On Sunday morning, I followed friendly people up a flight of stairs,
to a farm on a roof in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
The 6,000 feet of garden still held the remaining chard, glowing in the morning sun,
and baby purple lettuces I bent to inspect—and later, I left with a bag full of tiny, soft leaves.
The radishes and beets, equally small, might make an appearance in a salad on Thursday; the volunteers selling Rooftop Farms’ produce were smiling at the fresh vegetables that shared the table with pickled peppers and herb bundles too.
Then, over the bridge, I walked past P.S. 2 and her murals,
watched skaters glide,
and looked up at the bridges,
and out at the water as I walked to a packed New Amsterdam Market, between Beekman and Peck Slip.
Mine was the penultimate Porchetta sandwich with garlic pesto (and oh, was I envied that sandwich by those behind me),
and I wandered, impressed, with Sweet Deliverance’s goat cheese tart with roasted pears and fried sage leaves;
finally, I stopped for the “Thanksgiving Triumvirate” from Saxelby Cheesemongers, which will be a nice finish for the meal that I have tried to source locally.
From that market (where I also found a dessert wine I’m saving to surprise my guests), I journeyed back across the water to the Brooklyn Flea, with its giant and yet appropriate apple,
and wonderful vintage glasses with 14k gold paint (apparently, it was more plentiful middle of the twentieth century) for that final beverage—only the first of many holiday toasts, I hope, this season in Brooklyn. And now, to polish my grandmother’s silver…
It began with sandwiches. My fabulous friend Laura lives in Venice, California, near Gjelina, where we ordered the finest chicken sandwich with anchovies I’m likely to encounter and a BLT with a fried egg.
And so began five food-filled days in Southern California as I relaxed into the sound of the ocean you can hear softly from Laura’s apartment. We both look for food preparations to adapt to a home kitchen, and this Turkish squash had a beautiful savory hit of rosemary and crunch of salt.
We headed from our early lunch into the AFI DigiFest in Los Angeles to see public and private media collaborate on mobile applications, low-budget production, and short content. And later that night, I presented to the estimable Dr. Ben Bateman’s class at Cal State LA on online identity, representation, and asymmetry.
The next day, Laura and I walked the Venice boardwalk, watching the skaters and those aspiring to be skaters,
spying someone who might be part of the nearby Cirque show practicing on the rings,
on our way to tapas and the shops of Santa Monica. With very different orders at Bar Pintxo, I ordered classic wrapped dates, pine nuts in wilted spinach, and crab ringed in salmon and roe,
while Laura started with a pumpkin-apple soup,
and then a tossed Niçoise salad (that we’ll both recreate, as I find composed salads tedious and this clever version piqued my interest).
On the way back, we passed the Santa Monica Community Garden (more on that next time I visit),
just in time for the sunset.
(Later, we went with Laura’s friend (and now mine) LJ to The Foundry on Melrose, where they serve extraordinarily large scallops on the tasting menu.)
….
The Venice Farmers’ Market makes for a nice Friday tradition, with the sprouts you expect,
the Asian date called jujube fruit, you do not,
and then, the baby bok choy that inspired dinner for seven,
that combined with beautiful mushrooms from an inspiring and civically-engaged forager for a rice dish made perfect by Dr. Bateman’s (it’s too much fun not to include the title, Ben) punctilious rice technique and by conversation in the kitchen spanning wigs, karaoke, and terrible dancers before the dinner party progressed through Venice’s First Friday galleries.
Before all of that, though, there was a bouquet with eucalyptus,
and a surprise tour of secret Venice. Laura explains:
A tour complete with wildlife and speckled flowers, of course.
On to hipster Silverlake, we spotted Chloë Sevigny in hush puppies (yes, we groaned) while engrossed with burgers at The Local—this is their pork burger and special sauce of roasted chiles.
The requisite celebrity sighting complete, we traced the Silverlake Fallen Fruit Map to find oranges, limes,
a golden couch on the side of the street,
and a pomegranate tree that wowed us.
I had no idea that pomegranates begin like Dr. Seuss blossoms.
….
Recovering from Friday’s adventures, we began Saturday with a hearty brunch (steak was appropriate as Laura is soon to vacation in Argentina),
and we wandered the Venice vintage troves (ask me about trying on a diaper dress sometime), then took in the Pacific Coast Highway on our way to Malibu’s Sip, the wine tasting room for Cielo Vineyards:
Meeting new people from old places we have lived, we sat around the fire pit as the sun sank,
and decided fried seafood at Neptune’s Net biker bar was in order (listen to what our research uncovered their chowder is as good as) before discovering why men stare at goats:
I walked more slowly to the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market on Sunday morning as if to prolong my last day in Southern California, and just past the circling ponies,
there were persimmons, pomegranates, and dragon fruit,
bundles of herbs,
carrots and parsnips,
dried plums,
and yielding Halawy dates that I am portioning out, a few a day. We resisted the large pancakes,
to order savory crêpes from a line with fascinating rhythm,
and I boarded the plane that afternoon, shaking the sand out of my shoes, wondering what the next adventure with Laura will hold…
More pictures of our adventures in the Flickr set.
