Some of you already know this, but I came into social media from a rather different angle than most. I don’t come from the communications or PR industries. I come from finance. But after leaving the financial services world behind, I launched a venture called Farm to Table: The Emerging American Meal. It started as a TV show I wrote that aimed to chronicle the people, places and trends emerging in America’s local sustainable food movement.
The TV show, which was never sold or produced (though is still technically alive), led me to start a blog. That blog became a community of writers, activists, farmers, artisans and commentators and soon ballooned into one of the biggest websites in the sustainable food universe. I shepherded Farm to Table through various iterations, a few redesigns and eventually led it to a place of prominence both online and off.
Of course, in that process, I learned all the skills that I know use in my social media consulting business, inbound marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, traditional PR outreach, metrics, etc. Without Farm to Table I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am today. I owe that experience a lot.
This past fall, it became clear that I could no longer continue to run Farm to Table and build my new business. So I shut the thing down. I had looked for all sorts of partners to team up with, made tons of phone calls and pitches, but ultimately couldn’t find anyone willing to do the heavy lifting. So I wrote, bravely or stupidly, a post called The Failure of Farm to Table that summarized my experience, discussed openly my failure in finding a way to develop the TV show and basically said goodbye.
A day later, an entrepreurial young man named Khaled Allen, who had written for Farm to Table previously, and who, on top of being an excellent writer and committed sustainable food activist, was looking for a project to take on. Within a week, plans were hatched and I turned over the keys to Khaled and Dawn Gifford, another talented community member, who was willing to do some graphical work and administrative tasks along with Khaled. In fact, Dawn had a prescient vision for Farm to Table which the two of them, plus a few others, are implementing now. It’s going really well, and from my perspective, I am just lucky that a creative project that I started resonated enough with others that they were willing to adopt it as their own, and indeed, improve and build it.
But one thing that had been on my mind was that I wasn’t contributing to Farm to Table. Perhaps it was selfishness, or simply the stresses and time committments required to start my own consulting firm. But it kept gnawing at me, that something I had pushed out into the world, was now moving forward and that I had all but turned my back on it.
Well, I wrote not one but two pieces today for Farm to Table and wanted to call attention to them here.
1. Can We Please Retire the Shopping Cart?
The shopping cart is the device that should come to symbolize everything that was wrong about the 20th Century approach to food in America. Food-like products were overabundant, they were cheap, they were concentrated in one-stop mega marts, and most of all, they were easy to pick up and throw in the cart. All we had to do was walk down the aisles pushing this contraption at 2 miles an hour and fill our baskets. But what were we filling ourselves with?
2. Consumers Can Change The Market
For years now, the mainstream agriculture community, corporations, farmers, middlemen, even large grocers, have obstructed local, sustainable food from entering broad swaths of the market. Their reasoning has always been specious at best, but one of the answers they gave that actually did make sense was that the demand for local sustainable food did not exist. That answer no longer stands.
Hope you enjoy the posts and if you do, consider sharing them. Also, it is worth nothing that as a blogger, it is important to have multiple outlets for your writing. There are just some days when we don’t want to remain in our niche. We need to branch out. Embrace other blogs, write guest posts, contribute something outside of your tight circle. You’ll meet new people and expose a whole new community to your writing. I am so happy to have these outlets.
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