Listeria rarely shows up in produce, but an outbreak linked to cantaloupe from a Colorado farm has caused at least 72 illnesses, including up to 16 deaths, in 18 states. That farm has recalled more than 300,000 cases of cantaloupes.
It’s not clear how many klutzes want to notify their insurers
that a doctor visit was a W22.02XA, “walked into lamppost, initial
encounter” (or, for that matter, a W22.02XD, “walked into lamppost,
subsequent encounter”).
When farmer and direct marketer Paulette Rink grew tired of unloading products at every location she visited during the week and decided to create a store-on-wheels, she turned to a vehicle that is being reborn in many different ways on produce farms around the country: the old school bus.Making food stores mobile has the potential to connect farmers and consumers in fresh ways. In an increasingly mobile society, going mobile also has a novelty factor. “Food trucks are getting so popular, too,” points out Wendy White, a marketing specialist with the Colorado Department of Agriculture.Earlier this year, Slow Food Denver awarded a micro-grant to the Gypsy Farm Bus project, a farmers market-on-wheels that would visit underserved neighborhoods. Urban gardener Katherine Cornwell said she got the idea from an article about Farm 2 Family LLC in Richmond, Va.In that venture, entrepreneur Mark Lilly drives a converted farm bus to local farms, boxes up produce and takes it to several drop off locations around the cities of Washington, D.C., and Richmond. It provides benefits to urban consumers but also to small farmers who need distribution of their products and help with consumer education.In a similar spirit, Rink spent the past summer converting a 1985 model school bus into the “Traveling Desperado Bus” in order to expand markets for local food products.She and her husband, Gary, who started Rowdy Stickhorse Wild Acres near Covington 20 years ago and added sales of home-raised grass-based meats nine years ago, sell their own eggs, meats and produce, but they also manage a regional food co-op selling items like bread, honey, jams, cheeses and frozen foods made by other small-batch growers and bakers.The Rinks bought the bus this spring for $1,000, and spent another $2,300 on several chest freezers, a freezer-to-fridge conversion kit and electrical wiring to rig each case with its own outlet and electrical breaker. The two saved money by using salvaged materials whenever possible and doing nearly everything themselves, with help from their four children.They took out all of the seats and put in a tongue-in-groove hand-painted wood floor. The heater was repositioned from the back of the bus to the side so that shoppers can enter and exit through the back door as well as the front. Rink tinted the windows, sewed curtains and painted the interior walls. She built several rustic display cases from old barn wood with little safety rails to keep the jars of products in place while the bus is on the road, and put in overhead racks to shelve a variety of breads and coffees. New LED lights are being mounted on the ceiling.The outside will be painted barn red with the farm’s new logo mounted on it.“This gives us the flexibility to do more than just farmers markets,” Rink said.The concept is proving especially popular at two hospitals in Oklahoma City, about an hour and half south of the Rink farm. “I do really well at the hospitals, where the health care professionals are picking up groceries on their way home from work,” Rink said. “This is the farmers market brought to you.”While buses add mobility, the point is still to get people to shop closer to home. Cornwell said her plan — still in the very early stages — would involve traveling a limited area, which should minimize maintenance and fuel costs. “It gets pretty good mileage,” she said of the bus.Rink is creating a regionalized version of the Oklahoma Food Co-op, which was used as a model for the Wichita Food Co-op and the High Plains Food Co-op serving Denver and the Front Range.“What we have found with the food co-op is we’ve got people trained to buy Oklahoma, but now we want to encourage them to buy more locally,” she said.Relatively high gas prices and the travel time involved in distributing statewide are motivations for farmers to cultivate shoppers closer to home, she said.The Rink’s Oklahoma Farm to Fork Market allows customers to place orders online but no money changes hands until the delivery is made to simplify the inventorying process.“With this concept I want to keep it more first-come-first serve,” she said. In other words, more like a store.
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Why are there codes for injuries received while sewing, ironing,
playing a brass instrument, crocheting, doing handcrafts, or
knitting—but not while shopping, wonders Rhonda Buckholtz, who does
ICD-10 training for the American Academy of Professional Coders, a
credentialing organization.
Indeed, health plans may never again wonder where a patient got
hurt. There are codes for injuries in opera houses (see
code), art galleries (see
code), squash courts (see
code) and nine locations in and around a mobile home (see
codes), from the bathroom to the bedroom.