Market Open

Welcome to another week of fresh food! Today’s market has everything from muscadines to kimchi to squash, to greens, to soap, to duck eggs, to honey. Check out what is new this week; the market is open.

News/Update

We had an awesome market day yesterday. Nathan had an interesting AND tasty presentation on juicing. We also caught some great video of our volunteers working for the Super Service Challenge. I will let everyone know once we are ready to upload it for the competition.

I was inspired by Nathan’s workshop and a conversation with one of our volunteers about implementing more mini-events during market Saturday. I’m excited about different ways we can share our knowledge with each other. Look for a future weblog about this subject. I would love to start having more tastings, mini-workshops and other fun mini-show-and-tells during market Saturday. I’ll organize a few avenues for this and get back with all of you. In the meantime, consider ways you could share some of your own expertise!

I had the opportunity this weekend to help with an urban honey harvest. My kids and I had a blast centrifuging the honey, filtering, and bottling the finished product. In the end, we were a happy, sticky mess. Bees are one of those mysterious elements in our world. From thousands of individual bees, self-organization emerges out of seeming chaos. You can see the same self-organization in a school of fish or flock of birds. The individual parts work in synchrony to create honey, defend from predators, or travel as units across aerial paths in the sky. I’ve heard the mathematical models for these self-organized systems are very difficult, but originate within chaos theory. It has always befuddled the curious mind to understand how order emerges from chaos. These natural systems aren’t classical hierarchical systems where the queen decrees commands or the lead bird squawks orders. Yet, discrete chemical traces, body positions, and chaotic stimulus/response mechanisms build order from the bottom.

Of course, human civilization isn’t as good at self-organization. Though we consciously organize, many of our systems can have detrimental effects. The self-organization built off the stimulus/response mechanism of greed can create capitalistic systems that disenfranchise the poor, or degrade the surrounding environment. Such effects aren’t as sweet as the effects of our sister bees’ work. Decades ago, we arrived at a threshold where our societal projects needed conscious design that mimicked natural systems. We still aren’t thinking like bees. However, I can’t help but wonder if ALFN can’t become more bee-like as we evolve. How can we continue to self-organize a local food economy from the bottom. What stimulus/response pathways, traditions, and values can we use to build a sustainable food system? There are many avenues of thought to follow, but it starts not with the queen, but with the thousands of worker bees making choices that determine ecological sustainability—survival. Call it eco-design or bee-thinking. Whatever we call it, the process begins at the bottom with members.

Let the bee stay in your bonnet and have a sweet week.

Sincerely,

Kyle Holton
Program & Market Manager