Twilight Greenaway

Throwing Together a Meal, One Swap at a Time

When Karen Solomon, author of “Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It,” began sending out invitations for a monthly baby-food swap, she was not sure how her recipients would respond. 

After all, she was inviting them to feed their children meals, including roasted pears and curried lentils, made by people they did not know.

But for parents interested in consolidating food preparation while providing organic, homemade food to their newborns — as well as some impromptu parenting advice — Ms. Solomon’s swap at 18 Reasons, a nonprofit food center in Mission Dolores, was just the thing.

Read more on the New York Times.

Oakland Homesteading School Caught in Trademark Tussle

When K. Ruby Blume, the founder of Oakland’s Institute of Urban Homesteading received a letter last week informing her that the terms “urban homestead” and “urban homesteading” had been trademarked, she took it in stride.

Source: The Bay Citizen (http://s.tt/129C6)

When K. Ruby Blume, the founder of Oakland’s Institute of Urban Homesteading received a letter last week informing her that the terms “urban homestead” and “urban homesteading” had been trademarked, she took it in stride.

Source: The Bay Citizen (http://s.tt/129C6)

When K. Ruby Blume, the founder of Oakland’s Institute of Urban Homesteading received a letter last week informing her that the terms “urban homestead” and “urban homesteading” had been trademarked, she took it in stride.

Source: The Bay Citizen (http://s.tt/129C6)

When K. Ruby Blume, the founder of Oakland’s Institute of Urban Homesteading received a letter last week informing her that the terms “urban homestead” and “urban homesteading” had been trademarked, she took it in stride.

Source: The Bay Citizen (http://s.tt/129C6)

When K. Ruby Blume, the founder of Oakland’s Institute of Urban Homesteading received a letter last week informing her that the terms “urban homestead” and “urban homesteading” had been trademarked, she took it in stride.

Source: The Bay Citizen (http://s.tt/129C6)

When K. Ruby Blume, the founder of Oakland’s Institute of Urban Homesteading received a letter last week informing her that the terms “urban homestead” and “urban homesteading” had been trademarked, she took it in stride.

Source: The Bay Citizen (http://s.tt/129C6)

When K. Ruby Blume, the founder of Oakland’s Institute of Urban Homesteading received a letter last week informing her that the terms “urban homestead” and “urban homesteading” had been trademarked, she took it in stride.

The letter, from the Dervaes family of the Pasadena-based Dervaes Institute and the owners of UrbanHomestead.org “was very polite,” recalls Blume. It informed her that the family had registered the trademark and suggested she begin using alternative terms like “modern homesteading” and “sustainable living” for the work she does.

Read more on the Bay Citizen.

 

No Kidding Around

I've had a thing for goats for as long as I can remember. They’re smarter and have better personalities than cows, and their milk makes some of the best cheese around. When I was growing up in rural Hawaii, our neighbors raised a small herd of goats. I loved watching the animals graze their way through the jungle that saddled our driveway, and we’d buy fresh milk when there was extra.

Read more at the Bold Italic

In Secrecy, Farmworkers Share Their Stories

 
As Thanksgiving nears, and we turn our collective attention to the food we will be putting on the table, I have been thinking a great deal about a group of farmworkers I met earlier this month. As part of a Symposium on Food Systems and Sustainability, I had the opportunity to travel with a small group of students, professors, and advocates to Knights Landing, an unincorporated community northwest of Sacramento. There, in a community center normally dedicated to child care, language classes, and basic clinical services, we sat down with around a dozen men and women, who engage in the most labor-intensive piece of California’s agricultural puzzle.

Read more on Civil Eats

Serving, Cooking, and Giving it Away: Food, Art, and the Places In Between

As environmentalists, foodies, and locavores work to ensure that food is seen as more than the product of a faceless industry, it has also become an increasingly aesthetic endeavor. It only makes sense that meals—and the spaces they occupy—have landed front and center in many prominent artistic dialogues.

Read more on Art Practical.

 

Free Falling

It's after-hours at a small Mission grocery store. The green bins have just been put out and I'm sitting on a stoop psyching myself up. A seasoned dumpster diver would have waited a little longer, but I want first pick.

The bin is stuffed with bread, presumably about to expire. I take a bag from the top, easy enough. Then I untie a giant bag of compost; inside it looks a little like a refrigerator crisper that's been abandoned. Some of the food has seen its day, but some can be trimmed and washed to look like new. Read more on The Bold Italic.

A Walk In the Ag Park

Urban farming is on the tip of everyone’s tongues these days. But what about peri-urban farming, or growing food at the urban edge? For Sibella Kraus, director of the nonprofit organization Sustainable Agriculture Education (SAGE) and founder of the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, this approach is a promising piece of the food system puzzle. Not only do nearby farms provide fresh produce for city residents, but they allow interested farmers to grow food without having to commit to living in rural areas.

“Some folks are ready to move to places like Watsonville or the Capay Valley and really build up a good sized farm,” says Kraus. “In other cases, you may have a couple and one person wants to farm and the other person wants to have a job in the city…I think there are lots of different kinds of circumstances where this edge really makes sense.” And while farmers with small plots just outside cities can make a living off five or ten acres, getting a hold of the land is another story. “Small plots are really straws in the wind when it comes to the politics and economics of urban edge land use,” she adds. Read more on Civil Eats.

For Bi-Rite, Expansion Is a Necessary Risk

When Bi-Rite Market owner Sam Mogannam took over his family’s Mission District business in the late ‘90s, he had a Manhattan-based grocery called Balducci’s firmly in mind.

“I saw the store in 1990, when the family was still involved,” says Mogannam. “They had all the great services—old butchers and produce people in there who knew everyone. They were part of the community.” The result — a popular, densely packed neighborhood market that puts all the services of a larger store into a space the size of a single urban flat — is a rare sight on the West Coast.

Read more on The Bay Citizen.

 

Your Taco, Deconstructed

Look closely enough at anything and you can start to see the sum of its parts. Even, for instance, a single taco, which, when examined recently by a group of architecture students, became a window into the complexities of globalization. The assignment was part of URBANlab, a program of The California College of the Arts that took place under the guidance of landscape architect David Fletcher and members of the art and design studio Rebar.

The goal was to map the local “tacoshed,” which, much like a watershed, establishes the geographical boundaries of a taco’s origins—the source of everything from the corn in the tortilla to the tomatoes in the salsa.

By thoroughly understanding what it takes to make a taco, the class hoped to become “better able to propose and design a speculative model of a holistic and sustainable urban future.” The final product is a surprisingly useful microcosm of the industrial food system and its “richly complex network of systems, flows, and ecologies.” According to the class findings, within a single taco, the ingredients had traveled a total of 64,000 miles, or just over two and a half times the circumference of the earth.

Read more on the GOOD website

Temple Grandin: A Review of the HBO Biopic

Temple Grandin, the eponymous HBO biopic about the education and early career of the professor, author, and animal behavior expert is, in many ways, also a story about cows. Near the beginning of the film, a 19-year old Grandin is lying in a cow pen surrounded by animals; her face is smudged with manure and she’s grinning wildly. The scene foreshadows Grandin’s lifelong effort to transform the treatment of animals within industrial agriculture and, in the words of Polyface Farm’s Joe Salatin, “let cows express their unique cowness.” Similarly, this scene shows a rare, carefree moment in the life of a high-functioning person with autism, struggling to make a place in the world. The film as a whole attempts to let Grandin express her own “Grandin-ness.”

Read more on Civil Eats