How does a strawberry make it from a farm in Watsonville to a table in San Francisco, if not via a farmers’ market? A piece in today’s Journal profiles the burgeoning business of distributing locally grown produce in the Bay Area, which doesn’t happen just through chefs physically interacting with farmers on a daily basis. The San Francisco Foodshed Project, launched in July, is a consortium of businesses and nonprofits that aims to provide links in the supply chain between small farmers and big buyers of produce like the Ritz and St. Regis hotels, and adds a few markups to the fruits and veggies in the process.
The Journal points back to the locavore movement begun by Alice Waters in the 70s, noting the Foodshed Project as the latest step in its evolution. But as Slashfood rightly quips, “It seems that the movement that’s all about cutting out the middleman and connecting eaters with the source of what they eat is discovering the importance of, well, middlemen.”
A New Recipe for Feeding The Farm-to-Table Chain [WSJ]
Locavore a Luxury? [Slashfood]
