Food Retailing Innovation Memo: Innovative Combination Retail Food Market and Urban Farm Set to Open in New Orleans LA USA Neighborhood

New Orleans' Hollygrove market and urban farm is set to open in January, 2009

Educational garden and market hope to regrow Hollygrove neighborhood
By Judy Walker

Food editor, The Times-Picayune - New Orleans
November 10, 2008

Once the site of Guillot's Nursery in New Orleans, LA USA, the Hollygrove Market and Farm is set to start selling local produce in January.

The site of the former Guillot's Nursery will become the Hollygrove Market & Farm, a self-sustaining nonprofit store selling local produce and an education center for urban farming, organizers announced last week.

The Carrollton-Hollygrove Community Development Corp. and New Orleans Food & Farm Network will develop and operate the market on the one-acre site at 8301 Olive St. It is expected to open in January; the first cover crop to build the soil in the teaching garden already is sprouting.

Hollygrove community member Michael Beauchamp lives nearby and is a volunteer who has been with the program about three months.

"I'm a first-time gardener, and I'm loving it," Beauchamp said. "It's a cost savings. There are lower transportation costs. I can eat healthy and probably add years to my life. And I can plant my garden and come here and sell the extra."

The concept sprang from the Carrollton-Hollygrove Community Development Corp., a neighborhood organization formed to encourage rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina. The group wanted to address the long-standing lack of access to fresh fruits and vegetables in the
Hollygrove-Gert Town-Fountainbleau area.

Paul Baricos, the group's executive director, said they saw the Guillot's property and realized it would be perfect., They partnered with NOFFN, which was looking for a place to train farmers in organic certification, to "grow the growers" to meet the huge demand for local food.

"We'll operate the store," Baricos said, providing community jobs, "and (NOFFN) will train four to six people at a time. We hope to .¤.¤. focus on locally grown foods. But there's not that much grown in New Orleans. We canvassed rural farms within 100 miles, and we will buy from farms in south Louisiana and southern Mississippi. So it will be seasonal."

The market also hopes to sell to chefs, schools and weekend markets, he added.

NOFFN executive director Kris Pottharst said the partnership "is looking at it as not only fresh food but economic development. One purpose is to highlight the neighborhood as a desirable place to live. This will provide one of the sought-after amenities that is mentioned by all neighborhood groups as to how they want to rebuild their neighborhood after the storm."
Pottharst said the lease on the property was effective in September, and includes the 5,000-square-foot main building that will house the market. The second floor will be used for offices, classrooms and neighborhood meeting space.

Demonstration plots will be placed along the outside fence, in direct sight lines of the Carrollton Boosters sports fields across the street. A salvaged hoop house will be used to grow seedlings. Donated fruit trees have been planted. Tulane City Center, the outreach program of the Tulane University architecture department, is creating an outdoor shade space and entrance arbor.

Among those attending Friday's announcement of the program was former NBA player Will Allen, who received a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant as founder of Growing Power Inc. in Milwaukee. Allen has become an international spokesperson for urban farming.

"I'm the son of a sharecropper," Allen said. "And I'm passing on what was passed on to me, in a different sort of way, with a community twist."

Food Innovation Guest Memo: An American Professor's Food Revolution Starts With Rice

International Herald Tribune
June 18, 2008
By William J. Broad

Many a professor dreams of revolution. But Norman Uphoff, working in a leafy corner of the Cornell University campus, is leading an inconspicuous one centered on solving the global food crisis. The secret, he says, is a new way of growing rice.

Rejecting old customs as well as the modern reliance on genetic engineering, Uphoff, 67, an emeritus professor of government and international agriculture with a trim white beard and a tidy office, advocates a management revolt.

Harvests typically double, he says, if farmers plant early, give seedlings more room to grow and stop flooding fields. That cuts water and seed costs while promoting root and leaf growth.

The method, called the System of Rice Intensification, or SRI, emphasizes the quality of individual plants over the quantity. It applies a less-is-more ethic to rice cultivation.

In a decade, it has gone from obscure theory to global trend — and encountered fierce resistance from established rice scientists. Yet a million rice farmers have adopted the system, Uphoff says. The rural army, he predicts, will swell to 10 million farmers in the next few years, increasing rice harvests, filling empty bellies and saving untold lives.
Today in Health & Science

"The world has lots and lots of problems," Uphoff said recently while talking of rice intensification and his 38 years at Cornell. "But if we can't solve the problems of peoples' food needs, we can't do anything. This, at least, is within our reach."

