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What would it take to have a fish farm be part of a food hub? This was a question I was given the opportunity to examine when I was awarded the Stanton Fellowship of the Durfee Foundation. Why fish? It’s a healthy form of animal protein. Why a fish farm? Our fisheries are stressed and our oceans are showing the impacts of carbon acidification. Aquaculture, or fish farming, can take place on land and through environmentally sound methods that produce a healthy form of animal protein using less water, feed, and energy than it takes to raise other forms of animal protein.

Why me? As a Senior Advisor on Food Policy to Mayor Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, I’ve worked on creating and implementing strategies to develop “Good Food” systems, where food that is local, sustainably grown, fairly produced, healthy and affordable, can be available to all. In the course of this work I became convinced that we should make room in our food system for an emerging model of local food production and distribution, called a food hub. What is a food hub? A deliberately scaled and networked distribution system; a way to bring size to small scale. In other words, it is the farmer’s market model writ larger. The greater increment is scale, and it has the potential to be created through a system called a food hub.

Why do we need this? As communities examine their participation in the food system, we grapple with the realization that our poorest communities suffer the worst health problems from having only the cheapest food available to them —junk food that is far from healthy. At the same time, smaller scale farms, most of which are growing healthy produce, struggle to bring their food to market. In reconciling the current largess of our food system with the imbalance at the struggling ends of it, the 21st Century model of a distributed network of smaller scale production, applies. Cities around the country are considering how to be better leaders in creating regional food systems that bring local, sustainably grown, fairly produced healthy food to the tables of those most in need.

This paper summarizes some of the key points I’ve gleaned from my two-year journey in the Stanton Fellowship, made possible by the Durfee Foundation, which believes in investing in possibilities. If one day, urban food consumers know the provenance of their fish through a local fish farm, as well as they now know the provenance of their fruit; if one day, a community struggling to afford access to healthy food can count on a regular dinner of locally grown fish and vegetables…then possibilities will have seen their promise.

Read and download the full publication at http://knowyourfishfarm.info/.