Market Reminder

Good Morning ALFN Members,

Remember to finalize your orders for this week’s rotation by Wednesday at noon. We are still busting with fresh produce and local goods in the market.

Waste Revolution: Thinking in Circles

There is a great opportunity to meditate about modern waste this March 12th. The annual Keep Little Rock Beautiful event will take place in the morning until noon. You can either organize your own neighborhood area to clean, or volunteer to help clean the Fourche Creek Area. Check out their website…you may even see a picture of one of our growers on the front page:)

Picking up trash is necessary, but I’m also interested in thinking deeper into our own waste system. Our current economy extracts natural resources and then transforms them into products (usually with the addition of chemicals) and then eventually streams these same resources into permanent dumps. I have a good visualization of this problem. Take the Christmas tree. I’m sure you’ve seen them on the roadside lately. No problem here. The city can pick them up, mulch them and cycle them back into the soil. However, I’ve seen a more Americanization of this lately. I’ve observed a number of Christmas trees with the lights still on the tree. Our linear economy does this to many natural products. Natural resources are processed with various non-biodegradable substances that render these products toxic and true waste. So much of our waste is based on efficiency instead of resilience and regeneration.

What’s the tagline here? Think in loops. Consider how all your economic actions can be regenerated back into systems based on transforming the dormant energy in waste back into the top of our food and production infrastructure. The hard part to all of this means we are bucking a system based on efficiency. It may slow us down a bit. But hey, we are part of a slow food movement, right? Slow it down and think about waste streams…and take lights of Christmas trees:)

Wastefully yours,

Kyle Holton
Program & Market Manager