On Urban Food Commons If all of the lawns in America were combined they would cover roughly all of Greece. If this is a bit abstract think Nevada plus Massachusetts. If that is still too abstract: they cover more land than all cropland in the United States combined. This is remarkable and beautiful. Lawns are deeply intertwined with every moment of our lives: the sites of playing games, lazing in the sun, picnicking, rolling down hills and watching the world go by. We are all collectively cultivating a vast expanse of rolling green livingness for free use and beauty. Lawns are also a huge problem -- this area the size of Greece is a massive site of poisoning -- herbicides,...
This spring we gave Alice Waters some of our Dandelion Wine -- she had never tried a Dandelion wine; we presented at the Culinary Institute of America (a day-long conference on art and food), screened a couple of movies (The Gleaners and I, A Cook on the Wild Side), and most special of all was talking with the amazing chef and food philosopher Peter Hoffman. He is a critical figure in the farm to table movement and he was gracious enough to talk with us about "What comes after farm to table? Sidewalk to table?". There is a good video of the whole conversation here. To prepare for these events we at SPURSE sat down to write out our current...
We have great news to share! René Redzepi, chef, and founder of the world’s best restaurant Noma, has endorsed the Eat Your Sidewalk Cookbook: “This is exactly the kind of philosophical look at foraging that is needed today.” For those of you unfamiliar with René’s work he is the chef behind the world famous foraging centric restaurant Noma. Besides regularly being voted the top restaurant in the world by the San Pelligrino awards, René is a major figure in re-imagining how we eat, cook and engage with our environment. We believe strongly that foraging, cooking, and eating are potentially revolutionary philosophical and ecological acts. And so we are really pleased that René recognizes both how urgently we need a philosophical rethinking of eating and cooking, and that the Eat Your Sidewalk Cookbook...
“This is exactly the kind of philosophical look at foraging that is needed today.” It is pretty astonishing to hear René tell us this. He had just turned off the blasting Norwegian death metal, sat down at a cheap folding table in a construction trailer perched at the edge of a wharf, out back from Noma and began to look through the Eat Your Sidewalk cookbook. René starts at the beginning flipping through the pages as we talk. After about twenty pages he gets to a double-page spread with an image of a bird -- head severed and blood seeping into the fresh snow. He gets very excited. “This is my favorite bird to cook.” Then he pauses and looks at us. “Do you know my favorite way...
Responses: With each set of dishes, we asked our guests to think of a word or phrase that arose in their reflections. Their words are critical, as they record the complexity of confronting the challenge of being-of-a-place and not simply being-in-a-place. These responses are listed by set of dishes, each response is separated by a comma. The ordering is ours. Sea curious, butter, moist, tastes like the sea salty, salt, salt, salty, salty, salty, salt citrus beach, vigilance edge of the sea that was, earth mind matter, smooth, cold, schluck es? teeth tasty smoothly, nature taste, danger barrier play wise calming, kind, oyster, smoked bitter, tree-flower, gin tonic: sparkling water with the bitter taste of the limestone, small stone sea...