That may sound audacious given the depths of the food crisis and the troubles facing rice. Roughly half the world eats the grain as a staple food even as yields have stagnated and prices have soared, nearly tripling in the past year. The price jolt has provoked riots, panicked hoarding and violent protests in poor countries.

But Uphoff has a striking record of accomplishment, as well as a gritty kind of farm-boy tenacity.

He and his method have flourished despite the skepticism of his Cornell peers and the global rice establishment — especially the International Rice Research Institute, which helped start the green revolution of rising grain production and specializes in improving rice genetics.

His telephone rings. It is the World Bank Institute, the educational and training arm of the development bank. The institute is making a DVD to spread the word.

"That's one of the irons in the fire," he tells a visitor, looking pleased before plunging back into his tale.

Uphoff's improbable journey involves a Wisconsin dairy farm, a billionaire philanthropist, the jungles of Madagascar, a Jesuit priest, ranks of eager volunteers and, increasingly, the developing world. He lists top SRI users as India, China, Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam among 28 countries on three continents.

In Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India, Veerapandi Arumugam, the agriculture minister, recently hailed the system as "revolutionizing" paddy farming while spreading to "a staggering" million acres.

Chan Sarun, Cambodia's agriculture minister, told hundreds of farmers at an agriculture fair in April that SRI's speedy growth promises a harvest of "white gold."

On Cornell's agricultural campus, Uphoff runs a one-man show from an office rich in travel mementos. From Sri Lanka, woven rice stalks adorn a wall, the heads thick with rice grains.

His computers link him to a global network of SRI activists and backers, like Oxfam, the British charity. Uphoff is SRI's global advocate, and his Web site (ciifad.cornell.edu/sri/) serves as the main showcase for its principles and successes.

"It couldn't have happened without the Internet," he says. Outside his door is a sign, "Alfalfa Room," with a large arrow pointing down the hall, seemingly to a pre-electronic age.

Critics dismiss SRI as an illusion.

"The claims are grossly exaggerated," said Achim Dobermann, the head of research at the international rice institute, which is based in the Philippines. Dobermann said fewer farmers use SRI than advertised because old practices often are counted as part of the trend and the method itself is often watered down.

"We don't doubt that good yields can be achieved," he said, but he called the methods too onerous for the real world.

By contrast, a former skeptic sees great potential. Vernon Ruttan, an agricultural economist at the University of Minnesota and a longtime member of the National Academy of Sciences, once worked for the rice institute and doubted the system's prospects.

Ruttan now calls himself an enthusiastic fan, saying the method is already reshaping the world of rice cultivation. "I doubt it will be as great as the green revolution," he said. "But in some areas it's already having a substantial impact."

Click here to read the rest of the story.

Food Innovation Guest Memo: Is the Future of 'Meat' in the Laboratory Rather Than on the Ranch?

Graphic by: Scott Wallace/Christian Science Monitor

By Gregory M. Lamb/Staff Writer, Christian Science Monitor
Thursday, May 29, 2008

The human appetite for “meat with feet” has never been great news for animals. But more and more, it’s also being viewed as a detriment to human health and the environment, leading some activists to wonder if a better way to produce meat might be found. One intriguing possibility may be found in the laboratory.

Last month, the animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals announced it was offering $1 million to the first person to make lab-grown chicken meat and sell it to the public by June 30, 2012. The taste and texture, PETA said, must be “indistinguishable” from real chicken flesh, and the lab-cultured meat must be “sold commercially … at a competitive price in at least 10 states.”

While PETA appears be in little danger of losing its money, so-called “in vitro” meat may yet be coming to a hamburger or chicken nugget near you, says Jason Matheny, cofounder and director of New Harvest, a nonprofit group forming a network of researchers and spreading information about cultured or in vitro meat.

At meeting in Norway last month sponsored by the In Vitro Meat Consortium, a group of universities and others studying the idea, “the consensus was encouraging that this is a technology that probably could be developed in the five-to-10-year time frame,” says Mr. Matheny, who is also a PhD candidate in public health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Those at the meeting also heard about a promising paper on the economics of creating meat in a lab rather than growing it in a barnyard. The study, which assumes that the process would involve a mix of current and conceivable future technologies, shows that a cultured meat product could be price competitive with conventional meat, Matheny says.

