The Cat Box

Greek headlines declare “Minor scuffles broke out Wednesday between demonstrators and police in Athens as thousands of Greeks took to the streets to protest new austerity measures that many critics describe as draconian.”

What could be a more exciting political expression than demonstrations in the street? Well, according to the new Greek website Gine Agrotis, food is. Gine Agrotis translates to “Become a Farmer!” in English, and the website says that “What and how we eat reflects positions we have taken on a range of social, health and environmental issues.”

What we are talking about here are CSA gardens aligned with social networking. The initiative is based on an innovative and disruptive business model that leverages the potential of a social networking platform to connect local  farmers, in large part young farmers, directly with consumers. So the farmers make more money because the middleman is cut out. Gine Agrotis was founded by Dimitris Koutsolioutsos, a 26-year-old graduate of the Athens University of Economics and Business. Koutsolioutsos rightly sees this initiative as an attempt to “break the market”, and a way to offer “a better quality of life to the city’s residents” through fresh healthy food provided at better prices than the traditional model can offer.

They also throw around ideas about planting locally to reduce the carbon footprint of food production and tying urban gardeners more directly to the process of growing their own food. Where have we heard this before???

I learned of the Gine Agrotis website from a blog called Good Greek Stuff http://goodgreekstuff.wordpress.com and was very interested to find this sunshiny development tucked inside the grey clouds of the present Greek economic problems. This very cool blog gives a look at this project of Dimitris Koutsolioutsos, and a look at a different kind of political revolution not being covered by international news companies.

Check out Good Greek Stuff and this story that illustrates something wonderful that we all have in common. Then visit the Gine Agrotis website at http://www.gineagrotis.gr/ where they accommodatingly will translate the website from Greek to English for us.