Why We’ve Turned our Apartment Into a Part-time Restaurant
- Emily Coates wrote in Food, New York City and Brooklyn
For the past two years, on (almost) every fourth Saturday of the month, our apartment turns into a part-time restaurant. Sixteen to 20 people show up at our gate over by the Domino Sugar Factory, tucked under the Williamsburg Bridge, to eat with people they’ve never met. We call it Neighbor.
The first dinner was nerve wracking. We spent all week preparing. We went through the schedule over and over and over and over again. We worried about everything. Who would come? Will they think it’s weird? Will they like the food?
Citizenship Building Block #11: Learn to Cook a Dish With a Story
- Lara Rabinovitch in Living, Food and Building Blocks Of Citizenship
Food is a window into culture. Learning to cook a dish from your heritage will make you a better global citizen by enriching your mind—and belly. So this month spend some time with a grandmother and learn how to cook a dish she knows well. This may be with your grandmother, someone else’s grandmother, or your grandfather—because he’s the cook of the family. Whether it’s Japanese rice balls, Brazilian feijoada, Ukrainian varenyky, or curry vindaloo, learn how to make at least one dish from one part of your heritage. It might be tuna casserole or tamales or thin-crust pizza. Either way: take notes, ask questions, and taste. You’ll learn how to make something to share with others while also reconnecting with a part of your past. Think of it as culinary archaeology, only tastier.
This Vending Machine Serves Up Fresh-Squeezed Juice
- Adele Peters posted in Food, Health and Juice
Step aside, candy bars. LA’s newest vending machine—technically, a “juice ATM,” serves fresh juices 24/7. Like the Sprinkles Cupcake ATM, but quite a bit healthier.
Push for Good: This Week’s Guide to Crowdfunding Creative Progress
- Alessandra Rizzotti wrote in Environment, Culture and Food
Innovation makes the world go around, so why not crowdfund it? The best thinkers and ideamakers are the those that can make collective progress, so if we support their causes, projects, and ideas, we can be a part of bettering the future of our planet.
Maybe you don’t know what causes you care about yet, or maybe you’re still searching. Consider this a guide of the goodness you can get behind. Take a look at GOOD’s curated Kickstarter page, which we’ll be updating regularly, and check back every Saturday for a round up of our favorite projects from the crowdfunding world.
Now to share some successes…
Tell us what projects you’re getting behind in the comments below. Push progress forward, and do it for our collective good.
Click here to add crowdfunding projects you can care about to your To-Do list.
The Plate Project: What Will We Be Eating in 35 Years?
- Adele Peters posted in Food, Design and Future
Food & Wine asked designers and foodies to sketch out their vision of the food of the future on paper plates.
From Farm Straight to the Trash: Why We Need Innovative Food Waste Solutions Right Now
- Peter Lehner wrote in Environment, Food and Waste
Forty percent of the food in this country—almost half—is never eaten. We know we can reduce this waste once we put our minds to it. We’ve done it already, with great success, with energy. Governments, working with and encouraged by advocacy groups, designed programs to educate consumers and to prod manufacturers to design better products—light bulbs, refrigerators, cars—that made saving energy easier. Activists and innovators are just starting to develop solutions for food waste. We need a similar movement to build momentum behind these efforts and start bringing these solutions, literally, to the table. And to farms, stores, restaurants and dining services everywhere.
This month, we’re challenging the GOOD community to host a dinner party and cook a meal that contains fewer ingredients than the number of people on the guest list. Throughout March, we’ll share ideas and resources for being more conscious about our food and food systems. Join the conversation at good.is/food and on Twitter at #chewonit.
Are stress and time-crunched days resulting in the more-than-occasional cold pizza breakfast or bowl of cereal dinner? Perhaps it’s time to freshen up your diet. In the GOOD Guide to Healthy Living & Eating, we outline all kinds of healthy and delicious ways to make sure you’ll get more nourishing meals in your life.
