05.25.10 | Cindy Chen SF Events | No Comments » |
On May 12, in honor of SF Bike Week, forageSF teamed up with the Disposable Film Festival to bring San Franciscans an underground farmers’ market plus a bike-in movie night. I was there for a taste of the festivities.
The Underground Farmers’ Market conceived by Iso Rabins of forageSF is a gathering place for cooks, foodies, and those who want to share their wares with the public but don’t have the means to participate at a regular farmers’ market.
Attendants were encouraged to bike to the event, sample and buy some homemade goodies before settling down to watch selected short films made on non-professional devices ranging from cellphones to web cams.
Some highlights of the market included Raw Daddy’s, selling raw, vegan cone-filled treats. With one bite of the lemon macaroon cheesecake cone, my preconceptions of raw food were completely changed. Who’d ever think raw could be so sinfully good?
Flaxseed Cones
James Hall aka Raw Daddy serving up some of his raw, vegan concoctions
Then there was mmm, butter! serving delicious batches of flavored butter made from small batches of organic cream. The maple and bacon butter was especially good.
mmm, butter! offerings
forageSF had its own offering of pork belly from Marin Sun Farms sandwiched in fluffy buns with pickled veggies and wild onions. The pork belly bun was excellent: the meat was tender and flavorful and went very well with the acidic crunch of the pickled veggies.
a close-up of the pork belly bun, yum!
There were many great vendors, all with interesting stories to tell about how they got to the Underground Farmers’ Market. For many, it’s about a passion for food, especially food prepared with interesting and quality ingredients—from local farms, home grown, or freshly foraged. Here are some pictures of other vendors and the event:
Goat Cheese from Flosa Creamery
Sandwiches and bread from Challahback
Kraken Candy
Making fresh dosas
Ladies of Luscious Liquids
a crowd around Maggie May's Bacon Sweets
bacon IPA caramels
attendees noshing on platter of food including bahn mi burgers from KitchenSidecar
Crowd at the market
Talking with the vendors at the Underground Farmers’ Market really made me think about my own passion for food. It was refreshing that many of the vendors were in there 20’s and 30’s and already engaged in socially responsible ways of preparing food. They prove that cooking the slow way can be delicious, inventive, hearty, and intensely satisfying, not only for the body, but to the taste buds.
The challenge we face in our daily lives is to allot time out of our busy schedules to cook and experiment with food. This an especially important challenge when there are children in our lives. CNN recently reported nearly 1 in 5 four-year-olds are now obese. While the problem is multi-fold, the family environment remains an important piece to the puzzle. If we instill our passion for food in our children, chances are down the line, they will be make better choices.
Cooking should be playful, inventive, and worth the additional time and effort it takes. So next time you are in the prepared food aisle at the grocery store, take a minute and consider your alternatives. Cook with the children in your lives, take them to farmers’ markets, teach them to be inquisitve and curious about food. As the Underground Farmers’ Market shows us, there are many ways to get involved. So get out there and whet your appetite for slow food!
03.31.10 | Leah Binkovitz Uncategorized | 1 Comment » |
One of my favorite things about Passover is the wonderfully strange tradition of chocolate covered matzah. How long can someone be expected to endure the bread of affliction without a little chocolate to make the process more bearable? I may be a little liberal on my thinking about Passover dietary restrictions, but I think the purpose of matzah is not to endure matzah but to think about the plight of the refugee, to consider the continuing struggle against oppression throughout the world. Food has the power to transform how we think about the world. It has the power to join families across the globe and across history.
So where a typical seder would end with a round of “next year in Jerusalem,” I prefer instead to toast to a better here, to next year in peace. And there is so much work to do before we get there. I don’t want to take this opportunity to write about a particular case of injustice, there are many. I want instead to urge you to take the time to recommit yourself to work for justice. Whether you are celebrating Passover, Easter, or the weekend take this time to remember your responsibility to heal the world. As our country deals with the aftershocks of a health care debate that was at times successful and at other moments shamefully ignorant and hurtful, we all must look around at our community and toast to a better year next year and to our fight to get there. So whether you want to lead a campaign to reduce reliance on bottled water in your neighborhood, or read an article detailing the neocolonial impulses behind the biotech push in Africa, or maybe even enter the world of the televised Food Revolution led by media darling Jamie Oliver to see how the mainstream is defining real, good, fair food and what you may have to add, or stage a bake-in to protest the strange New York-based trend against home baked goods in schools, it is all worthy work. What we eat, how we eat, where we eat, and with whom we eat can and should bring us into a conversation about advocacy, access, justice, and community. But I know that sometimes it is hard to do, it is sometimes overwhelming. Sometimes people spit on and insult those who are working for a better quality of life for our citizens. Sometimes people would rather rally against than rally for. But you will have allies. Those people who sit down to eat with you, those are your allies. Begin the conversation here. And do not get too overwhelmed. It is sometimes okay to have your matzah with chocolate.