In my next post, I’ll detail my Austrian adventures with this great group of digital activists and, of course, the food. For now, below is the video of my talk (also here), the slides, and a rough transcript.
You should definitely read through and watch the other presentations, particularly David’s and Ethan Zuckerman’s (Thank you to Ethan for also blogging my talk.) As I tweeted from the festival (all tweets on the symposium are tagged #arscloud), I was humbled to be part of this group and found presenting incredibly fun.
The Secret Life of Foodpaths
(this a rough transcript of what I said and a few things I wish I’d said)
I was out to dinner the other night with some friends from MIT, and they said “Kristen, why food?” And I responded that I think food has a lot to do with cloud intelligence. I always think of Clay Shirky and Kevin Kelly’s work where they talk about how the internet runs on love. And that’s very different from lust, which is what we think of sometimes when we think about food representation online.
I am also a food pornographer—please don’t tell my mother that I just told you that.
What I want to talk about today is how we make online food back into real objects. If we have the internet running on love, and we have food lust happening online, and I really want to talk about the social future of food (for more food eye candy, check out tastespotting.com, the food porn aggregator that has attracted many copycat sites).
So we’re going to step away from food fetishism to talk about cooperative [food] communities. Stephen [Downes] talked this morning about moving away from collaboration and into cooperative communities. If you think about food coops, we’ve been talking about cooperative activity and food this way for a long time.
In the NYT a few weeks ago, Renato Sardo, an urban homesteader, was trying to explain the importance of food, and I’ll point you to the end, where he says, “food is the thing you do most.”
We’re not going to talk about politics today, though there is a lot of food politics and some food politics communities online (Civil Eats is a great one); we’re going to talk about politics in this way, instead: Yes We Can Food. What I’m really interested in is the how the products are often quite mobile, but the processing is local [and DIY food processing reclaims the word for food communities, another interesting topic for another time]. That’s what’s on the stamp—be it technology or food, we tend to read labels for where something is from, to have a sense of its place.
While not talking about government, we are going to talk about a government building. This is the official government building of Wellington, New Zealand: the Beehive, which has a great url, http://www.beehive.govt.nz/; I want to talk about honey today, and how honey can be a model for online activity.
This is another beautiful image, also of a beehive, but this beehive has CCD, Colony Collapse Disorder. It’s beautiful and tragic, because if you’ve been following the ‘Save the Honeybees’ movement, you know that the honeybees are in quite a bit of trouble. We use honeybees to pollinate many of our crops; this is a global problem. The honeybees become like a traveling circus, and the same set of bees will be taken around a country, used to pollinate different things, and they become very weak and they die. This image is of a hive that’s been abandoned.
We see similar patterns in online activity; many of us belong to many online communities and as we distribute our attention, there often isn’t cooperative action as an outcome [of our participation]. The real promise of cloud intelligence may be the possibility of cooperative action. We don’t want to become like the [weakened] bee.
Two current buzzwords in food are relevant to our discussion–the first is “single origin”, and single origin honey comes from one specific place. When you buy honey, it says on the label what type of honey it is, like tupelo, wildflower, clover, avocado, which indicates what the bees ate, mostly. What you may not know about honey is that it is most healthful [note: this is unproven, but there is much compelling evidence indicating the benefits increase the more local the honey] if you consume honey produced closest to where you live. Although honey from around the world is wonderful, it won’t give you as many benefits as the honey produced on your block, on your street, in your town.
I live in Brooklyn, New York, where it is illegal to keep bees. There is an aboveground movement and people are keeping bees on rooftops. I have a rooftop. It’s sort of an open secret. Everyone is very into knowing exactly where the product, honey, has come from.
The other term I want to talk about is “source-verified” food. I think it indicates our deep level of distrust of labels, and it sounds very scary, almost governmental. This isn’t on genetically-modified food, this is on slow food, the kind of artisanally-produced food that we think of as the highest caliber of craftsmanship or craftswomanship. We need to focus on what we eat as well as where what we eat is from, on a more granular, local [geospecific] level. We have an alienation from production, and I think that’s one of the reasons for the DIY excitement in online food communities.
I found this image last week; the idea of mapping and elevation, and then pie and cake. We’re familiar with layers in a cake, but this made me think about Cory Doctorow’s article in the Guardian last week about cloud computing and using Amazon as a way to archive data in terms of the layers of data that we have.
Many of us have been online for some time now, and we have generated a lot of material that is out in various places online. If we start to think about this data as sedimentary layers, it will help us start to generate data that can have cooperative actions associated with it. This is my pie-in-the-sky question: how do we want to backfill the sky [the cloud]? What really is worth archiving? If the data never has actions or adds up to anything, where are we going?
