As TEDx talks spring up around the country, inspired by the original conference on "ideas worth spreading," IATP's Food and Community Fellows past and present keep showing up with great ideas of their own.
Patty Cantrell is a journalist, community organizer and consultant at Michigan-based Regional Food Solutions, not to mention a 2008 Food and Community Fellow, and she recently offered her unique perspective at TEDx Manhattan.
Her talk, entitled "New Roads to New Markets" is drawing praise from around the web, including some fantastic local coverage in Southwest Michigan, for its passionate, articulate account of the new direction food is taking local economies across the country.
Many Americans, she says, are "washed out" of our massive, too-centralized superhighway of a food system. But as people find new ways to connect food with communities and communities with each other, Patty argues that we're creating a new, tightly networked, decentralized system with good food as the ties that bind us together. "We are making our way back to each other," she says, and that builds an enduring system where people know and care for one another and get better food in the process.
