158 Bennington St, East Boston

The north end gets a lot of attention for its bakeries; here’s an example of how the Cook Boston initiative would boost local businesses all over the city.

I wouldn’t call Lolly’s under the radar -if you live in East Boston, it’s likely you know this little shop- but in the context of the rest of the city, it gets lost in the noise.

For the initiative, they could host a concha workshop for Mexico’s independence, the day of the dead, or a Rosca demonstration for the three kings day.

Partnerships like these would boost local shops’ cultural relevance in the city while increasing traffic.

Cook Boston, as I envision it, provides city residents the tools to break food monopolies from farm and production to processing and distribution.

At a city council hearing a few weeks ago I suggested that a revamped compost network in the city could reward residents with x lbs of produce in exchange for y lbs of diverted food waste.

The compost could be sold back to local producers in negotiations for reduced produce prices with the added benefit of reducing petrochemical use. These chemicals affect consumers, the farmers, and destabilize local ecosystems through air, water, and food chain contamination.

There are many such nested interventions in this proposal. It’s bizarre to see the immediate belittling my ideas get for not solving state, nation, global issues as an unelected un-resourced nobody.

If yall want to keep bringing those issues up as counters, you need to be doing the work to generate policy interventions, starting with your local leaders. I am appealing to the council’s and mayor’s rhetoric of community empowerment and local business development with the progression of this initiative.