Hmmm.  From the front page of Sunday’s AJC…

When Atlanta gardeners pick their pumpkins and gourds next month by hand, landscaper Brian Barth will harvest his bounty by net.

Barth has raised more than 100 tilapia and a dozen catfish in a 1,200-gallon tank in a Decatur backyard, his first adventure in aquaculture.

Unlike vegetables, there’s no weeding or watering. Unlike chickens, there’s no clucking or running away. The tank’s churning water soothes by sound and promise. Barth knows exactly where his protein will come from.

“I really think this is the next thing in urban food farming,” said Barth, 31, whose Tree of Life Ecological Services installs edible landscapes. “I can see this in basements or office buildings. Restaurants have always had fish in huge tanks. It will be tank to table.”

Wicked.  From the Gainesville Times…

Sustainable agriculture groups have seized on the opportunity of the first open agriculture commissioner seat in more than 40 years.

Georgia Organics and Emory University on Thursday will hold what they are calling Georgia’s first sustainable agriculture debate.

They say the three men seeking to be Georgia’s second agriculture commissioner in more than 40 years have agreed to participate in front of a packed house at Emory University School of Law’s Tull Auditorium.

…Some 600 people responded to an invitation from the Atlanta-based organization to come to Thursday’s debate, [Georgia Organics Communications Director Michael] Wall said.

The response has been such that Cinnat Howett, Emory’s director of sustainability initiatives, had to hire security guards and extra custodians.

A bit more info on the event HERE.

Creative Loafing just put up a post on Fresh Loaf about a new University of Georgia’s Center for Agribusiness and Economic Development study, which asserts that if every Georgia household spent $10 on Georgia-grown produce that it would pump $1.9 billion a year back into the state economy.

Ah yes, the old “something for nothing” assumption.

Correct me if I’m wrong – and I know you will – but while I have been, and continue to be, a vocal and passionate supporter of local food, I can’t put much credence into a purely economic study.  It may be a great PR piece, but while attempting to simplify the impact of locally grown and purchased produce on the state economy, it seems to undermine itself.

How?

Because it makes one unstated assumption: while Georgia would entirely devote itself to locally grown produce, no other states would.  What happens if every other state does the same thing as Georgia?  How adversely affected would the peach, peanut and Vidalia onion industry be if other states spent more money locally?  Would these two behavioral patterns cancel out the other’s economic impact?

My point is NOT to defend corporate agriculture, but simply to suggest that the argument for more local food on the dinner plate must be more holistic, and that the case for it may actually be weakened when viewed in a vacuum of “economy”.

The impact of local food can’t be reduced to simple revenue.  The argument just doesn’t play out.  (Unless you currently live in a state with no agriculture economy.  Even then, your actions will hurt the economies of the big exporting states.)

Local food is about supporting your neighbor instead of a corporate farm, which in turn supports improved working conditions on farms.  It’s about health and taste.  It’s about the impact on the environment.  It’s about creating a food production model that’s a bit more flexible than the current version, which is solely reliant on a single variable – inexpensive energy – in order to keep feeding the population.

Local food is about a lot of things.  A state’s economy may just not be one of them.

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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After a pre-opening party for friends and fam on May 29th and 30th, Farmstead 303 opened up this Tuesday, June 1st in the Decatur Depot.

While parts of Farmstead’s website are still under construction, the first seasonal menu is up, kicking and awaiting your perusal.

Of particular interest, Farmstead is utilizing its excess land along the train tracks to install 13 raised garden beds around the property to grow and serve ULTRA-local food.  The video below gives a brief tour of what’s currently planted around the property.