On Episode 6 of How Great Cities are Fed, Karen and Ben are talking about The Middlemen. "The Middleman has occupied a prominent and generally unfavorable position in a great deal of the discussion of farm produce marketing during the past 15 years. In the minds of many he seems to be an anonymous and mysterious being who somehow or other edged in between the producer and the consumer with the intent of levying toll upon both of them."
In this episode of How Great Cities Are Fed, we’re going to talk about the cold chain, which was kind of just emerging at the time that Walter Hedden wrote his book, How Great Cities Are Fed – that book, of course, is the basis and inspiration for this show.
In this episode of How Great Cities Are Fed, we’re going to talk about foodsheds – what they are, what they mean, and how they’ve changed over the past century.
In our first episode we looked pretty broadly at the food supply chain, what was going on with U.S. agriculture when Hedden was writing, and the infrastructure that brings food from the fields into our cities. Today, we’re focusing on the point in the supply chain where products are aggregated and sold further on – to wholesalers, distributors and end-customers. We’re focusing today on Markets.
In this debut episode of How Great Cities Are Fed, your hosts Karen Karp and Ben Kerrick introduce the series by taking a look at some of the conditions surrounding Walter Hedden’s 1929 book, and exploring how those conditions have shifted and continue to shift. We frame the relationship between food and cities, and bring in experts to discuss how the supply chains that feed urban centers have changed in the past century. Guests for this episode are Shayna Cohen, Senior Consultant at Karp Resources and a Fulbright Scholar; Matthew D’Arrigo, Vice President and Co-Owner of D’Arrigo Brothers Company of New York; and Robyn Metcalfe, a food historian in the College of Natural Sciences at University of Texas, Austin.