foodchain1
When I fly, I like to get the window seat. I like to watch as the plane slows to a gradual climb, just before it breaks into the cloud bank. The glimpse I get at the world below is beyond fascinating. Some compare it to a patchwork quilt, with squares of varying shades of green stitched together. At night, I can tell the cities from the neighborhoods or subdivisions, as evidenced by the big cluster of glowing lights shining up into my cozy seat, and I am not just seeing, but feeling the beauty of a gathering of individual beams creating radiance. This always reminds me of a simple notion. It’s a big picture concept, really, the idea that we can get much more done together.
There is something dazzling about people uniting, forming a solid force. This is a concept that Kentuckians have been pursuing in relation to the local food economy. Louisville has been recreating overlooked neighborhoods near their downtown area. With the conception of “NuLu” several years ago, many small businesses are flocking to East Market Street District. Beyond being a haven of small business owners, this area has attracted the environmentally conscious and organic and local food lovers.
Louisville is at it again, looking at its Portland area this time. These efforts even garnered the attention of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which then partnered with the Louisville Department of Economic Growth and Innovation to offer a loan program as an incentive for small food processors to plant their businesses in the area.
Lexington has its own patchwork quilt, if you will, through the blossoming success of the Bread Box. A warehouse that formerly contained the Rainbo Bread Company is being transformed into a place to foster community, including several tenants looking to innovate the local food economy. In April 2012, West Sixth Brewing Company, brewing all its craft beer on site, opened its doors, retaining to a large degree the original setup of the old Bread Box building. The taproom leads into the brewery, which is housed in a bright room with floor-to-ceiling windows on one of the long walls, allowing visitors a nearly Willy Wonka-like view at the inner workings. The grains, briefly used with most of the nutrients still intact, will travel from this area to another directly behind the brewery that contains FoodChain, a nonprofit working to redefine how we use our buildings by providing education and demonstration of cutting-edge, sustainable indoor food production and processing.
As it begins, this Lexington treasure is housing an incredible prototype of an indoor aquaponics system that will soon expand to become the state’s first large-scale indoor system. If you think aquaponics sounds like something from a comic book or a seventies pop band, you’re not alone. Rebecca Self, the executive director of this new nonprofit, explained that it is a combination of aquaculture, growing fish in tanks, and hydroponics, growing plants without soil. By linking them together, the plants and fish benefit each other and help reduce the inputs needed for production.
In the current prototype, 12 largemouth bass, which will ultimately be fed with those leftover brewery grains, are swimming around in a big blue barrel that is positioned just a bit higher than a plant bed. However, these plants aren’t tucked into little beds of soil. Bits of shale nestle up to the young sprouts as another blue barrel sits just slightly below the bed to catch runoff water. To lessen energy consumption moving water from fish to plants and back again, this system makes use of one of the most basic principles of physics — gravity. Gravity pulls water containing ammonia from the fishes’ waste down to the plants. The plants can’t absorb the nutrition as is, but the bacteria that live naturally within the shale bed transform it into nitrates, which is then available to feed the plants. As the plants take up this nitrogen source, they thereby filter the remaining water, which is then cycled back up to the fish through a small fountain pump, at which point the whole process will begin again. Waste is minimized (if not eliminated), energy is conserved and fish and plants thrive in quite the unexpected environment. It is one way, Self said, that FoodChain is “reimagining the local food economy.”
As the amount of urban spaces have grown, the need for maximizing potential of said spaces has expanded as well. Many other cities are making way with rooftop gardens or repurposed buildings — planting, nurturing and then distributing healthy food. Such food is healthy in the sense that it really is good for your health, but also in the sense that this groundbreaking project has the potential to help the health of Lexington as a whole. Part of FoodChain aims to provide a platform for local cooks, with the goal of a full-service certified kitchen incubator that will be in part supplied by the aquaponics products. Also in their more immediate plans, the goal is to build off of the existing 100-gallon prototype structure and to construct a larger 15,000-gallon system, which will produce 240 plants per week, 125 pounds of tilapia per month, and 150 freshwater prawns per year. The different phases of this project can be found on their website, www.foodchainlex.org.
If you can imagine a bustling area full of colorful and varied food, placing work in the hands of local people rather than having commercial food shipped in, where languages, tastes and cultures collide, then I believe you’re imagining what is to come for the Bread Box and FoodChain.
It is not hard to become enthusiastic for this project, as you listen to Self speak. She lights up discussing the biology of it, the successful reception by the community and the potential for a catalyst of change to inspire the city of Lexington. “Food isn’t partisan,” she explained.
Indeed, food isn’t partisan, but it acts instead as a unifier. It is a constant that stitches us into something bigger than ourselves, and if there is anything that Big Blue Nation understands, it is how to operate as a team. Look out, world — basketball is not the only thing in which we can be champions.