I felt like a true New Yorker last night when I managed a Shake Shack visit without waiting in line. Even in the cold, a shake order is required, especially after a heady two hours of a philanthrocapitalism debate.
Even more than philanthrocapitalism (and Shake Shack), Jason is into rebuilding soils with his company, re:char; I like knowing people whose work I don’t quite understand, and I may visit his workshop this spring to learn what “fast pyrolysis biochar system development” actually means.
This morning began with a croissant warmed in the oven, then spread with homemade butter and some of the honeycomb Nina brought from D.C. before I gathered vegetables and headed over to Bushwick, a somewhat remote area of Brooklyn, where my friend Dean lives.
For a relaxed lunch to celebrate the inaugural meeting of Coworking Bushwick, I sliced fractal cauliflower and purple haze carrots, roasting them next to a serious piece of pork shoulder we procured at the Union Square Greenmarket on Wednesday.
Dean made a chimichurri sauce with his serious knife skills (this is all chopped by hand),
and he programmed the rice cooker to handle freekeh (roasted green spelt) from Cayuga Organics, also at yesterday’s market. The freekeh matched the roasted pork shoulder, its crunchy crust, and carrots that retained their purple; the wheat contains a decent amount of protein, making the ancient grain a nice base for a vegetarian meal. Also, it’s fun to say ‘freekeh.’
Soon after lunch, keys were clicking again and code was implemented as the coworking continued into the afternoon, making me think about how nice it is to work from different venues, and especially places with bright, sunny kitchens full of people as attached to their computers as I am…
This is a group of younger social entrepreneurs, many of whom are quite savvy online, who use and will use social content to serve larger organizational purposes. Note: I’m sipping raw milk as I write this; we’ll be back to food in the next post.
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.
I don’t usually blog about work, but this is my favorite thing that I’ve done at Knight.
Image by Emily Lerman/LAist. I’m in the middle surrounded all of these wonderful leaders–missing from the picture is my co-conspirator at GOOD, Max Schorr.
You can read more about the five projects in the GOOD blog post, in Emily Lerman’s LAist post (she also took the picture above, and my friend Andy Sternberg of LAist was also there), and in my friend John Jackson’s post, where he notes Natalie Portman was sitting in the front.
This is an experiment for Pulse (you know how I like crazy ideas), and each of these projects will convene a community event this spring. I took video of their presentations (better video from GOOD will be up soon, and I’ll link to it here, but for now):
I wanted to share with you what excites me about media and community: events like the one in Los Angeles to announce these leaders, where a crowd of two hundred stayed for two hours to listen and ask questions and think about how to make this community stronger.
Congrats to Alissa (her post on the event), Eric, Sonja, Edgar, Erik and Kelly—
I think of Malcolm Gladwell books as a sophisticated guilty pleasure.
He Who Must Name Patterns is the darling of airport bookstores (which I think amuses him; there is a part on airplane crashes in Outliers that is difficult to read on a flight, similar to beginning Ian McEwan’s Saturday while in the air), and the chapters are nicely organized for casual reading–each extended anecdote about the length of a New Yorker article, come to think of it.
Gladwell’s books belong in the self-discovery section of a bookstore that I imagine next to the self-help aisles, their cheerful covers in contrast to the signature manilla Gladwell titles with serious serifs and a centered object (Outliers has a colored orb, Blink an asterisk that makes me think of Vonnegut’s infamous doodle in Breakfast of Champions, and Tipping Point a match). Whereas in the previous books you might be able to slot yourself into one of the three special groups of people (Connectors, Mavens, Salespeople) or note your snap judgments, this recent book has fewer lessons that can be easily applied–aside from his 10,000 hours thesis.
Of more interest, Gladwell takes the signature Stewart Smalley line to pull apart specific examples of success; beyond the “smart enough” threshold, social savvy makes key figures (read: connectors) in your life like you enough to bend the norms and let 10,000 opportunity hours bloom.
The epilogue is an explanation of how Gladwell explains the community figures who paved his path to success, and I couldn’t resist marking the page lauding “divergence tests”–an alternative way of measuring intelligence through timed creative responses. In elementary school, I put in a good thousand hours or so solving problems with my Odyssey of the Mind teams, the brainiac Olympics for entitled children (Gladwell mentions entitlement as a key skill for success), and I do want to think those Saturdays spent designing PVC pulley systems and blurting out ten spontaneous uses for pipe cleaners will serve some larger purpose.
After spending years at a top ten U.S. university in a graduate program with disturbingly smart people, I will cite Gladwell’s book in this season of cocktail parties and feel entirely justified in my prediction that the wittiest of my friends are marked for success in that field. Comprehensive knowledge as well as a keen sense of timing in impersonations on John’s part, snarky classroom literary dissections on Ben’s, obscure musical categorization references from art historian/XML geek Dana, appreciation of rap and West coast culture from ascot-wearing Miltonist Eric, and Jordan’s inspired nudges in the Charlottesville underground arts recommend them for future renown.
If success depends on your forbearing community, perhaps the next Gladwell treatise will be on how to sustain the communities you successfully choose later–
