When Woody Tasch asks the question: What would the world be like if we invested 50% of our assets within 50 miles of where we live? I imagine the city and country reaching toward each other to become more sustainable and interdependent. From an aerial view I see wide corridors of fields and forests interpenetrating a mosaic of dense towns and cities. From dense areas people could walk, bike, or run through parks and post-industrial gardens to get access to wider corridors of farms, orchards, land trusts, forest, and vice versa. The connectedness of these systems would allow farmers easier access to consumers, and everyone access to a diversity of environments. Such a dream would require development limits, and public and private (Slow Money) investment in productive corridors. What would it take for your community to look this way? What do you think would happen if we invested in the places we live?

The Food Literacy Project at Harvard University brought Woody Tasch to the screening of Food Fight on February 16 with the film’s director, and Slow Money founding member, Chris Taylor. The film acknowledged that industrial agriculture had indeed provided cheap food to Americans but in the process has destroyed flavor and nutritional value. Continue reading »

President Obama addressed the urgent need for bringing healthy food options to underserved communities in his FY2011 budget proposal by calling for more than $400 million in investments in new and expanded supermarkets, farmers markets and other food stores. According to The Reinvestment Fund, for more than a year, they have been working with PolicyLink, The Food Trust and the White House, the Senate, and the House to create a national-scale version of the successful Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative. Continue reading »

Why is it that we aspire to the local? Professor David Roochnik, Boston University, considers this question In Defense of the Local: Aristotelian Reflections on a Politics of Place: Since the “scientific revolution” of the 17^th century, we find ourselves in a technological culture in which the finite and knowable, the local (and the Slow), is replaced by the infinite and unknowable, in a thoroughly de-humanized conception of the universe. Understanding this may help us better understand the nature of our political experience. Buying tomatoes at the farmers’ market is a gesture, a plea, a response to and a protest against a globalized culture, and a desire for place.  Aristotle helps us understand that desire. He thereby helps us to understand ourselves. And we need this kind of self-knowledge in order to make a better claim for the priority of the local in our lives.

Click here for an excerpt.

Cape Ann Fresh Catch is the first CSF in Massachusetts and Clare Leschin-Hoar uncovers the complexities of thoughtful fish consumption in “The Dish on Fish: Steps toward Sustainability” in EdibleBoston.

Continue reading »

The Food Project in Boston, Growing Power in Milwaukee and Chicago, and Added Value in Brooklyn all engage young people in a wide range of food related activities that include restoring sites and soils, growing and harvesting food, cooking and selling produce, and giving food to those in need.

Continue reading »

Since obesity alone threatens to overwhelm the healthcare system, The Full Yield delivers healthy food to the workplace, Nest Collective and Revolution Foods deliver nutritious meals to underserved schools while Safeway rewards employee’s improvements in health measures.

Continue reading »

In 2006, Diane Imrie, Director of Nutrition Services, and the management team at Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington, Vermont, signed the Healthy Food in Health Care pledge for fresh, local, sustainable food. Now they are nationally recognized leaders in the relationship of food to environmental, agricultural, and health issues.  They have opened a new café with the goal of having the most sustainable menu in health care in the country, developed an educational component, incorporated sustainable construction practices, and received a federal grant to foster food partnerships in Vermont and across the U.S.   Slow Money investment in partnerships such as these could increase the quality and quantity of local food services to health care facilities. Continue reading »

Dave Jackson, owner of Enterprise Farm, describes on his website the melancholy we who live in snowy climes all feel at the end of the Farmer’s Market season. Though Eliot Coleman is known for supplying his small town in Maine with a Four-Season Harvest, until recently the winter alternative in Boston was simply the supermarket. There are now alternatives that have been created in the space between the farmer and large wholesale distributors. These new relationships emerge from the shared values embraced by organic farming, reduced energy costs, and the relationships that follow. Continue reading »

Marcia Stepanek published the following article on November 10, 2009 on MSNBC’s website.

First there was slow food, then slow cities and slow design. Now there is Woody Tasch, the catalyst behind a new movement touting “slow money” — the name the former venture capitalist-turned-revolutionary gives to his philosophy that combines a passion for social enterprise with the benefits of locally grown food. Continue reading »