Locavore Labs build relational foodsheds

Tada! The Local Food Lab is dead (for me) … long live The Locavore Lab.

As mentioned before on this blog, Local Food Lab is the name I’ve been using for intensives where eaters, farmers and everyone in between works together to map and evaluate their local food system, and dream into projects, businesses and organizations that can help build the food system they want. It’s part education, part design charette, part networking, part eating,  part mystery and totally participatory. The output belongs to the community – and the ideas are there for the plucking for people plucky enough to take their next steps.

But come to find out that “Local Food Lab” is Trademarked so I need to find another name. I tried Community Food Lab but a group in North Carolina has that website and even though they haven’t TMed it, they did ask me to not use it.

Facebook friends have offered an astonishing number of alternatives, and nixed most of my “good ideas.” Until someone suggested the Locavore Lab. That feels sassy. It includes everyone in a particular place on earth who cares about local food. Locavores – that’s who we are. Lab is what we do for a couple of days to accelerate the shift to sourcing more of our food closer to home. A relational food system is what we have, as local as we can go, as connected as we can be and grateful for the many hands in the industrial system that bring from afar what we also need.

I’ll play with it more but for now, Locavore Lab is the square I’m on. And I’m announcing it so I have a pixel trail to first usage… which I did not have for Local Food Lab so I lost that platform.

Oh, and new hashtags #locavorelab and #relationalfoodsystem. #justsaying.

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