Last I checked, we don’t refer to our neighborhood gardens as “local gardens” or “animal rights gardens” or “foodie’s delight gardens” or “weight-loss gardens” or even “environmentally friendly gardens”.

When friends and neighbors come together for any number of reasons and start a communal garden – as the late Sally Wylde and her then husband did in Oakhurst back in 1994 – it is first and foremost referred to as a “community garden.”

While the central tenet of “community” may seem glaringly obvious when looked at it in this specific way, this component is one that is often ignored in many of the larger conversations about “local food”.  Big picture questions about what it means, who it should be helping, and who it ultimately reports to.

As the popularity of “local food” has evolved out of the “Back to the Land” movement of the 1970s and entered the mainstream, it has quickly been claimed by nearly every conceivable “cause” in the country.

To the ardent environmentalist, local food is a way to wean ourselves off cheap energies like oil.  To those with great concern for animals, it can be an alternative to becoming a strict vegetarian.  For those interested in worker’s rights, it’s a way to support a local farmer, who isn’t hiring for positions so grueling that only the most desperate among us will apply for them.  To the “foodie” (“gourmand” if you’re old-school) it’s all about taste.  To the nutritionist, it’s the commonsensical respite from a decade of powerful, mainstream diet fads.  And so on.

However, the vast promise in the simple act of “eating locally” has also, in some ways, become its own Achilles heel.

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I’m still on record that I love this idea, right?

The Decatur Minute has a great sketch of what the city-sponsored “Oakhurst Farm” or “Oakhurst Urban Garden” between 2nd and 3rd Avenue in Oakhurst could look like.

With the help of resident and landscape designer Lindsey Mann, the idea for the farm has been floating around city hall for a few years, but it now finally has the funding it needs to move forward.  According to the Minute, the first planning meeting for the farm will take place next Wednesday at 7p at the Solarium.

Click the sketch to the right to view a larger version over on The Decatur Minute.

The AJC’s Kristina Torres has a nice, little feature on DHS senior Anna Rose Gable and her efforts to start a community garden on an unused portion of school property at the corner of Commerce and E. Howard.

The article says plots are available for $65 each, but doesn’t give any contact info for those interested.  Anyone have that?

This could be great for those of us that would like to start a little vegetable garden, but are covered by a very dense tree canapy.

With the publishing of Michael Pollan’s unintentional mission statement “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” in 2006, interest in the local food movement has exploded over the last 3 years.  Across the country, many different factions of farmers and eaters began to take a critical look at what they ate and where it came from.

But still in its infancy, the movement is endangered of being defined by its own extremes.  Stories about local food that float into popular culture often focus on the efforts of the wealthy, featuring recently retired corporate executives buying up old farm houses and producing goat’s milk cheese or local high-profile chefs taking up the food-to-table cause.   Outside of our own Atlanta, Serenbe sits as an upper-class community/utopia focused as much on food sustainability as on the principles of New Urbanism.

And while these high-profile efforts remain vital components of a larger picture, four-star restaurants and $4 heirlooms are often mistaken as the end goal of foodies everywhere.

Luckily, that’s not true.

The end goal is actually a lot more complicated and a lot less Utopian.  This month Mother Jones magazine details the struggle of locovores nationwide as they turn their attention away from their own habits and toward the habits of our agriculture policy.  While the first step was personally enlightening, the second is bound to be a seemingly endless slog through the mud of agribusiness subsidies.

And while this effort won’t provide as many great garden photo-ops or opportunities to sample great cuisine, it should never be forgotten that this is ultimately the more important and impactful goal of local food advocates everywhere.

Luckily, Pollan keeps reminding us of this.

Sometimes I feel kinda psychic.

These days whenever I come across an article by a food writer that invokes the word “rant” in the title OR apologizes for ranting in the first two sentences, I can  accurately predict that 9 times out of 10 the name “Michael Pollan” will show up within three paragraphs.

Thus was the case this morning, when my eyes fell upon food critic Cliff Bostock’s Year-End Rant in the pages of Creative Loafing’s Year in Review.

Since its publication in 2004, Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and follow up, In Defense of Food, have really hit a nerve among those in the U.S. that have a passion for food.  Omnivore helped propel the slow/local food initiative, which today is exemplified by CSAs and in restaurants like Decatur’s Cakes and Ale, highlighting local, in season foods.

Why bring all this up (again)?

Well, a few weeks back, DMoholic Scott pointed out to me that Pollan is coming to Decatur on March 21st to speak at Agnes Scott as part of Georgia Organics 12th Annual Conference and Tradeshow.   The conference runs the 20th and the 21st and registration will begin in January, with preference given to GA Organics members.  So if you want to see Pollan, you might want to become a member if not already one.  Registration will open to the public in late-January if any openings remain.

Oh how I love this photo.  Take THAT corn subsidies!

In this week’s New York Times Magazine “Food Issue”, Michael Pollan writes an open letter to the next President of the United States restating his case for total reformation of the food industrial complex.

Anyone who has read his “Omnivore’s Dilemma” will notice that much of the article is little more than a summation of the book’s argument, slightly updated for 2008.  But for those that hear words like “slow food” and “organic” and think its an exclusively liberal, yuppie enterprise, I would challenge you to take a few minutes to read the 9-page article (yes, 9 pages) and then tell me that there’s not also quite a bit of conservative and libertarian thought embedded in the idea too.

At the local level, we already have a wide selection of CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) delivering around town, an organic farmer’s market, the Oakhurst Community Garden, farm-to-table restaurants that promote local eating, and a city commission that is currently pursuing the idea of allowing residents to farm small parcels of city-owned land that aren’t really usable for anything else.

What else can we be doing to lessen our dependence on the oil-based food industry?

Here’s a question that popped into my mind…what’s CSD’s lunch menu look like these days?  Well, here’s the October menu for the elementary schools…corn dogs?