You can discover lots of interesting things on the break room table where I work. My most recent find was a page from the Duke newspaper, The Chronicle, with an ad on it for a campus conference, "Sustainable Community Development: Does the University Have a Role?" The event was sponsored by both Duke and UNC (the School of Public Health, oddly enough), and proclaimed itself as free and open to the public.

It was last Thursday.

I never saw a thing about this conference anywhere on any Durham listserves, never heard a peep about it from my rather extensive network of community volunteer contacts. If I had, I might have taken a day off work and gone. But to my knowledge, if you weren't a member of one of the organizations presenting and/or a student or faculty at one of the schools, you would have had very little opportunity to discover that this event ever existed.

How does one live in a community, attend (or work for) a university right in the middle of that community, then host a conference about the role of the university in sustainable community development, but do nearly nothing to actually invite that community to participate? Is it just me, or is there a fundamental disconnection here?

I looked up the conference agenda, and while there were a few local organizations represented, it looks as though the event was more about sustainable community development in faraway countries.

Fascinating, that - personally, I feel that the best place to start with sustainability is where you are. Sure, somebody needs the global perspective, and I don't discount that Duke's graduates are for the most part intelligent, capable, and destined for Big Things. However, by discounting the community in which Duke exists, they lose out on a wealth of potential real-world learning experience. Of course, I somehow doubt most Durhamites are surprised to hear that Duke didn't really reach out to the greater community for a smaller free event.

Durham Farmers' Market: Not Quite a Bullseye, Yet

Seems like every day I hear of a new "green fad diet." First there was the Hundred Mile Diet, aka "eat only what comes from within 100 miles of you." It's an interesting concept, and certainly helped the notion of local food get into the cultural memespace, but to me it doesn't really seem to be based on much of anything in particular in the way of sustainability principles, like, a bioregion, or how far a farmer can drive to reach a market on a reasonable tank of homebrewed biodiesel. Here in the Somewhat Flat Part of NC, there seem to be a lot of farmers still operating near our urban areas, but in places like Phoenix, 100 miles doesn't even get you out of the desert.

The Hundred Yard Diet sounded more like a cross between extreme permaculture and some sort of scavenger hunt through my neighborhood (do we have 100 houses with gardens in their yards? no, I don't know either), neither of which really seemed to have the potential meet my needs. I'm a woeful gardener, despite repeated attempts. In the last 3 years, the only things I've successfully grown have been a few scraggly peppers and one pumpkin. Of course, I'm still trying, but there's a long long long way to go before I could reasonably feed my family for even just one week out of the gardenspace at our house.

The Bullseye Diet actually seems like the most reasonable to me: simply strive to get your food as close to home as possible. Given the huge improvements in the Durham Farmers' Market in recent years, it seems as though at certain times of the year, it might actually be possible to create a week's worth of meals using only foods obtainable from there... however, this past weekend, we discovered a glaring hole in DFM's general midsummer food selection: namely, fresh fruit. There simply wasn't any.

Now, in the fall, I've seen apples at a few places, and certainly Lyon Farms will sell you plenty of strawberries in season... but it doesn't seem as though any of the farmers are working at the type of year-round crop diversity that would create a truly broad culinary palette for local food aficionados. Where's the pears, the plums, the grapes? What about melons and unusual berries? What about getting multiple varietals of foods, and doing staggered plantings to stretch the availability season of a particular food type?

Also, I noticed that no one at the market had any kind of grains whatsoever. Kind of hard to have breads without grains... At least there's a couple of bakers there, but where did they buy their supplies? I bet it's not from within 100 miles. :-)

Of course, one can't always expect to find the same assortment of food at a farmers' market as at a chain grocery store, and that's part of the beauty of these "green" diets - to really do any of them right, you have to re-localize your thinking about food. Some things simply won't ever be grown in marketable quantities locally, or at least not without significant inputs of energy that aren't sustainable in the long run. However, I would hope that, in a post-Peak Oil community, the area farmers would be doing all they could to broaden their marketable selection with locally-growable crops that fill a certain "food niche" once imported from different climates - fruit, grain, late harvest vegetables, etc.

The Durham Farmers' Market rocks - but it isn't quite ready to support full-on Bullseye (or Hundred Mile) dieters... yet.