Europe is the hotbed for this kind of research, with government-funded Dutch researchers taking the lead. In that densely populated country, “If you’re a half a kilometer from a pig farm, you’re going to notice,” Matheny says.

But researchers don’t envision creating faux chicken wings or a T-bone steak. “The technology to produce something like that doesn’t exist, nor is it clear when something like that would exist,” Matheny says.

Instead, they are trying to create a lab-grown version of ground meat, the kind found in hamburgers, sausages, and chicken nuggets. Such products account for about half of all meat consumed today, Matheny says.

Roughly 56 million farm animals worldwide are slaughtered for human consumption each year, says a 2006 report from the United Nations’s Food and Agricultural Organization. Raising livestock, it said, accounts for 18 percent of the human-caused greenhouse gases that cause global warming. That’s a greater share than all forms of transportation combined.

Demand for meat is expected to boom in coming decades, with the number of livestock doubling by 2050, the UN report concludes, as workers in rising economies such as China and India acquire the taste for animal flesh.

Already in the United States, “the present system of producing food animals … is not sustainable and presents an unacceptable level of risk to public health and damage to the environment, as well as unnecessary harm to the animals we raise for food,” said a report from the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production late last month.

Such warnings have scientists working on a meatmaking process that starts with just a single cell taken painlessly from an animal. The likely candidate, a muscle stem cell, would be placed in a mix of amino acids, sugar, salt, water, and proteins that act as growth factors.

Over time, the cells would divide and produce millions of daughter cells, which then are placed on a scaffold. After the cells attach themselves to thin grooves in the scaffold, they are bathed again in the growth mix while being periodically stretched and contracted. This movement creates tension so that the cells form fibers, as happens when muscles are exercised.

After several weeks, a thin sheet of real muscle tissue develops that can be pulled off the scaffold and processed: stacked, rolled, or ground up. Fat cells for flavor and connective tissue for added texture could be grown along with the muscle or grown separately and added later.

The nutritional value could be precisely controlled as well. “With cultured meat, you could have a hamburger with the fat profile of salmon,” Matheny says, adding that a healthy form of fat could be used instead of the less healthy version that naturally occurs in meat. Bioengineered meat might seem incompatible with vegetarian, vegan (no dairy products or eggs), or organic, low-tech lifestyles.

But cultured meat would be aimed primarily at those not ready to give up the sensory pleasures of meat’s flavor and texture. “We don’t expect the whole world to go vegan overnight, and in vitro meat can provide a way to eat ethically while still providing a meat-fix that people are looking for,” says Lindsay Rajt, a spokeswoman for PETA.

“We’ve been trying to get people to become vegetarians for centuries, and it hasn’t worked very well,” says Elizabeth DeCoux, a vegan and an assistant law professor at Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville who teaches and writes about animal rights. “I think people who love animals and haven’t been able to give up meat-eating are probably going to be a big, big market [for cultured meat].”

More exotic uses might be found for the technology, too, Matheny says, including what he calls the “Jurassic Park scenario.” Meat could be produced from the DNA of extinct animals or endangered species, sparing dwindling stocks that are now hunted for meat.

But “the real market for something like this is the people who like the taste of meat and are buying their KFC or McDonald’s chicken nuggets and want a product that is safer and healthier,” he says.

Whether consumers would reject cultured meat as unappetizing “Frankenfood” remains to be seen, but Matheny says the challenge can be met.

“Bread is a bioengineered product. It doesn’t grow on trees, and we accept it,” he argues. Yogurt is cultured in factories that look like pharmaceutical plants. Ultimately, he says, “consumers accept products that have really pronounced benefits.”

Natural~Specialty Foods Memo Editor's Note to Readers: Is this just a "pie-in-the-sky" idea from Peta? Or does lab-created "meat" have merit? Is there a market for "meat" created in a labortory? How would consumers react? Would it be the next food safety issue like GMO's? Should it even be called "meat?" Any ideas for a good name for fake or lab-created meat?

Feel free to chime in with your responses to these questions and your general opinions on the possibillity and potential that the future of "meat" might just be in the labortory rather than on the ranch, using the comment link below.