Craft Fairs, Honey Festivals, and the Nation Magazine – Oh My!
Posted: September 16, 2011 Filed under: Art & Craft, Finger Foods | Tags: 2011 maker faire, agriculture, autumn, bees, brooklyn, brooklyn homesteader, bust magazine, craft, craftacular, feminism, food policy, globalization, hunger and nutrition, industrial food system, news, NYC, nyc honey festival, the nation magazine, urban agriculture, women, women farmers Leave a comment »
Ok, so that wasn’t the best play on the famous Wizard of Oz mantra, but I tried. This weekend is choc-full-of exciting events here in New York. Saturday and Sunday is the World Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science. Be prepared for reclaimed disaster relief housing, vertical gardens, and robots that teach you things. I’m nerding out over the whole event, but I’m easily most pumped for BUST Magazine’s sub-section Craftacular! (Also, keep an eye out for the Oct/Nov issue of BUST! Yours truly wrote the feature story on urban farm women in NYC!)
Craftacular is BUST Magazine’s outdoor shopping village featuring 50+ vendors, deals, and demos. Check-out hand weaving, mozzarella making, and more!
Purchase tickets to Craftacular and the Maker Faire here. See you there!
Do you like honey? Do you like the beach? If you answered “yes” to these questions, then let me propose this: what are you doing tomorrow, Saturday September 17th beginning at 10AM? It’s the premier of the NYC Honey Festival at Rockaway Beach, sponsored by rooftop farm Brooklyn Grange, and featuring one of the women I interviewed for my BUST Magazine article, the wonderful Meg Paska of Brooklyn Homesteader.
So what can you expect: beekeeping demos, food raffles, cooking demos with the folks at Brooklyn Kitchen, honey-beer brewing with the guys at Sixpoint, honey mustard pickles from Horman’s Best Pickles, and a honey-themed dinner on the boardwalk after dark. Pack some sunscreen, a bathing suit, and your beekeeping veil and head down to the Rockaways for a new twist on a day at the beach. For more information, visit http://www.nychoneyfest.com.
In other food news, the Nation magazine premiered its annual food issue. This is an important one for the food world, as it carries pieces on food economics, crisis, and the environment. The 2011 issue features a roster of a who’s who in food systems celebrity, including articles by the likes of Michael Pollan, change-maker Vandana Shiva, Raj Patel, Frances Moore Lappe, Anna Lappe, Eric Schlosser, Daniel Imhoff, and Civil Eats editor Paula Crossfield. Check-out the full list of articles here, and be sure to pick-up your copy on newsstands today.
Tomatoes in April? You Betcha!
Posted: April 7, 2011 Filed under: Finger Foods | Tags: agriculture, carbon footprint, ethical eats, farmers market, globalization, industrial food system, local food, NYC 1 Comment »
Prior to an auspicious run-in at the Saturday greenmarket in Union Square, I hadn’t eaten a fresh tomato since about September. In my attempts to eat what I preach, tomatoes are one of the foods that I try to buy only seasonally (from June to about mid-October). Out of season, grocery-store tomatoes are typically shipped from some far-off place like Mexico, they’re rarely organic, and they taste just blegh.
However, there is hope for the ‘locavore’ foodie who craves that sweet taste of summer: hydroponics! Try to imagine my excitement at the site of shiny-red vine tomatoes amidst the blanket of earthy-toned root vegetables and salad greens that are typical greenmarket fare this time of the year. Shushan Valley Hydroponics, a hydroponic farm based in upstate New York, grows tomatoes hydroponically in greenhouses on their 200-acre farm for about 10 months out of the year, and sells their pesticide- and herbicide-free tomatoes at the Union Square greenmarket on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
Hydroponic farming is a neat thing, especially for the closet science-fiction geek like myself. It’s essentially indoor-farming without soil: instead, plants absorb a nutrient rich water mixture. The advantage? Produce, plants, and herbs can be grown year-round in indoor spaces, which is promising for the urbanite who’s developed the itch to grow their own food. City Hydroponics, a NYC-based hydroponic resource company, provides free “Intro to Hydroponics” classes every Saturday morning from 10AM-11AM.
I was a bit incredulous of how these hydroponic tomatoes would taste – as a fan of the coveted heirloom tomato varieties that grace the greenmarket for only a limited time during the summer, my tomato-taste-reference-bar is set high. But these tomatoes are surprisingly delicious: firm, sweet, and juicy. The tomatoes run about $4.95 a pound, which is pretty steep on a student budget, but store bought tomatoes cost about the same for an absolutely sub-par taste.
