A Great Loss for the Good Food World
In memoriam Vivian Carmody; plus this week's farmers market schedule
The Wild Blue Yonder
Like it or not, our 30th floor apartment overlooking Belmont Harbor provides an annual box seat for the Chicago Air and Water Show. This weekend is the 12th since we moved into this place. It’s also the first time I had to take photos without a big boy camera (my old one is out of commission, and I’ll be buying a new one soon).
My iPhone 13 Pro Max is very capable of taking excellent photos, but view-finding very fast-moving objects is a bit hard, especially with the planes blending in with a hazy sky. But I did get the timing on a few of the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds precision aviation team. This one, I think, is the best.
In Memoriam Vivian Carmody
I usually approach Local Food Forum with as much sunny optimism as I can muster. But as a media platform that is in service to our Good Food community, I now have shared the stories of community members in crisis, from fires and floods and drought.
This, however, is the first time I’ve had to report on a sudden loss of life, made even more difficult by the fact that the victim, Vivian Carmody, was an all-too-brief acquaintance.
Yesterday afternoon I noticed a Facebook message from an old Michigan State friend who lives near Detroit that said, “I knew you’d want to know.” It was a screenshot from the Detroit Free Press with the headline, “Eastern Market CEO Injured, Wife Dead After Being Hit by Car in Detroit.”
The article reported that Dan and Vivian Carmody were walking to a restaurant late Friday afternoon when they were struck by a car, which then crashed into a tree. Vivian died of her injuries; Dan was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries. The driver, according to reports, was in critical condition.
The news left me stunned. I have known Dan, head of the Eastern Market Partnership since 2007, for almost a decade through work. and I am a great admirer of Eastern Market in its role as provider of healthy food for more than 40,000 customers each Saturday, sales for dozens of Detroit-region farmers, and jobs, hope and opportunity in a city that has just recently started to rebound from decades of economic and population decline.
I made a whirlwind trip to Detroit just last weekend to learn about the visionary plan to expand Eastern Market into mostly vacated adjacent neighborhoods with a modern wholesale produce center, a Food Innovation Center to help start-up businesses grow and thrive, and a produce processing facility.
That evening I met Vivian for the first time. She and Dan have been a public interest power couple in Detroit. A brand development expert, Vivian was Dan’s partner in Carmody Consulting, a company he started long before he was hired at Eastern Market, which has a long record of image-boosting partnerships with non-profit downtown urban development projects.
That Saturday, I toured Eastern Market with Dan, then met Vivian that evening. The couple graciously invited me to tag along to a dinner at a friend’s equestrian farm in Detroit’s far northern suburbs. It was a delightful evening — complete with a horse-drawn carriage ride where I captured the photo of Vivian above — with delicious food, wine and conversation about a number of eclectic topics.
I was already pondering a second trip to Detroit soon to explore the city’s extensive, largely BIPOC urban agriculture network, and suggested a rain check for the dinner to which the couple had invited me on Friday at Sozai, a sustainable sushi Japanese restaurant, a date that was thwarted by my travel fiasco that day.
It is really impossible to wrap my mind around the fact that just six days later, a woman so full of life and with so much more to offer her community was taken away in an instant. May she rest in peace. Local Food Forum sends its deepest condolences to Dan Carmody, his children, and the Eastern Market family.