I’m creating an Urban Agriculture Study Group at the City University of New York (where I’m on the staff of a green building program) with a couple of crazy-passionate, very inspiring students.  One of them went off to Power Shift 2009 and came back excited to change the word through urban farming.  But he hadn’t even read Michael Pollan yet, so I set him to work.  Lesson One: Omnivore’s Dilemna.  (Eventually I hope to go on field trips with the group — maybe to visit my friends at the Queens County Farm Museum!).

I just emailed this HuffPo post to my students…

Resolarizing the food economy can support diversified farming and shorten the distance from farm to fork, shrinking the amount of fossil fuel in the American diet. A decentralized food system offers many other significant benefits: Food eaten closer to where it is grown is fresher and requires less processing, making it more nutritious, and whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience; regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks.

Here are few examples of how we could start:

• Provide grants to towns and cities to build year-round indoor farmers’ markets.
• Make food-safety regulations sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that small producers selling direct off the farm or at a farmers’ market are not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer.
• Urge The U.S.D.A. to establish a Local Meat-Inspectors Corps to serve and support the local food processors that remain.
• Establish a Strategic Grain Reserve to prevent huge swings in commodity prices.
• Create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal funds to buy fresh local produce which would vastly expand regional agriculture and improve the diet of the millions of people these institutions feed.

Link via Ms. Cathy.