Cloud intelligence may be your aggregated actions in context of coordinated, cooperative activities.
I don’t want to take this too far lest it become trendy; some of you may remember tall food from a few years ago. Chefs were creating dishes that were sometimes so tall that you could not see the person you were dining across from. The kitchen would cook ingredients that were then stacked in ring molds that were removed and the top garnish was added, heightening the drama as the dish is sent out. This gives little indication of what the food ingredients actually look like, as everything has been forced into this cylindrical container, this parameter [much like proprietary software, but that's another topic entirely].
To return to the ideas of movement, mobility, and maps as Ethan [Zuckerman] spoke about this morning, this is a map from Fallen Fruit.org of a neighborhood in Los Angeles with the different kinds of fruit trees. You can discover the fruit on a given street that, without the map, you might not see. The fruit becomes the treasure.
Thinking about fruit tree maps along with guerilla gardening and the fact that if [in the U.S.] food is planted on public property, the bounty is yours for the taking. That is, of course, if you are mobile; in contrast, the food itself can be mobile.
In New York right now, we have a food truck movement (this is also happening in a big way in Portland, Oregon); about a dozen or so popular, high-end food trucks. This is the French food truck, Le Gamin, and this is their lamb burger with strawberry ketchup, that I think is worth seeking out (told you I was a food pornographer).
The way to find these trucks is through Twitter. And when the food trucks tweet, they sometimes ask for help with parking, so this is your way to be a fan and to take an action (another very popular group of trucks on Twitter is in Los Angeles, the Kogi Korean BBQ trucks on Twitter here). The trucks also tweet at each other, creating a supportive community of mobile food vendors, and they often park near each other, raising the visibility of mobile food in a given area [that can, rather swiftly, relocate if necessary].
I had schnitzel the other day, this image is from the @schnitzeltruck–I was prepping for Linz, for Austria. The Schnitzel Truck shows up near where I work on Fridays, and we have the Dumpling truck come on Mondays, and the Cravings truck came on a Wednesday (they do Taiwanese fried chicken with secret pork sauce).
I was walking around the same area on a weekend with a friend who said, “You know, it’s such a shame. I used to work around here and there’s really not that many places to go for lunch.”
And I looked around, and the streets were sort of empty, and I though “hmm.” When I look at the same street, I know that the Schnitzel Truck usually parks on this corner. And the Dumpling Truck parks over there. Oh, and there’s an ice cream stand that sets up between these two buildings.
In the social future of food, we are the cooperative mapmakers.
Thank you.
I collect interesting examples of food, currency, and shelter experiments on culturemodding.com.
Many, many moons ago, I was the Sugar Plum Fairy, and looking back, I’d rather have presided over midsummer’s sugar plums, glorious fruit without the tart skin of most plums, than the confection the fairy takes her name from. Yesterday morning, I simmered sugar plums and peaches in butter and honey,
just the thing for yesterday’s pancakes or this morning’s oatmeal, as the fruit throws off a beautiful syrup (recipe) that can be stirred into drinks or a savory sauce with mustard.
My close friend Ben and I found the sugar plums on Saturday morning at the Prospect Park market,
one of the first places I wanted to show him on his trip to Brooklyn. We then perused books, clothing, and fantastic retro clock faces on streets and stoops on our way through Park Slope to the food coop, the dumpling truck (Ben recommends the Watermelonade),
and finally the waffle truck, where we saw someone from the dumpling truck recognize us and smile, writing his favorite drink on the chalkboard next to mine—I like how the different trucks support each other and often park nearby.
Into Manhattan for one of our many train rides that day, we heard tapping in the Union Square station,
laughed off a terrible movie with very good burgers at Dumont in Williamsburg, before meeting Solana on a rooftop where we learned how the gendered ice sculptures were created,
and chatted with mustachioed men before dancing until three at a neighborhood club…and a few hours later, we met Solana (who unfailingly glows with energy) and other Global Voices (Lova, Juhie, Jillian, Anas) for a Superfine brunch in DUMBO,
wandering the market near the Brooklyn Flea,
where I found a new vintage dress (for the next kthread cooks where I warble and (for Amanda) introduce you to the new kitchen), liked the shiny bottles,
and decided Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory’s vanilla was as good as spending the afternoon with information activists I respect and almost as good as a weekend with an old and very wise friend who is off soon to new adventures near other bodies of water…
Remember when I said there would be another (better) video than the one I posted before about the event with Knight Pulse, the community site I work on for Knight, and GOOD Magazine?
Voilà. (Also posted on the GOOD site, and more background in the GOOD recap.)
I watch this and smile—hope to be out that way again in early June and meet up with some of the lovely people in this video, including the wonderful Max Schorr of GOOD and my wise friend John, who attended the event to support this really interesting work—
