make the case that the economy we have is leaking dollars rapidly and it's something that really requires us to think differently about food to reclaim that possibility i do the work that i do because i think everyone in this society needs to the chance to really the twin cities spend eight billion dollars a year buying food and even though we're in the top ten states farm states of the u s we spend about seven billion dollars that buying food that's sourced outside of the state and that comes from places we often don't know the practices the farmers use we don't actually know where the farm one of the results of the industrial food system is a people really get separated from each other we have people working in factories we have people working in farms we have boxes of food that come to a store and you can basically make all those transactions without ever talking about it anybody for more than twenty seconds people are very hungry to know where their food came from and farmers are telling me they want to actually know the customer that it's their food they're tired of putting stuff on a truck and having it disappear forever they want to actually have a relationship at the end of the day we spend less on food than most other countries there in the industrialized world but it really isn't cheaply look at the long term fall of that we have a huge obesity and diabetes epidemic in this country and the medical costs this hundred seventy four billion dollars a year we also lose three thousand people here to food poisoning that states we lose that many people every year because of having food that is tainted or we're just not smart enough to handle it safely in our own homes the relationships we form around trading food around feeding ourselves well run exercising better around developing a much more healthy lifestyle for ourselves we need to do the that to really have a thriving economy again if you come to a place like this farmer's market you have a real chance of knowing the farmer asking them ho produce their food learning about whether they're certified organic or not or whether what their sustainable practice might be actually is really crucial for economic development you need some place where people can meet each other and develop relationships and learn how to do bit other other deals together it's really important to remember that in this in the history of st paul we had a farmer's market in st paul before we had a state of minnesota it was that crucial for having a place for trade to happen for farmers to make a living but also for people to see each other and have together to the city market in st paul run a member and one of reasons i shop here is that i have a share of the source of feels like when i'm buying here i buy something else support my future in food as well we have ten percent of the food co ops in the country are here in minnesota it's a really thriving force and they're trying to now expand to about five hundred stores nationally that will be coopted leone's what we had to do was develop local trucking services local distribution methods that really allowed for produce from local farms to come all the way from wisconsin southern minnesota northwest the twin cities into the metropolitan market we didn't have those forty years ago in very reliable ways this is a product less than ok all that you really couldn't find at stores when i was young nobody was eating it except for very small specific ethnic markets but now it's very present in the last year i visited farms in georgia in indiana that have wonderful melons and these melons from the southwest wisconsin are the best ones i've had all year that are not just local but are higher quality much richer deeper red and also sweeter flavor when our growers come in and we get to have that one on one you know you can definitely tell that they see the co op as an asset you know we really help to get their name out there and they in turn help us with  mushrooms and cloning them and growing them cultivating them indoors and also selling us foraged wild mushrooms and mushrooms that we just got in with a wild crafted lobster mushroom and typically we buy these mushrooms you know from out west west coast oregon in the ship over here and they come in you know at a fairly decent quality but to be able to get the stuff directly from somebody who's growing it in the state the difference in quality is just fast and we're able to get it actually for a comparable price for us to it's great to actually have access to this because they're really really good mushrooms we work really hard to bring in food from the five state region that's minnesota wisconsin that did the co does and iowa we feel good about that because it supports the local food economy and the local economy at large and i feel lucky to be able to share that with our members and our shoppers a lot of the stores that now future local foods would not have done that if someone hadn't thought forty years ago to make that opportunity possible supporting some growers even though they were small and struggling to really learn how to produce food better and to really scale up to where they can really meet a metropolitan market demand we spend one point two trillion dollars a year buying food in this country it's an amazing amount of money we spend buying food that's more money than we needed to bail out the banking system a few years back so it's quite a bit of money and nothing in the economy involves people as ritually as food does because we're all eating well required to eat we all can actually across party lines across regional lines we can learn how to do this better together and now we have to translate that into paul into the policy arena because now we have enough consumer power to make that really work on a commercial scale but i think at this point legislators haven't been convinced of the need to do this i think they see it as really good when people buy fresh vegetables but they don't it's silly see themselves playing a role the entire food system we have assumes that oil will be cheap the more fuel costs rise the more vulnerable we are in minnesota for having a healthy food supply argue that only the state of minnesota can really afford the resources needed to to do some of the planning to make sure that we produce enough food we have enough farmland set aside so will guarantee ourselves that we can produce all the food that every minnesotan needs to eat every year in a