03.23.10 | Leah Binkovitz Policy | No Comments » |
The bill has more or less passed. The reconciliation bill will be taken up shortly by the Senate and many seem confident it will pass here as well. Considering the major elements of the bill include things like ending discrimination against individuals with preexisting conditions, ending limits on lifetime spending, allowing adult children up to age twenty six to be included on their parents’ policies, ending premium disparity between men and women, and subsidizing affordable policies while taxing cadillac plans, it seems to be more of an insurance reform bill than a health care reform bill. The bill doesn’t include things like reforming measurements of service delivery, moving from quantity to quality or tort reform to decrease defensive medicine practices concerned more with legal liability than the health of patients.
And what about preventive care? Not much beyond what many state health departments already offered. The implied benefit is that with the promise of insurance, more people will take advantage of doctors’ services before the issue becomes a crisis. But there was one, minor attempt to consider preventive care in the bill. And it reveals that within Congress, there may be a dim recognition that our food system has something to do with our health. The Wall Street Journal blog “Washington Wire” posted an article Monday about a provision within the bill “requiring restaurant chains to disclose calorie information on menus.” Because these requirements first have to go through the FDA, menus won’t see changes for a few years. Of course, reactions from the restaurants are mixed but the movement to get information into the hands of the consumer isn’t new. And in fact, it seems, it isn’t helpful. An article by The New York Times published last October reveals “Calorie postings don’t change habits.” The study was conducted by professors at NYU and Yale to test the impact of labeling laws in New York City and found, “that people had, in fact, ordered slightly more calories than the typical customer had before the labeling law went into effect, in July 2008.” So, the provision is headed in the right direction but going about it in the most delicate way. The thinking seems to be, leave it up to the consumer and do as little damage as possible to the private food industry. But, as the study shows, we don’t understand the consumer. Human beings are not rational actors, food is not just a matter of calorie counts, and the “consumer” is not a neutral actor with equal access to all products. If we want to address the connection between health and food, it cannot be done through this minimalist philosophy of intervention that imagines a simple surgical incision can heal the whole body. Calories, cost, convenience, familiarity, marketing, information, etc. all factor into our relationship with food. Slow Food embraces the recognition that the most important information about food is hardly its calorie count. Health is not a numbers game. It is not a matter of converting individuals to a lower intake level. Health happens on the scale of the community and we need provisions that recognize this.
03.14.10 | Leah Binkovitz Farms | No Comments » |
I’ve had several conversations about what the most recent housing crisis will mean for American culture and that persistent, driving dream. Note well that the Great Depression of our past was similarly marked by foreclosures and a national conversation about how to protect homeowners. Out of this discussion came a more convinced country that homes were our greatest assets and that we must defend homeownership. The government created the thirty year mortgage, provided subsidies for suburban living, backed home loans, and created an agency to rate neighborhood values and stability to inform loan policies. With housing once again in a state of collapse, what will our national debate bring this time? My father is optimistic that we will no longer look to our houses to provide us with capital leverage but to provide us with a home. I am a bit more skeptical. Housing construction is still read as an index of growth and renting is still, on average, more expensive than owning. Anything less than owning land in a nice zip code is considered indecent and perhaps immoral.
But what does the home mean for the 35% of U.S. households that participate in food gardening? In the New York Times Magazine today, Peggy Orenstein made a compelling argument that some of the zeal for the household scale farm comes from a group embracing the ideas of “femivorism.” Femivorism provides stay-at-home moms the opportunity to find autonomy and satisfying labor at home (in addition, of course, to the satisfaction of having a family). It is a way for families to come closer to sustainability while negotiating gender equity. Orenstein warns that even the wires of a chicken coop can be confining in the end but overall she seems impressed with the efforts of homemakers to completely challenge the idea of home. I too admire that radical rethinking and I think it offers a window of hope for Americans to save the meaning of home, the process of housing. But my skepticism always finds a reason to worry. While I think it is important work to reclaim our homes, our foods chains, and our families I am worried it represents a retreat from public life. As Orenstein notes, it is often the earnings of the husband, modest but critical, which makes possible this movement. But this is not always possible. Families with less money, single parents, renters, and other groups face a huge obstacle when it comes to home farming. I worry this obstacle will only continue to grow if we stand by and allow our public goods to be privatized, watching the death of our public safety net, the same net that was shakily born out of the Great Depression. We must not value the homemaker over the service worker. We must not forget that the need to fight for labor protections, a fair minimum wage, and other social services still exists. This steady informalization of the workforce is something UC Berkeley Professor Ananya Roy has termed the feminization of labor. It seems the house is now the respectable place for the feminist female to occupy herself, whereas the workforce is for less valued members of society. I certainly do not blame the various new food movements for these developments. I blame all of us. We must find an effective way to give everyone the opportunity not necessarily to own houses and create capital but to make a home in the fullest sense of the word while supporting a strong public sector.
Slow Food SF Blog
Slow Food SF Twitter
Connect