Only 12 days left to raise minimal funds to support the urban farm and food sharing site Farm Food Connect! Please back this project and let others know they can too! Every little bit helps.
Much progress has been made and a functional pilot site is up and running. However, this project needs your support.
Farm & Food Connect works to preserve food heritage; support a growing cottage industry in urban farm and food; and utilize appropriate technology to ensure community access to fresh affordable food.
Farm & Food Connect is home to the urban farm and food directory, a tool to promote urban agriculture and accessibility of affordable food in urban communities. The directory includes searchable profiles of folks who grow and prepare there own foods and want to share with and educate others.
FarmFood Connect is up and running! You can now search a directory of profiles for food for share, trade or sale, ample food knowledge such as cheese making and even plots that may be available to grow food on for those who do not have space of their own.
The directory is for everyone. If you have something urban farm and food related to offer create a profile and get the word out. If you are looking, hop on and search through the listings. The beauty of it is that you can search in your specific region by city or even zipcode and, brace yourself…its free to have a profile and to search.
Use the directory on Farm Food Connect and support the project. You can help the site meet greater needs by supporting it though Kickstarter! Help this project be a success.
I gave a fun little show and tell at a neighborhood preschool recently. I love talking to children. They have such excellent feedback and creative suggestions. while demonstrating how a molcajete grinds spices such as cinnamon, I asked the group if they recognized the scent of the spice I was grinding. One particularly clever lad said “its cinnamon!” Indeed it was. When asked how he was able to recognize it he said “my grandma makes cinnamon soup with my mom.”
This sounded so fabulous I contacted his mother to find out 1) if this is true and 2) for the recipe! Apparently, he made up the story. I lamented the fact that he hadn’t made up the recipe too. Lo’ and behold, a few days later I received the recipe in the mail!
I love it. It sounds like Asian fusion. The technique is right up my alley too. The kid is brilliant.
Since April, I’ve been posting about efforts by Value [the] Meal to restrict predatory marketing tactics used by McDonalds. I hosted an event for family and friends to learn more and support the cause. Turns out the efforts have been fruitful! A big win in SF that regulates how restaurants can market to youth.
The SF Board of Supervisors voted with a veto-proof majority to place limits—based on specific nutrition criteria—on how toys are marketed by restaurants in the city and county of San Francisco. This means unless a Happy Meal meets the nutritional criteria, no more toys.
Civil Eats did a nice write up on it, check it out.
Its a thoughtful rainy Sunday. I am mulling over some ideas in my head. I’ve been trying to find a way to articulate a strong motivating force in my urban farming activities. My actions stem from a want to honor, preserve and practice old wisdom around food. Actually, around community in general.
When my family migrated to the U.S. they traveled with railroad worker camps in Texas and Kansas. When The Depression, hit they left Kansas for California (Story is my gg-grandmother was too cold in KS. I agree.) and purchase with their hard earned savings, a block in a small town in the Central Valley. Eventually, family members lived in houses they built on parcels of the block. Some still do in fact.
I mention this because I am fascinated with the manner in which these past generations lived- tight community bond, sought care from one another, grew and shared their own food, maintained rich cultural practices and were inclusive beyond just the Mexican community. I am also intrigued by the forces that caused the shift away from communal culture. There are layers of complexity to living in a communal model, I know. Yet, I still want to have a healthy vibrant and connected community in the context of today. By that, I mean there is no going back. So how do we move forward and retain the knowledge from hard lessons learned in past eras?
Back in June, I attended an Earth Island presentation that was a conversation between Raj Patel, author of Stuffed & Starved among other things, and Annie Leonard, creator or The Story of Stuff. I was deeply inspired by the words of Ms. Leonard. She presented a more hopeful path on which we truly are embarking. A path where people are grappling with defining what community is, how to engage in it and opting for economic choices that can grow a community (and its resources) rather than deplete it. She referenced the book Plentitude, by Juliet Schor. Juliet Schor is also author to the Overspent American in which she introduces the idea of a Share Economy.
As I move forward in my own thinking and action I truly wrestle with finding a balance between independent creative action and slowing down or compromising to be inclusive. I am inspired by and watchful of models of communal living, social business models…basically anything that provides a practical model for how to create a livelihood and live in a way that is connected (to our own needs, each other, our environment…you know, the big Connected).
I have been learning more about how to incorporate this thinking into my own projects and practices. This led me to discover a great book called Power and Love by Adam Kahane (Kahane has worked in sustainable food). It provides an honest depiction of how well intentioned social change movements can become turf and resource wars of their own. It also moves beyond this common folly to outline techniques to overcome this tendency and work together toward a shared goal.
This is highly relevant to food system change as it requires policy change as well as cultural shift and community participation to be effective. The below video is a talk on Kahane’s book (there are 5 parts to the talk), check it out.
The ladies over at Food & Tech Connect are too cool. If you haven’t found them yet, check them out now. They just posted on some great recipe applications for Smart Phones (article below).
Cooking for Geeks: According to O’Reilly Media, “If you’re a programmer, hacker, or maker who is interested in learning how to cook, this book is for you.” The book is for anyone interested in experimentation in the kitchen and understanding reactions in cooking. The app offers the full book and includes all of the stanza features.
Martha Stewart Cookie App: Martha Stewart announced the release of a new iPad cookie app, last weekend at the New York City Food and Wine Festival. According to Slashfood, features will include: “photos that practically make you smell chocolate, and a roulette-wheel-style cookie-recipe finder that lets users choose by ingredient, type, flavor or cooking tool. And in case you don’t have a gingerbread-man cookie cutter, the app also lets users connect directly to Macy’s online shopping site to buy necessary equipment.”
Foodmatic: New cooking app that uses a built-in database with hundreds of ingredient to determine what flavors and foods compliment one another.
FOOD & WINE iPad App: New app offers digital issues including bonus recipes, video cooking lessons, wine advice, and entertaining ideas. FOOD & WINE’s Dana Corwin told eater, “We really rethought everything about how a recipe should work on an iPad, which is complicated because you really want it to be useful.”
Ikea Kondis: Ikea just released a new and kind of amazing app that compliments their recently released baking cookbook: Hembakat är Bäst (Homemade Is Best). What’s rad about it? It allows you to pick a dessert you would like to make, then select what form of exercise you would like engage in to work off the indulgence.
