We need a nationwide renaissance where the food we eat not only sustains our bodies, but sustains our bank accounts, our car leases, our retirement accounts. Local foods enriches every community where it has a strong presence. It keeps food in the community a hundred different ways.

We asked a few dozen of our friends here at Farm to Table what their predictions were for the local foods movement in 2010: What they were most excited about this market season, what trends they were watching closely, the must-have heirloom fruits or veggies to look out for, and pretty much anything else that got them motivated to head to the market early and often.

I was contacted by the Times a few weeks ago and asked to contribute a short editorial on the role of the Federal government in local foods. They were looking for someone to provide a counterbalance to the majority opinion that can be summarized with the simplistic statement that: Government should be doing more.

It’s time to retire the shopping cart, a symbol of an era when abundance, convenience and economy were the height of achievement. A shopping cart is the device that should come to symbolize everything that was wrong about the 20th Century approach to food in America.

For years now, the mainstream agriculture community, corporations, farmers, middlemen, even large grocers, have obstructed local, sustainable food from entering broad swaths of the market. Their reasoning has always been specious at best, but one of the answers they gave that actually did make sense was that the demand for local sustainable food did not exist. Clearly, that paradigm is shifting.

We need to tell more stories. And we need to do a better job of telling the stories that we currently have. As our culture and society continues to undergo a great value reset, brought on by a mixture of the end of the Bush administrations’ problematic legacy, the election of Barack Obama, and the Great Recession, American’s are looking to be comforted.

For me, real maturity means working through the reasons not to and finding out the ways to actually do it. Social media gives us these tools, and yet for all our savvy and talents, for all the amazing content that is produced in the local, sustainable food worlds, the community is disparate, segregated. I’ll be here, watching, talking and listening. When we want to do this, when we want to get even more serious about how badly we all want to fix America’s broken food system, I’ll be there waiting, willing to continue to do the next generation worth of work we have ahead of us.

I didn’t like 24 in 24. If you can imagine trying to eat at that many places in that amount of time, you know you’d be hating food by the end of the 12th restaurant. To do 24 in 24 in NYC, you’d need a theme, like Brooklyn or Pizza because you couldn’t possibly take only 24 restaurants and claim it was the best of the city. I wanted to capture the full flavor of the boroughs in one project. The only way to do this would be to eat at all the restaurants in the city that people liked to call their favorites.

There has been a huge surge of interest in urban agriculture in the last couple years, and we believe the only way to make urban agriculture a lasting profession is if there is a model for financial sustainability. We never want to hear, ‘Remember in the 2000-2010’s when urban farming was the latest fad?’ Part of BK Farmyards mission is to eliminate barriers for jobs in urban agriculture. We plan to teach intensive, production farming techniques on site and use the production sales to expand the farm to its full acre and employ talented farmers in Brooklyn.

In this episode of the Dairy Show, host Michael Crupain talks with Pastry Chef Gina de Palma of Babbo in New York