{"id":34,"date":"2010-06-17T19:02:51","date_gmt":"2010-06-17T19:02:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hub-dev.bates.edu\/food\/?page_id=34"},"modified":"2016-11-01T15:41:43","modified_gmt":"2016-11-01T19:41:43","slug":"changing-consumers","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/food\/alumni\/nicolas-lindholm\/changing-consumers\/","title":{"rendered":"Changing consumers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Q: Do you see changing awareness of food issues among your customers?<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Lindholm<\/strong>: I\u2019ve been very impressed at the general cultural awareness growing up in the past 10 years.<\/p>\n<p>When I started the Maine Seed-Saving Network in 1995, there weren\u2019t a lot of people \u2014 especially farmers, let alone gardeners \u2014 talking about saving their own seed. Everyone pretty much just went to the seed company every year.<\/p>\n<p>At that time, genetically engineered vegetable varieties were just being introduced, and the big wholesale seed companies were being consolidated. There was a small organization called\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.seedsavers.org\/\">Seed Savers Exchange<\/a>, in Decorah, Iowa, and I really liked what they were doing, but I could see there was a need to do some of that \u2014 and then some \u2014 at a local level. I started it as a membership organization and we hosted a seed swap. I gave talks and seed-saving demonstrations and that sort of thing for gardening clubs,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mofga.org\/\">MOFGA<\/a> chapters, the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mofga.org\/TheFair\/tabid\/135\/Default.aspx\">Common Ground Fair<\/a>, schools and things like that.<\/p>\n<p>That organization is dormant, but what I saw happen is companies like\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.fedcoseeds.com\/\">Fedco Seeds<\/a> and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.johnnyseeds.com\/\">Johnny&#8217;s Selected Seeds<\/a> and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.superseeds.com\/\">Pinetree Garden Seeds<\/a>, all three based here in Maine, basically took the bull by the horns in that time frame. By 2002, they were promoting seed-saving, getting small New England farms to grow some of their varieties, increasing their selection of heirloom varieties and open-pollinated varieties.<\/p>\n<p>And from then to now, everyone\u2019s awareness has come about. It&#8217;s almost a household thing to be talking\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Heirloom_tomato\">heirloom tomatoes<\/a>. &#8220;Local,&#8221; at least in our area, seems to be a big term \u2014 how far away your food has to come from, how close to your own home can you eat? And that has a lot of larger cultural repercussions, too.<\/p>\n<p>It certainly is useful to me, as a small farmer, to garner interest from a whole bunch of people who, five years ago or 10 years ago, never even thought of going to farmers markets. When I joined the Stonington farmers market, 10 years ago, there were about three or four of us. Now there\u2019s about 10 farms and about 20 other food and craft vendors, and I think 400 to 500 people visit it every week \u2014 it&#8217;s mobbed.<\/p>\n<p>And that\u2019s in the tiny little fishing village of Stonington.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Q: Do you see changing awareness of food issues among your customers?&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"parent":465,"menu_order":6,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"class_list":["post-34","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/food\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/food\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/food\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/food\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/food\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/food\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/34\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":530,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/food\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/34\/revisions\/530"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/food\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/food\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}