The Market Is Open

ALFN Members,

The market is open for another year of rain and sun. Though it is January, we still have loads of fresh vegetables with plenty of meat and eggs.

Refurbished Website Categories

As mentioned in a previous weblog, we have slightly changed the market categories on the left side of the page. For the most part, categories have remained the same. Foods are separated into kind with prepared foods in various sub-categories under “Locally Produced Goods.” I hope the new organization will simplify and clarify your shopping experience. As usual, you can see the sub-categories only if you click on the main category link. Please let me know how they work this week!

Plastics

I remember the first goat we had die due to eating plastic bags. We were living in Mozambique, trying to get a small goat project up and running with a small village. The goats ranged throughout the surrounding fields of the village, and it was impossible to find all the plastic bags littered throughout the area. As a satellite community of the nearby capital, the village suffered with an influx of cheap plastic bags used for everything. When we cut open the dead goat, I pulled out plastic bags from his intestines. The bags could have been washed off and used again.

The turning of numbers seems to offer ways to calculate and quantify. So with the turning of 2015 to 2016, I thought it would be interesting to count plastic. A new study has found 3-10 times more plastic in the world’s oceans than previously thought. The study only quantified microplastics that could be measured with nets and did not consider the heavier plastics that sink to the bottom of the ocean. Americans throw away 185 lbs of plastic a year on average. These plastics spend decades in landsfills or migrate to the oceans where they break up into millions of pieces which are often ingested by the marine biology of the oceans. Consequently, there is a good likelihood, actually studies suggest a one-in-four chance, that the fish we eat has plastic in its body.

Plastics are petroleum-based products and carry the same burden on the world’s ecosystems as the fossil fuel industrial-complex. What if the city only picked up our trash once a year? What would our plastic load look like? For the locavore movement, such long-term problems can be hard to handle. Should we be concerned about random bits of plastic in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean? I don’t know how to translate this concern into viable action except through personal behavior change and a deeper philosophical conversion. I can reduce and even try to cut plastics out of my lifestyle.

I’ve been watching the Arkansas River rise over the last few days. Inevitably, the floating trash along the margins, caught in drifts, captures my attention. Water runs down. A locavore with a global awareness realizes that we are located on a specific point within a larger watershed. All my trash drifts down the watershed into the great planetary basins of the world. And we all learned the hydrological cycle back in 5th grade. We are on a huge conveyor belt. Call it Karma, or call it cause and effect.

As we continue to cultivate our own local economy, we should also find ways to regenerate the bags which hold our local goodness!

Come volunteer this Saturday! You can sign up at Volunteer Spot.

Thanks

Kyle Holton
Program & Market Manager