• Tracey Deutsch, Associate Professor of History at University of Minnesota
• Suzanne Wasserman, Director of the Gotham Center for New York City History
• Joseph Holtz, General Manager and Co-Founder of the Park Slope Food Coop
• Jason Lepes, Senior Merchant for New Business Initiatives at FreshDirect

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.”

On Episode 5 of How Great Cities are Fed, Karen and Ben are talking about Transportation And Terminal Handling of Perishable Food. And they’re broadening this a bit to talk about transportation infrastructure and how it enables our food system.

The Final Mile: Food Systems of New York is a year-long series of public programs, organized by Open House New York as part of its ongoing Urban Systems Series. The Final Mile is intended to shed light on New York City’s dynamic and multi-layered food economy while introducing and exploring approaches to render this invisible system more tangible.

On Wednesday, April 29th 2015, food systems expert Karen Karp, president of Karp Resources, and Robert LaValva, founder and president of the New Amsterdam Market, took the stage to discuss the relationship between food and cities and lay out some of the key issues that need to be explored in the coming year.

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.