Because half the battle is just getting the good stuff on your plate, learn how to find (and afford) the most delectable fruits and veggies at the farmers’ market, keep them fresher for longer, and then get ideas for stretching one tasty, nutrient-packed ingredient into five different dishes. And, because most of us are parked on our caboose in front of a computer for hours a day, we even have the stretches and snacks that will allow you to extend your newly found healthy habits right on into your office.
Illustrations by Matt Chase
Push for Good: This Week’s Guide to Crowdfunding Creative Progress
- Alessandra Rizzotti wrote in Push For Good, News and Food
Innovation makes the world go around, so why not crowdfund it? The best thinkers and ideamakers are the those that can make collective progress, so if we support their causes, projects, and ideas, we can be a part of bettering the future of our planet.
Maybe you don’t know what causes you care about yet, or maybe you’re still searching. Consider this a guide of the goodness you can get behind. Take a look at GOOD’s curated Kickstarter page, which we’ll be updating regularly, and check back every week for a round up of our favorite projects from the crowdfunding world.
Continue reading on good.is for more details
IIllustration by Jessica De Jesus
Infographic: How Do You Know if Antibiotics Are in Your Meat?
- Column Five wrote in Food, Infographic and Lifestyle
According to the Food and Drug Administration, approximately 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are given to livestock to promote faster growth and to prevent and treat disease. Mounting evidence now reveals that this widespread use of antibiotics, coupled with overuse and misuse of the drugs for human treatment has resulted in a new millennium health threat: a bacterial superbug resistant to antibiotics. Click on the infographic above to learn more about how antibiotics enter the food system and how you can help identify if they are in your meat.
Host a Dinner Party with More Guests Than Ingredients
- Zachary Slobig wrote in Food and Living
We live in complicated times. Let’s make supper simpler. This month cook a Friday night dinner where the meal contains fewer ingredients than names on your guest list. We’re calling it “Fewer Fridays.” Even better, make this a one-pot meal with thoughtfully sourced, real food—we’re not telling you it has to be local and organic, but you get the picture. Then, give us the picture. Send us your recipe and photos to community@goodinc.com and you might make it into GOOD’s Fewer Fridays cookbook.
How to Feed a Town: The Incredible Edible Project
- Adele Peters wrote in Food, Sustainability and Sustainable Design
Four years ago, a group of residents in the small English town of Todmorden decided to adopt an ambitious goal: by 2018, the whole town would become completely “food independent,” growing and raising all of the food it needed itself, through the Incredible Edible Todmorden project.
Now, virtually every free piece of land in the town is filled with food, from yards in front of the police and railway stations, to parks, schoolyards, backyards, and traffic roundabouts. Everything grown on public land is free for anyone in town to take. The nonprofit running the project also offers classes in everything from baking bread to pickling.
Infographic: How Much Food Nearly 7 Billion People Waste
-
Aubrey Yee wrote in
Environment, Living and Food
Inspired by a recent Wall Street Journal article written by Anna Lappe and Danielle Nierenberg, Sustainable America has created this infographic to show how food is wasted and lost around the world, and what can be done about it.
Food waste and food security are serious problems, but there are current solutions and ways you can help. Read on to learn more, and stay tuned for our next post, which will delve deeper into some of the points made by Lappe and Nierenberg in the Wall Street Journal piece.
Photos: A Colorful Winter—Beautiful Fruit and Vegetable Still Lifes
- Yasha Wallin posted in Creativity, Living and Food
‘A Colorful Winter’ by photographer Florent Tanet comes right in time has winter finally hit, everything is grey and drab and we lack some playful colors. Inspired by a luxury comestibles boutique in the famous Le Bon Marché department store in Paris, Tanet arranged every day fruits and vegetables into graphic patterns, successively sculptures and still lives.
