Yesterday while checking out the very cool, very funky, very un-airconditioned collective Brooklyn workspace called Green Spaces, I met Sean Dimin, who runs Sea to Table with his father. Like nearly every food business that settles into the clutter of retro furniture and stellar downtown Brooklyn views at Green Spaces — Crop to Cup coffee, Kumquat Cupcakery – their business model is a feel-good (for realses), super-contemporary one.

The Dimins go to areas of the world — the fishing village called Charlottesville in Tobago, remote parts of Alaska — where fisherfolk (okay, mostly men) catch a lot of fish (using traditional methods, BTW) but can’t make a living. They can’t, Sean explained to me, because they don’t have local demand for their catch, and lack the means, the time or the ability to sell their fish to bigger markets that would pay premium, meaning big city restaurants and the fine foodies that love them.

Sean’s father started the company in the early 2000s, after taking his family to Tobago for vacation (yes, they’re from Long Island) and seeing first-hand the fishing communities, their amazing catch (oh wahoo, blackfin tuna and mahi mahi, you are so tasty) and those communities’ inability to make a real living. Amazingly enough, to me at least, Sean’s father, who at that point was in the plastics biz (!!) was able to see that what they needed to was to get their product to chefs hundreds of miles away.

That’s exactly what they set out to do. Sean says one of the hardest parts was getting fishermen to ice down their catch; they had to actually give out coolers and build an ice-making plant, along with fish processing facilities, on the island. And that’s exactly what they’ve done, connecting restaurants like Savoy and Landmarc in Manhattan with Tobago fishermen who catch sustainable species in traditional ways, all  thanks to the wonders of overnight delivery via FedEx. Since then, they’ve expanded that model, called Tobago Wild, to other fishing communities that need connections — and processing and distribution support as well — to bigger markets, launching Alaska Wild in Alaska and, most recently, Dixie Wild in the South. (In addition to North Carolina Amberjack, Dixie Wild is responsible for bringing Gulf Coast shrimp to NYC. I thank you. But please begin home delivery now.)

Here in New York City, there are a handful of groups doing similar things with farmers: Basis Farm to Chef is working to help collect and distribute far-flung farmers’ products from cheese to corn to city restaurants by providing pick-up and delivery. The book Organic Inc. also chronicles a former farmer near Philadelphia and D.C. who decided he might have more of an impact by creating a co-op of farmers with some trucks to get to those nearby markets than actually farming. And even Whole Foods, whether you approve of their CEO’s health care stance or not, has programs to handpick a few local businesses in each region and help them get their products into its stores.

What’s amazing to me is that this father-son combo with no food-world experience was able to see clearly one of the sustainable food world’s biggest problems: How to connecting rural or remote or small producers to the hordes of people with the demand for those products and the ability to pay for them.

It’s that arena — that gap between grower and fisher and consumer — where the most exciting moves are being made, IMHO, to feed the world in maybe more globally minded ways than the cargo truck of food from California. Of course it’s true that those trucks are the commercial extension of these little co-ops, and you always have to balance the costs (to the community, in gas, in environmental impact, to workers, of Fed-Ex flights) of collecting and distributing stuff from one place and getting it to another with the benefits. So … let’s just try to not make all the same mistakes again, shall we?