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Hi!

I’m Martha Bayne and starting this month I’m going to be blogging occasionally for Fresh Picks about local food issues in the media and around town. I’m a freelance writer and editor, and I organize some weirdly popular programs at the Chicago music venue the Hideout aimed at raising money to support groups involved with local, sustainable food production and community food security. If you ever won a big bag of Irv and Shelly’s produce at a Veggie Bingo game last summer, that was me running the show.

It was hard to miss last week’s big food-world story. In the January/February issue of the Atlantic, writer Caitlin Flanagan launched a scathing attack on Alice Waters’s Edible Schoolyard program that has raised the hackles of cooks, gardeners, parents, and teachers across the country. The editor in me was, frankly, appalled by Flanagan’s lazy research and feeble logic, but I’m not going to add to the general furor surrounding her piece, as many quicker and sharper keyboards are already on the case, including her fellow Atlantic contributor Corby Kummer. (Ed Levine’s impassioned rebuttal at Serious Eats is also good, and I always find Tom Philpott, over at Grist, a calm voice of reason in the heat of any rhetorical firestorm.)

But I do think that Flanagan’s piece is instructive in highlighting just how much misinformation and mistrust is still swirling around out there when it comes to eating locally — which, of course, can include growing your own food. I’m not sure I really want to locate the well from which Flanagan’s bile springs, but her hostility toward what is really a very simple idea — that it can be useful and beneficial for people (children and adults) to learn more about where their food comes from — is kind of fascinating.

Know your food. It’s a pretty basic idea. You can politicize and problematize and pick it apart all you want — and I do think people should — but it’s hard to argue that at heart the endeavor is unworthy or unsound. Knowledge is power, right?

Know your food.

What I like so much about Irv and Shelly, and why I am working with them, is that they’ve seized this idea and turned it into an equally simple, practical business model. Every box of Fresh Picks produce embodies this fundamental principle without a lot of muss or fuss. Which I assume is why you’re here as well, yes?

But that’s probably enough preaching to the choir from me. More to come, soon enough.