GRACE Communications Foundation
Katie Sweetman is a graphic designer and writer at GRACE. She is the designer behind projects such as Cultivating the Web: High Tech Tools for a Sustainable Food Movement and Edible Brooklyn. Originally from Washington, DC, she now lives in Brooklyn.
Difficult to cultivate and highly delicious, morels are so rare they command upwards of $30 a pound, depending on the market. But if you're lucky enough to live in morel country, you can forage this mushroom-y delicacy for free.
The humble ramp (aka the wild leek, aka ramson) has enjoyed a cult-like following for decades. Their fleeting appearance around the spring equinox sends people into a tizzy and is cause for online alerts when they arrive at New York City's Union Square Greenmarket. Much ado about a wild onion? Maaybe.
Before the year-round ubiquity of the supermarket orange, December heralded the navel, tangerine, satsuma and clementine season. And it's still the time when citrus is at its peak, its bright hue and golden taste a welcome if fleeting contrast to the dark days of winter -- a spark of sunlight in a time when the northern hemisphere has so little. Get 'em while they are here!
Could it be that cauliflower is the Wonder Bread of the vegetable world? Or is it stealthily packed with nutrients and enough Vitamin C to rival an orange? Surprisingly, the latter is true. Not bad for something writer Mark Twain once described as "cabbage with a college education."
From Adam and Eve's use of their leaves to cover up to the Newtons of your childhood, figs have a long cultural history. The sticky harbinger of late summer pairs well with a slice of prosciutto and a glass of wine â€" a grown up alternative to the cookies of youth.
If you're lucky to have access to a garden with verdant clumps of basil growing in it, there's nothing like its heady smell hovering in the summer heat. Bonus: according to folklore, basil is a cure for scorpion stings. Intrigued? Read on.
This week in Seasonal Food: Rhubarb. Get to know this fascinating, delicious vegetable -- er, fruit. (Which is it? Depends where you are!) Tangy and beautiful, these late spring/early summer stalks will lend a lot of zip to your seasonal eating.
Last Saturday, the folks at 350.org and others around the world participated in a global event designed to demonstrate that climate change is no longer a shadow looming on a distant horizon. It’s evident in an upsurge in extreme weather -- how do you connect the dots?
Audre Gutierrez is a certified medicinal aromatherapist from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and partner in Wisdom of the Earth Essential Oils. Although it may not be evident, the organic food movement and aromatherapy actually have a lot in common.
"Do you have a Mister Sausage in your life?" O'Donnel asks in her promotional video for TMLMC. And surely, you do. You'll know Mister Sausage as "that person who cannot imagine not eating some kind of meat every single day." These Mister (and Misses) Sausages of the world will find their imaginations -- and their culinary horizons -- expanding because TMLMC has 52 menus, organized seasonally. There is also a section titled "Kitchen Tricks for Your Sleeve" that will serve any cook well.
What Howard seems to take away from the project is the singular idea that, hey, he doesn’t have to buy eggs anymore when he can get them from his chicken. Really? That’s all? I wasn’t expecting a zealous conversion to the merits of urban farming, but I did expect more reflection on how The Farm, despite its failures, fit within the larger context of the sustainable food movement.
Cultivating the Web investigates the best and brightest ways that good food advocates are leveraging the internet to generate social change and further the sustainable food movement.