(Source: ignant.de)
Five Reasons Why Urban Farming is the Most Important Movement of our Time
- by Ro Kumar
I love suburbia not for what it is, but for what it could be. While most other houses on my street have grass lawns, my yard sprouts zucchinis, tomatoes, pomegranates, kale, spinach, apples, figs, guavas, almonds, garlic, onion, strawberries, and more. Over 500 plant species all in all. We grow more than 3000 pounds of food per year on a plot of land the size of a basketball court—enough fruits and vegetables to feed my family of four year-round. Our house is part of a growing global movement of people involved in urban farming.
The simple act of planting a garden can shape issues like economics, health, and politics at the same time because food is an essential focal point of human activity. As the urban farming movement grows, here are five ways that it will transform our world
1. Renewed local economies. Local neighbor-to-neighbor commerce generally doesn’t happen in our communities. Residential areas almost never include common spaces where community exchanges might happen. Likewise, because selling homemade bread to your neighbors is illegal in most areas, the law discourages community commerce, and instead encourages you to purchase from the supermarket chain.
In my own community, the urban farming movement has reinvigorated local commerce. Instead of buying oranges, I now trade pumpkin for oranges from my neighbor’s tree. If urban farming continued to grow, it would cause a massive and positive economic disruption by introducing local food production that would compete with the corporate mainstream on price, quality, convenience, and level of service.
2. Environmental stewardship. Industrial agriculture is a major source of fossil fuel pollution. Petrochemicals are used to fertilize, spray, and preserve food. Plastics made from oil are used to package the food, and gasoline is used to transport food worldwide. Urban farming unplugs us from oil by minimizing the transport footprint and using organic cultivation methods.
While industrial agriculture often maneuvers to avoid paying for environmental externalities, urban farmers directly bear the ecological costs of their actions. This makes urban farmers better stewards of their land because they draw their nutrition from it. Rather than using chemicals that destroy soil biology, urban farming culture stresses sustainable organic techniques that enrich the topsoil.
3. A focus on local politics. Urban farming makes it clearer and easier for people to be involved in local politics by bringing issues that directly affect neighborhoods to the fore. Local regulations become far more relevant to the day-to-day life of a person attempting to cultivate their own food than most issues normally discussed on CNN. The growth of urban farming has already resulted in large-scale legal pushes like the California Cottage Food Act, which will allow people to legally sell certain homemade goods like jams and breads. Other neighborhood issues such as the raising of chickens, beekeeping for the production of honey, or the chlorination of water are already in the sights of urban farmers and environmentalists alike.
4. A revolution of health and nutrition. Increased awareness about the negative health effects of food from the industrial food chain is itself a big reason why urban farmers grow their own food. When you feed your produce to your family, you’re less likely to douse it in poisons. Local food has more freshness, flavor, and nutrient retention because it goes through less transportation and processing. As the urban farming movement grows, it will mean more accessibility to nutritious local food and more time spent doing the healthy physical work of gardening. This could result in less obesity, less chronic disease, and decreased healthcare spending.
5. A flowering of community interaction. Urban farming is a lifestyle inherently centered on community. Growing food is, after all, a cooperative effort. In my own community, I see that the knowledge of how and what to grow is exchanged, seeds are swapped, labor is shared, and the harvest is traded. As urban farming grows, a stronger interdependence within communities is likely to result as local food systems bring more community interaction into people’s daily lives.
The most important movement of our time. Although there are many other notable initiatives today, the influence of urban farming is uniquely widespread because more people live in cities than rural areas and food is a central necessity that affects everything at once. The seeds of change are already being planted in homes like mine across the world. For these seeds to grow and blossom, we need to demand more local food so that the market for urban-grown produce expands. We also need to put pressure on our legal system to allow easier local trade and more local food production.
Imagine if we grew food instead of grass. Every community is a local food economy waiting to come to life. The answer to climate change, the health crisis, and the recession economy is right outside your door. I’ll meet you at the garden fence.
Illustration by Corinna Loo
