Tag Archives: women

Dirty Girls – Meet the Urban Women Farmers of New York City

Posted on October 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

Women farmers have hit the big time – the BUSTy, feminist, big time. I can barely believe it, but if you pick-up the Ocotober/November issue of BUST magazine you’ll see my humble name in the table of contents! “Dirty Girls: Resourceful urban farmers are giving new meaning to the term asphalt jungle. By Stephanie Fisher” Over the summer I spent a month running around Brooklyn interviewing women farmers – from bees to sub-irrigated planters to organic vegetables, all of these seven women are doing their part to bring a little bit of nature into this hectic gotham. The women also gave us some farm-centric projects that you can do at home, like a low tunnel cold frame and beet infused vodka. Check out the issue (it’s the eco issue, so there’s tons of good stuff) and meet a few of the beautiful women farmers of New York City.

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Posted in Farm Women Fancy, Finger Foods

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Craft Fairs, Honey Festivals, and the Nation Magazine – Oh My!

Posted on September 16, 2011 | 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.

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Posted in Art & Craft, Finger Foods

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TerraStories, One Girl’s Journey Through America and its Wonderful Women Farmers

Posted on July 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

During my time at NYU, I was lucky enough to meet countless intelligent, passionate, and like-minded women, who boast commitments to food issues activism, feminism, and overall awesomeness. One of these ladies happens to share my love for all things farm women. Meet Marlie, a compassionate senior at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study (my Alma mater!), with a concentration in Food Justice. She’s the wonderful lady behind TerraStories.tumblr (more on that in a sec!).

During the school year, Marlie has her hand in anything and everything food and agriculture related on campus, from Oxfam @ NYU to the Student Farmworker Alliance (SFA @ NYU) to Community Agriculture Club, just to name a few. OH, and did I mention she also spends her Saturdays working the Hawthorne Valley Farm stand at the Union Square green market, come rain, hail, or what have you? I didn’t? Well, yeah, she does that too.

This summer, she’s packed up her Brooklyn loft and traded in her Metro Card for a road map as she drives across the U.S. interviewing women farmers state to state. Over the course of seven weeks, she’ll be making her way from Massachusetts, up the East coast, down and over through the Mid-West, all the way to Colorado, and finally ending her journey in Kansas City to volunteer for Farm Aid’s benefit concert on August 13th. Check out her route below:

Marlie will be periodically blogging about her experiences and the women farmers that she meets over on TerraStories.tumblr. So click that link and follow her along her amazing journey!

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Posted in Farm Women Fancy

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Brooklyn, Counter Space, and Eric Schlosser

Posted on May 3, 2011 | Leave a comment

{image from “Counter Space” at MoMA; accurately reflects my life these past few weeks}

Another busy week over here at Legume Loyalist… Slow Food NYU is prepping for our final event of the semester on Friday, all of my final undergraduate papers are due next week, and graduation is a mere two weeks away. Sigh.

But, some exciting news! Legume Loyalist is moving…to Brooklyn! Our lease started on Sunday in our brand new apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn. We’re uber excited to escape the frenzy of Manhattan and revel in the neighborhood-y feel of Brooklyn. The best part: we’ve downsized on rent and gained a bigger bedroom, an office, and a balcony! Pictures to come soon.

Yesterday was the last day to view Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen at the Museum of Modern Art. It was a gem of an exhibit that charted the evolution of the home kitchen, and how aesthetic and technological changes reflect larger cultural ideologies. The exhibit even featured an entire Frankfurt Kitchen on display! (I seriously think I should have majored in ‘kitchen studies.’) I had the chance to see the exhibit one last time early yesterday morning before class and picked up the exhibition publication, but in case you missed it, the entire exhibition is available online. Check it out here!

A constant conversation over here at NYU’s Food Studies and Gallatin School is the idea of the sustainable-food-advocate foodie-elitist. Eric Schlosser, in a Washington Post opinion piece published this past Friday, discusses the irony behind denoting sustainable-food-advocates ‘elitist’ and effectively argues the other side. It’s a great read. “Why being a foodie isn’t ‘elitist,‘” by Eric Schlosser:

“The cheapness of today’s industrial food is an illusion, and the real cost is too high to pay. [...] Calling these efforts elitist renders the word meaningless. The wealthy will always eat well. It is the poor and working people who need a new, sustainable food system more than anyone else. They live in the most polluted neighborhoods. They are exposed to the worst toxic chemicals on the job. They are sold the unhealthiest foods and can least afford the medical problems that result.”

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Posted in Finger Foods, Food Systems Satire

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TBECC Round-Up: Recipes, Crafts, and Books, Oh My!

Posted on April 28, 2011 | Leave a comment

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” This is hands down my favorite quote from a novel ever. I’m a huge Virginia Woolf fan; there’s something about female, high-society writers that I can’t get enough of. (Edith Wharton, anyone?) I’m definitely no literary buff, not even by a long-shot, but I’ve always identified that simple sentence with my own notions of feminism and femininity (beyond the larger context of the book of course, I’m not married to a politician, nor do I have servants). So in preparation for TBECC, a celebration of domesticity and feminism of sorts, I just had to buy flowers…myself.

TBECC was more than just flowers and aesthetics, of course, and it lived up to its name: friends, women, eating, talking about food issues, sharing knowledge and just enjoying each other’s company. We had SO MUCH food. Meg baked a banana cake with chocolate sea salt caramel ganache (which she baked in a toaster oven!); Marlie brought salad (thankfully, some lighter fare) and bread from Hawthorne Valley Farm where she’s a market worker; Julia brought buttermilk pie and honey and jam; and I baked some honey whole wheat pound cake and mini cinnamon rolls. (More recipes to follow!) To drink, I sorted my out-of-control collection of Harney and Sons tea, and pulled out my bag of Counter Culture Jagong coffee (arguably my new favorite, although Crop To Cup’s Burundi is still up there).

Dani Walsh, the wonderful woman behind www.WomenEatNYC.com  (and Grub Street intern!!), a bee-yoo-ti-ful blog that includes recipes and pictures of women enjoying food, stopped by and helped out with some necessary lighting in my living room (no natural light, boo!). She also shared some really cute recipe cards (Dani, let me know where you found those little guys!). We discussed our favorite baking books including, The Pie and Pastry Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum (who also wrote the Cake Bible!) and The Bread Bakers Apprentice by Peter Reinhart.

Eventually (it was inevitable) the knitting needles came out and Meg, knitter extraordinaire, shared her go-to book for knitting: The Complete Guide to Needlework edited by Readers Digest. Meg’s copy is ancient, but it’s a gem of a reference book. The pictures are painfully 80s, but the instruction is invaluable, with pictures and clear descriptions of a bajillion patterns and stitches for all kinds of stitching crafts from knitting to quilting to needlepoint to embroidery.

We’re hoping to host another TBECC before the school-year lets out. My hope is that TBECC will encourage more women (men too!) to get together, share domestic knowledge and take back our food system!

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Posted in Art & Craft, Farm Women Fancy, Food Systems Satire, Recipes

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