St. Patrick Catholic Church on Sunday held a blessing and dedication for  The Green Machine Mobile Food Market. The market will create access to healthy food for areas of Memphis that don’t have ready access to traditional supermarkets.

The mobile market will begin making stops at 15 area locations June 2, Kenneth Reardon, a professor and director of the graduate program of City and Regional Planning at the University of Memphis, told an audience of community leaders, parishioners and volunteers gathered at St. Patrick.

Reardon also shared the history behind the mobile food market and thanked the many community partners who have helped get the project off the ground.

St. Patrick Parishioners and members of the community await a blessing and dedication for a Memphis Area Transit Authority Bus that has been transformed into a rolling deliverer of healthy foods for the city’s neediest areas.

The Green Machine Mobile Food Market will begin making stops at 15 city locations beginning June 2 to sell fresh, affordable produce supplied by Easy-Way Produce Stores.

Antonio Raciti, a University of Memphis visiting professor in city and regional planning, speaks with a local parishioner on the newly rehabbed bus. Raciti created the overall design and detailed construction plans for transforming the bus into a retail sales environment.

A very interesting, cautionary opinion piece from American Journalism Review about how the media covers schools.

http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=5280

We’ve spent a lot of time covering the schools in recent years in the paper and on the Behind the Headlines show. The reform efforts of Superintendent Kriner Cash, the Gates Foundation efforts, the rise of charter schools, and of course the pending consolidation of city and county schools, all have occupied a lot of space. For good reason, I think.

After reading this, though, I’m frantically trying to think about where, when and how often I’ve fallen into some of the easy lines described by Farhi.

Two items from the story that stuck out to me:

“’The discussion [of the state of schools] is quite simplistic. I’m not sure why exactly. My suspicion is that the media has trouble with complexity.’”

“In 2011, the percentage of parents who gave their children’s school an A grade was at its highest ever (37 percent), whereas only 1 percent of respondents rated the nation’s schools that way. Why the disparity in perceived quality? Gallup asked people about that, too. Mostly, it was because people knew about their local schools through direct experience. They only learned about the state of education nationally through the news media.”

The New York Times did an interesting story on the question of whether it’s better to rent or buy a home now, given the beating that house prices have gone through in the last 18+ months.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/business/economy/21leonhardt.html

The article includes extensive analysis, it seems, including a city-by-city rating of those markets in which you’re better off buying, those you’re better off renting. Memphis is included, and is scored as what I’d call a 50/50 market — neither renting nor buying is high risk. Which would seem like a good thing to me, reflecting the fact that home prices are neither too high or too low.

There’s also a nifty rent vs. buy calculator. I love online calculators.

I spent far too much time in a number of different airports over the last few days, including a number of visits to the single worst airport in the United States: ATL, the Atlanta airport.

I was thinking about this in the context of our recent article on ongoing improvements to the Memphis Airport, a starkly different article in the New York Times today about delayed and canceled improvement projects at many other airports nationwide, and the steady and perhaps ominous (for Memphis, at least) replacement of Northwest Airlines signage with Delta signage that I saw during my trip.

Atlanta is the worst US airport I’ve ever used. It’s not for a lack of amenities: there appear to be a nearly unlimited range of dining, entertainment and retail options throughout the airport. The concourses are architecturally interesting. The high windows offer beautiful, panoramic views.

The problem is that I’m never able to use or enjoy any of these apparently wonderful options or features because, in Atlanta, I’m always sprinting from Concourse A to Concourse D, bag in tow, frantic because, as always, I’ve arrived late.

In all my years traveling, I’m not sure I’ve ever not been late arriving in Atlanta only to find that, after sprinting across the airport, my flight is delayed, be it an official delay that leaves you wandering around the gate hoping for some news or explanation of what’s going on, or the unofficial “we’re 19th in line to take off” delay that gets you in your seat on time but leaves you rolling across the tarmac at a somewhat sub-supersonic 2 MPH.

On one recent trip, the pilot actually announced, “It’ll take longer to get to the runway today than the flight itself will take.” I thought it was an expected but welcome bit of irony from the pilot. It wasn’t. I fell asleep on the plane, woke up thinking we must be in the air, but then realized we were still only number 3 for takeoff.

All this makes me hope that Memphis does in fact benefit from the Northwest/Delta merger by taking some flights from the obviously overburdened Atlanta airport. I’m sure Delta will make its decisions about cutbacks or expansions in service at the Memphis airport entirely on cost and profits, which is fine. But one has to think — or maybe it’s just hope — that all those delays in Atlanta must result in some sort of additional cost, some diminishment of profit, that could be addressed by utilizing Memphis more, not less.

Memphis is an imperfect airport — a number of truly surreal delays in getting luggage from baggage claim come to mind and the airport lacks the amenities and architectural grandeur that swept through so many airports over the last decades. But it’s a perfectly pleasant, thoroughly manageable airport that, for the time being at least, will get you anywhere you want to go. Let’s hope it stays that way — or even gets better.

Posted by Eric Barnes, publisher of The Daily News, The Memphis News and Chandler Reports.

All I can say is Yes! Andy Meek has the story that Midtown is a big step closer to having a new grocery store, this one at Overton Square. As someone who’s lived and worked in Midtown and Downtown for 13 years now, the prospect of a new, clean, well-organized and properly run grocery store within a short driving distance is almost too much to handle.

The company, Associated Wholesale Grocers, operates different types of grocery stores around the country. If the deal goes through, which isn’t certain, it’s not yet clear which type of AWG store will be built. Let’s hope it’s a Thriftway, though. I’ve been to Thriftway stores up in the Pacific Northwest and they are usually great.

The impossible dream.

The holy grail.

The cliche’s abound.

What’s it say about my age that I’m so excited about this? Sigh.

Regardless, I’m excited. And if a grocery store does go in at the big retail development at Poplar and Cleveland, as is possible, then us Midtowners could actually have options for shopping. The dream, the dream.

(And it’s pretty cool that Andy broke this newest development, since the news itself has over the years sparked remarkably fierce competition among us, The CA and The MBJ — a competitiveness second only to coverage of a possible Target in Midtown. Andy? Any update on the Target?)