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A favorite fruit has hit the local markets
Photo by Bob Benenson
My Saturday schedule was loaded, so all I could squeeze in was a farmers market sweep at Green City Market's Lincoln Park location. This time of year, you can get a lot done even with a short market visit.
The haul above included the first sweet cherries I've purchased this year, these from Mick Klug Farms (St. Joseph, Michigan), who also sold me the strawberries and asparagus. I love me some local fruit.
I also tried, for the first time, the English muffins from Dorothy's Bistro (Chicago), and having had one this morning, I can tell you that they are amazing. I've grown very fond of their sourdough bread but with a (short) out of town trip coming up on Wednesday, I didn't need a whole big loaf. That gave me the opportunity to sample the English muffins, which I'd been anxious to do.
Finally, English shelling peas and cherry tomatoes from Nichols Farm & Orchard (Marengo, Illinois).
Have a market haul you'd like to show off? Send a photo and I'll share it with the world.
Food is in Chicago's DNA. The city rose from the prairie as a center for marketing and distributing the Midwest's agriculture bounty. The nation's industrial food system was invented here in the 19th century; today, Chicago is a center for advocacy for a healthier, more sustainable, more humane and more equitable food system.
So it comes as no surprise that many leaders seeking to revitalize Chicago's underserved and underresourced communities are promoting the development, by people of color, of community gardens and urban farms.
These small growing projects are helping restore hope, jobs and opportunity to challenged communities, while helping residents who face food insecurity to feed themselves — as Chicago manifests what has become a powerful national movement under the banner of food sovereignty.
This is the topic of Local Food Forum's next "Better" Dialogues webinar, "Gardens in a City: Cultivating Hope in Chicago, which takes place on Monday, June 17 at 7 p.m. central time. The title references Chicago's official motto, Urbs in Horto, which translates from Latin as "city in a garden."
The program will focus on the work of Community Food Navigator, a Chicago non-profit launched in 2020. Its focus is on providing tools and resources to help people of color in underserved areas produce food for themselves and their communities — the core of the concept known as food sovereignty.
Our featured guest is Nick Davis, managing director of Community Food Navigator. As Nick told Local Food Forum for an article published earlier this year, “The purpose of the Community Food Navigator is really to build power amongst growers of color, build connections and relationships in our food system, and coordinate our food system a little bit better.”
He continued, “It's important that the community has a sense of how other people, block by block and neighborhood by neighborhood and then the region, define that for themselves, and how we can start to organize and convene people and tighten up our relational networks so that we can actually move towards those definitions of visions of food sovereignty.”
Nick also said he wants to make it clear that Community Food Navigator is powered and informed by the community of growers, food educators, food mobilizers and organizers who have been doing incredible work for years. “We just co-design and implement strategies to address issues they raise,” he added.
Nick will be joined by other leaders in the urban growing community who are aligned with Community Food Navigator's work. We will announce the full lineup of guests soon.
Join co-hosts Bob Benenson of Local Food Forum and Chef Sarah Stegner of suburban Chicago's Prairie Grass Cafe for this free webinar. There will be Q&A, so bring your questions.
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