Our Food System: Sustainability and Taste
Posted: March 31, 2011 Filed under: Farm Women Fancy | Tags: agriculture, ethical eats, fast food, feminism, food culture, food justice, globalization, GM foods, industrial food system, local food, NYU, vegetarianism, women farmers 2 Comments »
And now for something completely different…academics!
My internet presence has been stunted as of late, but I have a good excuse. I didn’t want to talk about it until it was over and I officially secured my spot in the graduation march, but now that I have, I’m extremely proud to say that I’ve passed my colloquium as of yesterday at 12:30PM! The past week has been fraught with books, notes, more books and admittedly a few tears in preparation for the big day.
In order to graduate, Gallatin seniors must complete a colloquium, which is a 2-hour oral exam of sorts but officially dubbed a ‘conversation’ between the student and a panel of three professors. The semester prior to the colloquium, students have to submit a 3-5 page rationale that outlines their concentration along with a booklist of 20-25 books that inspire their concentrations. For most Gallatin folk, this is an exciting time where you can nerd-out over your passion without the threat of your friends rolling their eyes over your polemical remarks (that happens to you too, right?).
My concentration is “Our Food System: Sustainability and Taste.” For any other food system nerds, you can check out my rationale and booklist.
International Women’s Day and the Oxfam Hunger Banquet
Posted: March 4, 2011 Filed under: Farm Women Fancy, Finger Foods | Tags: agriculture, domesticity, feminism, food culture, food justice, globalization, hunger and nutrition, industrial food system, NYC, NYU, self-sufficiency, women, women farmers Leave a comment »
To celebrate International Women’s Day, Oxfam New York City, in partnership with a few other important NYC and NYU-based organizations, is hosting a Hunger Banquet this Tuesday, March 8th at 7:00 PM at the Mercy Corps Action Center to End World Hunger. From the Oxfam NYC blog:
We are hosting an event to focus on the courage of women worldwide who are struggling to feed their families while also confronting climate change and other threats to agriculture. We are convening to focus attention on the courageous role of women – as an example to us all, men and women – to be able to come together, stand up for our rights, and work together to create a better future.
Along with providing meals that represent various socio-economic demographics, they’ll also be screening Sisters on the Planet, a film about four U.S. women who are confronting hunger and food sovereignty. Speakers for the event include Majorca Carter, a wonderful, inspiring speaker who is also the founder and executive director of Sustainable South Bronx. Check out her powerful TED talk on “Greening the Ghetto.” See you there!
How Do You Take Your Coffee? Crop to Cup will change that.
Posted: February 28, 2011 Filed under: Finger Foods | Tags: agriculture, carbon footprint, coffee, ethical eats, food justice, globalization, industrial food system, local food, NYC, NYU 1 Comment »
{Crop to Cup, a delicious, ethical-foodie addition to my mornings. Mug courtesy of my Auntie Julie for my 21st birthday last year via Emma Bridgewater. So lovely, so British.}
Based in Brooklyn, and started by a Gallatin school alum (woot woot!), Crop to Cup has redefined the notion of “local” in the NYC coffee world. On the Crop to Cup website, you can literally trace your cup back to the original farm from which it came. I recently had a bag of the Burundi “Buho.” I’m definitely not a coffee connoisseur, but this cup was certainly delicious. It was smooth, rich, and warm, perfect for winter mornings. Click on “Trace your cup” and you’re redirected to a page with all the specs of your bean: description of the local farm economy, climate, soil, elevation, harvest time, import station, etc. For the Burundi cup, there’s even a google map image of the exact farm! So cool!
Crop to Cup buys its beans from the Burundi farmers through a program called Whole Crop. Here’s what Crop to Cup has to say about the program via their blog:
On our end, we’ve agreed to be long term partners – we plan on spending considerable time at Buhorwa to understand the challenges the farmers face, and we plan on buying considerable volumes of coffee from this community of roughly 600 family farmers both this year and in the years to come.
The goal: improve overall processes including lot separation and transparency, increase quality and the percentage of high quality coffee as a portion of the entire harvest, and assist farmers in receiving sustainable, fair payments for their entire community’s product. To achieve this on a community-wide scale, we have made a pledge to build sustainable markets not only for each year’s top lots (which essentially sell themselves), but also for the lower grades that this station – like every coffee community – will inevitably produce and which farmers must often sell to local traders at below-cost prices.
So in buying Crop to Cup coffee, not only are you supporting a small, local business here in NYC, you’re also guaranteeing that a local coffee farmer has been paid top price for their beans. Sounds like a great idea to me.
