Social Food Cooperatives

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Discussion

Stowe Boyd:

"Social tools will lead to an alternative food system to the extent that people choose to spend more time involved in the production and distribution of food. This does not mean that everyone will become a full-time farmer, but average people will begin to dedicate more time to local food production and distribution than they have in the past 50 years. This could entail growing food in a greenhouse with five other families, working at a food coop, or keeping chickens on the roof of your New York City brownstone and trading eggs for produce with neighbors. But it will start to become a mainstay of post-industrial life for many.

The social systems that existed in the pre-industrial era are lost to us, so we will have to regenerate them using low cost, low threshold social technologies. We don’t have the ability to recraft the world as a series of rural villages, where people knew the dairy farmer, and the greengrocer knew exactly where every pumpkin was grown. But we can emulate that knowledge using social networks and big data.

In the final analysis, we will create a new food system through our involvement in each other, and where food becomes a social object that brings us together, a secular sacrement, instead of a market commodity managed for maximum profits by corporations." (http://www.foodandtechconnect.com/site/2011/09/27/stowe-boyd-on-hacking-the-food-system-social-food-taking-food-back-from-corporations/)