Over the last couple of months I’ve been looking at regional food chains, focusing in on one link at a time (here’s the whole series). My purpose here has not been to make an argument about the value of local food. (That’s been done.) Instead, I started with the assumption that fostering regional food systems was worthwhile, and tried to take the next step by asking, how do we scale this up?

There are lots of great examples scattered around the U.S.: community-supported agriculture, urban gardens, green-belt farms, locally sourced school cafeterias. How would we make these exceptional successes the norm?

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I’ve been especially interested in people who have managed to make money. Where there are profits, there is a real possibility of expansion.

To conclude this series, I tried to refine the most relevant questions to bullet points. Along the way, I realized I was basically writing sloppy tweets. So I redoubled my efforts and squeezed each thought down to 140 characters. The result is a sort of to-do list for anyone seeking to build a strong regional food system.

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