The mission of the Food Partnership Council is to vigorously promote a
sustainable, local food system that encourages a better quality of life
for our citizens, improves our community’s economy and self-reliance,
and preserves the land for generations to come.
Expert on Local Food and Economy to
Speak in Red Lodge
Join the Red Lodge Area Food
Partnership Council in celebrating their second anniversary of promoting local
food by welcoming Ken Meter to Red Lodge on Friday, April 12, 7:00 pm, at the
Elks Club. His talk is titled “Local Food as a Strategy for
Economic Development.” Ken is one of
the foremost food system analysts in the U.S. and President of
Crossroads Resource Center, http://www.crcworks.org.
He is a strategic consultant to food hubs and food business clusters across the
country. Meter will share his experiences and findings, while offering
innovative ideas to strengthen our community's local food system.
“To me, a food system is the whole set of relationships that
gets us from a farm to the food at our tables,” Ken states. He further defines
a strong local food system as “very healthy food that we know the source of,
and it should help us build wealth in our communities. It should also help us
connect with each other as people, who learn about what farmers do, and learn
what consumers need, and learn about what each other has to have to work well
in the system. [It should] help us know the skills and capacities we need to
handle food safely, cook it adequately, to create lovely meals and have a good
aesthetic experience while we dine.”
Crossroads’ Ken
Meter started strategizing for community-based foods in 1974, as part of a
citizen’s group that was concerned about equity in the food system. Today, Ken
speaks across the country averaging one presentation per week for the past
three years. He feels privileged to help nurture the rapidly emerging local
foods movement.
Along the way,
Ken has helped change the way we think about food. He appears to be the first
one to use the phrase “farm and food”, to distinguish the needs of commodity
producers from those farmers who sell foods direct to consumers (January 2001).
He was the first to call for a federal “food bill” (July 2006), addressing the
entire array of issues from farm to fork. He also was the first to call for
federal farm policy to focus on communities rather than commodities (December
2003).
We hope you will join us for this
unique opportunity to listen to and
dialogue with Ken talk about wealth,
health and community self-reliance through a strong local food economy. We encourage attendance of community
members and neighbors across sectors including farming, economic development,
tourism, planning, education and health in order to set the stage for cross-specialty
dialogues about collaborative ways to strengthen our local food economy and
advance the well-being of our community.
The Food Partnership Council thanks
the Beartooth Front Community Forum, Carbon County Resource Council and
Beartooth RC&D for their sponsorship of this evening. This event is free and will include desserts
made with local food by local chefs. For more information, contact Janet
Peterson at foodpartnership@gmail.com
or (406) 425-3806.
Join the Red Lodge Area Food
Partnership Council in celebrating their second anniversary of promoting local
food by welcoming Ken Meter to Red Lodge on Friday, April 12, 7:00 pm, at the
Elks Club. His talk is titled “Local Food as a Strategy for
Economic Development.” Ken is one of
the foremost food system analysts in the U.S. and President of
Crossroads Resource Center, 