Pedal-To-Table: Bridging the gap between Local Food/ Local Transportation
November 3, 2009
by Tzippora Rhodes and Nicole Grijnsztein
Delivered with a smile.
The various reasons people hold for choosing to eat local often tie into a general drive to live healthy and socially responsible lives. It’s these same motives that inspire me to promote urban bicycling.
Teaming up with West Town Bikes, a non-profit dedicated to fostering Chicago’s vibrant bicycling community, and several local growers, including Growing Home, Genesis Growers and City Farm, among others, we launched the Loaded Bikes project. Loaded Bikes presents individuals concerned with the impact of their food’s production with an alternative to that food’s transportation. Hooking up the local food initiative to pedal power is a natural extension of the sustainability ideal. I am convinced that within the city of Chicago, density and proximity make bikes (towing bike trailers) a completely viable option— and this growing season I set out to prove it.
Loaded Bikes got its start this summer providing CSA home-delivery by bike to three different CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture programs. Growing Home was the first to let us reach out to their shareholders. Like most CSAs, Growing Home has a handful of sites across the city where they leave tens of 5/9 bushel boxes brimming with fresh-picked produce for their CSA subscribed members to pick up. Loaded Bikes offers to deliver individual boxes from these various sites right to people’s homes by bike, with rates based on distance from drop-off site.
Members of Genesis Growers and the Simply Wisconsin CSAs also have the home-delivery by bike option. Between Tzippora Rhodes (myself), Jasmine Easter— an incredibly reliable Growing Home intern who saves my back (or legs rather) on a weekly basis, and Rosa Diaz— a lady who between a full-time job and night school still finds time for the project, Loaded Bikes has replaced 142 car-trips so far this summer. We plan to continue our service through the end of December. Next season, now that we’ve proven the feasibility of local produce by bike, we will reach out to more farmers and to more shareholders and spread the pedal-to-table trend.
Loaded Bikes also delivers City Farm’s restaurant orders. Given that these vegetables are grown on-site at Clybourn and Division, the turnips and chard that we pedal have never seen the inside of a petroleum-based vehicle. For those who obsessively calculate carbon footprints, we hope to make this the rule, not the exception, for the yields of urban agriculture.
Another project in the works is a compost retrieval service. With all of the community and backyard gardens starting up, there is a serious need for fertile organic material in which to grow healthy crops. By collecting organic waste and hauling it (by bike!) to urban farm sites we would solve multiple problems in one stroke, creating a complete food cycle.
One more project of note is the Loaded Bikes trailer-sharing collective. Similar to I-GO or Zip Car, Loaded Bikes is building bike trailers for collective use. One of the hardest obstacles to a total reliance on bike transportation is the difficulty in hauling larger and heavier items and the prohibitive cost of personal bike trailers. By keeping communal trailers at various sites across the city, members can check out the appropriate equipment they need when there’s a sizable load to haul.
Here in Chicago we’ve got the infrastructure, we’ve got the cyclists, and we are even building our own bike trailers to do the hauling. Local produce by-bike is a natural extension of the Slow Food and urban agriculture movement and as an advocate on both ends I hope to complete the loop.
Loaded Bikes
West Town Bikes
Growing Home
Genesis Growers
City Farm
Simply Wisconsin CSA
