into action items for the everyday eater.  ( “Eat Food. Not Too Much.  Mostly Plants.”)   In Defense of Food and Food Rules are smart publishing moves, giving the populace the diet books they crave (pun intended), but what of the movement itself?

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This was just posted in DM’s classifieds section…

East Lake Farmers Market is located at the corner of 2nd Ave & Hosea Williams, at the convergence of the East Lake, Oakhurst, & Kirkwood neighborhoods. Last year East Lake resident Doug Williams started the farmers market against all odds. “We got the green light at the end of March, & managed to pull together a small but great group of vendors to participate by mid-May, operating all season on a tiny budget” Doug explains, who set-up the market every Saturday for 26 weeks. Each week, over 100 neighbors from around the area supported the market.

Many improvements are underway for the 2010 ELF Market season, which opens Saturday, May 1st with a ‘Collard Greens Cook-Off’ benefitting Hosea Feed the Hungry, including purchasing EBT equipment that will enable the use of food stamps, making healthy produce more available to all. Community fund raisers, live music, & market demonstrations are being planned throughout the season.

The ELF Market is now accepting donations for the 2010 season.