Profile: Farm Folk/City Folk

Food. It's not more basic than that. Yet over the last century, with advances in technology and transportation, food production has become increasingly complicated and elaborate, with a loss of the sense of our primordial relationship with it. Food often travels long distances and undergoes less-than-healthful processes to keep it fresh for our table.

FarmFolk/City Folk is a nonprofit society that acts as a catalyst for the local production of a diversity of foods; a food production system that is economically viable and provides healthy financial returns to farmers; and the preservation of farmland in BC. Farm Folk/City Folk is also working with BC seed producers to create a BC organic seed strategy and sponsors the Small Scale Food Processors Association.

FarmFolk/City Folk promotes local consumption partly by organizing and selling tickets to food tours for the public and professionals such as the BC Chefs Association, where farms, food and beverage processors and wineries are visited, and attendees enjoy the fresh culinary delights of local producers - from ostrich to Black Angus beef, hazelnuts to shitake mushrooms, cranberries to winter squash.

Every fall, in the Lower Mainland and on Vancouver Island, FarmFolk/City Folk celebrates the harvest with its Feast of Fields - a luxurious outdoor sampling of local foods prepared by some of BC best chefs, food producers, brewers and vintners. Feast of Fields also helps keep FarmFolk/City Folk financially sustainable.

For ten years FarmFolk/City Folk has been spinning a vibrant web of relationships with farmers, city communities, businesses, individuals and organizations throughout BC - all in the effort to foster an appreciation of sustainable food and farming, promote health, nutrition, environmentally and economically viable food production.

This profile is taken from "A Social Economy Showcase BC Stories". A project of BC Social Economy Roundtable, VanCity and IMPACS.
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Tags: for:vsef, Social Economy, Nonprofit, TechSoup

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