A couple of things coming together for me here in response to your post. These ideas are surely self evident to many, but I thought I'd connect the dots for my future reference.

A couple of years ago, Norm, in response to a local food Thanksgiving post by Evelyn, you mentioned market bags - an advertisement you had seen in Toronto. I reminded you about City Fresh and Maurice and The New Agrarian Center. You were living in Ohio City at the time I believe and were wondering about the lead content in the cilantro there in the community garden you and Evelyn participated in as growers. I can't find that you had posted it here, so maybe we just spoke about it when you joined me and Julia Barton and Brad Melzer to discuss lead remediation in NEO soils, but there was a concern about the lead levels in the cilantro and other produce you might be harvesting from that site. There is certainly a concern about lead and other pollutants in the Cleveland soil.

So you moved away from Mittal and farther away from the valley where Sherwin and Williams' spouted their lead dust for decades to the challenging city of East Cleveland. Now you and Evelyn have an "Edible Estate" in EC.

When I met Martha, she had been involved and interested in helping seniors at the Helen S. Brown Senior Citizens' Center to garden a lot across the street from the center. You and Sudhir and Philip were helping seniors to cross the digital divide by bringing them computers and teaching them how to stay in touch with relatives via email and to use the internet - broadening and expanding what can sometimes be an isolated existence.

So there are a few things here. Getting out to the market day for seniors (and everyone) can be an important participatory exercise in community development - Stone Soup. But some cannot get out to the market day. Those folks will need meals on wheels (might be two wheels) and it may not have to be meals, but simply food on wheels. Is there a way to combine the outreach to seniors in East Cleveland who are still living at home - to bring them computers and market bags? Can East Cleveland (with Maurice's wonderful formula for bypassing the polluted soils) now be a place for CSA (Community Supported Agriculture)?

Perhaps many urban parcels can be cultivated and the food sold at Fresh Stops in the city on particular days, but some will not be able to visit them. They could, however, have bags of produce delivered to their homes by young entrepreneurs on bicycles (with panniers or trailers). Motor vehicles could be used in winter months. Recipes could be tucked into the bags as suggestions for the mix of produce. Maybe this is already happening. I found this in Lakewood, but don't find other local food deliveries in NEO with an online presence. Help!

I am just thinking out loud here, but it seems to me that the homebound could use fresh food as well, and they could, as you already know, benefit from some sort of interaction with the world with regular visits by something more interactive than their televisions and telephones.