In May of this year, I was living in San Diego and helping a group called San Diego Growers determine best-practices for a regional food hub and distribution center. The formal USDA definition of a regional food hub:

A centrally located facility with a business management structure facilitating the aggregation, storage, processing, distribution, and/or marketing of locally/regionally produced food products.

During my time working with San Diego Growers, I was able to conduct surveys and compile economic data on various food hubs around the country.  I turned my economic analysis into a Triple Pundit piece on the developing movement. The story, titled “San Diego Regional Food Hub Cultivates Local Markets,” was picked up by others within the good food movement, the food hub movement and USDA.

For this month’s Triple Pundit contribution, I focused on growing food in urban areas. The 3p article, titled “From Skies to Soil: A Brief Review of Urban Farms,” weaved together many agricultural trends, juxtaposing growing food in multistory buildings with aquaponics, hydroponics and other greenhouse technologies with “the myriad countless dirt lovers and permaculture do-it-yourselfers that thrive on personal relationships with the detritovores that comprise the web of life.”

The premise of the article: Waste = Food. I traced the vertical farming movement from Nancy Jack and John Todd’s groundbreaking 1993 book “From Eco-Cities to Living Machines: Principles of Ecological Design,” to The Plant, a 93,000 square foot salvaged meatpacking facility that is vertical farming’s current embodiment.

By the way, here is the link to all of my Triple Pundit contributions. Let me know what you think. Leave a comment or contact me for more info.

I was recently staring at my computer monitor, scanning my email inbox, trying to focus. I heard the familiar “plunk” of a Gchat message and shifted my attention to read the note. A friend had sent me a link, and I clicked on it. A new browser tab opened and I scanned the webpage. “Wow,” I replied in the chat, “that’s neat.”

Back to task. Staring at emails.

Then my phone chirped with the sound of an incoming text. I picked my phone up, read my brother’s message and replied in agreement that we should catch up with a phone call sometime the next day.

I was about to put the phone down when I noticed the familiar Tweetdeck bird in my phone notifications. I opened the application and saw somebody had re-tweeted me on Twitter. Pretty cool. Oh, somebody else had written something on my Facebook wall.

I resisted the temptation to open Facebook or listen to a new voicemail. Instead, I put the phone down, remembering the information I’d been searching for was actually in my school mail, not in my personal Gmail inbox. I went to the upper right corner of my mail settings, switched accounts and scanned the new emails in my inbox. There was an email with new information about a team meeting, including a street address. I clicked on the message, copied the address and tabbed to my Google Calendar, adding the address to a calendar event. I knew the address would be essential when navigating to the location by phone later in the week.

I took another sip of coffee and gave a song on my Pandora station a thumbs up. Oh man, I’m so behind in my reading! It’s so nice out, I should be reading in Golden Gate park right now. I need to buy more coffee.

For fun, I decided to ask “The Oracle” a question. I opened a new browser tab and typed into the Google search field: “What’s the purpose of twitter?”

One of the top results was from Yahoo! Answers. Somebody had already asked a question very similar to mine a year before: “What’s the purpose of twitter? Is it another form of facebook?”

There were five (5) answers, but I found the first one most entertaining.

“No,” Answerer 1 replied, “it is not like facebook. twitter is where you can type what you feel! and talk about different topics. but it has no games”

Sounded reasonable to me. Case closed. Time to go buy more coffee.