Marketplace idea taken to new level

I’ve been fascinated by parking decks for years, starting with the Hess’s department store deck in my hometown of Allentown. The exit was a single spiral of concrete, winding down to the street.

As a Penn State freshman, my end-of-film- class project was a grainy black-and- white meditation on the Eisenhower Parking Deck. I think parking decks are architectural Mobius strips and a ripe metaphor for many sustainability issues.

There’s a lot of discussion among local foodies about how to support new and experienced local farmers better and how to expand local food production capacity. And there’s talk about how to create more markets — outdoor seasonal farmers markets, indoor year-round groceries and institutional buyers’ markets serving universities and hospitals.

But farmers hesitate to ramp up production without steady buyers, and buyers hesitate to make new purchasing commitments without knowing there’s a reliable supply. Which comes first, the farmers or the market?

Which should be a higher priority: aggregating consumers through food-buying cooperatives? Aggregating producers through farmers’ associations? Setting up local distribution hubs to help farmers, buyers and cooks collaboratively work out insurance, bidding, refrigerated storage, inventory control, payment and delivery?

Then there’s the tension between competition and cooperation. Sometimes I hear that local farmers and farmers markets hesitate to band together for marketing and other common challenges, because they produce similar crops and serve similar customer bases. But many also recognize that working together to build the overall customer base and coordinate planting can benefit all of them, as it does for farmers in the Tuscarora Organic Growers Cooperative.

In past agrarian societies, how did farmers choose crops so as not to drive fellow farmers out of business? Or did their agrarian cultural identity preoccupy them more with the survival of the whole community than the survival of each farm individually?

Given that today’s farmers must cope with the demands of competitive markets in a declining but still pervasive industrial culture, how do we keep them going and build viable cooperative systems around them so they stay safe and strong as the competitive system erodes around them?

One piece of the puzzle may be creating a clear role for local governments. Public health depends on public nutrition. If “government” denotes the group of people charged and funded by people to implement their community priorities, then local governments arguably have a stake in helping bring local farmers and eaters together.

In response to real estate market disasters — broken title chains, foreclosures, blight — some communities are linking publicly owned banks with eminent domain, mixed-use zoning and infrastructure retrofits to return sidelined properties to productive use in the neo-agrarian economy. Which leads back to parking decks and the movement converting car-oriented public space to food-oriented public space.

State College has at least one mixed-use parking deck, on Fraser Street. We could set up a Local Food Fund — supported by voluntary donations from taxpayers who think food access is a public good (or even a human right), and administered by the public works department — to renovate the top level of a downtown parking deck into a centrally located, publicly owned pedestrian-, wheelchair-, bicycle-and vehicle-accessible local food marketplace.

Katherine Watt is a State College writer and community organizer. She maintains a blog at springcreekhomesteading. wordpress.com, and can be reached at katherine_watt@hotmail.com.

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Marketplace idea taken to new level