Food halls housed in repurposed warehouses are now part of the fabric of the urban landscape. Most of them are based on a business model that capitalizes on affluent city and suburbs dwellers' romance with the locavore, farm-to-table movement and with niche culinary experiences.
The Redd on Salmon Street - located in the Central Eastside industrial district of Portland, Oregon - is a food project of an entirely different order, with a much more inclusive and wildly ambitious mission: to make regeneratively produced, locally sourced food a mainstay of the regional diet.
Today, if you shop in a big box grocery store, or dine in a corporate cafeteria or in most restaurants, your meals are invariably sourced from the industrial agriculture pipeline. "We want to invert that whole system," explains Amanda Oborne, Vice President of Ecotrust's Food & Farms program and architect of the Redd's mission. "We want it to be viable for every individual and institution-from a transaction cost, distribution, and business perspective-to be able to buy from a network of hundreds of small- and medium-sized local producers, not just from the global industrial ag commodity system."
