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Avant-Garde Cookbooks

  A book asks you to change your life. Great works get under your skin and into your being. They posses you. You can’t shake them off. You go back to them. Memorize passages. They work their way into your habits: how you move, what you see, where you go, how you shape your thoughts, and the cadence of your words. You don’t so much read great books as become their embodied offspring. They live beside us, above us and inside us. We automatically think of literature when we talk of great books changing lives, but I think that the humble cookbook should take the pride of place in this regard. “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell...

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The Recipes & Books of the Eat Your Sidewalk Cookbook

Here is a list of all of the recipes in The Eat Your Sidewalk Cookbook in alphabetical order. The recipes range from what seem like pretty standard "Braised Ptarmigan" (a recipe that got Rene Redzepi quite excited when we showed him the cookbook), to larger scaled recipes such as "Nature", "Indo-European Thought", and "Civilization" (yes we unconsciously follow recipes to reproduce these "dishes"); then there are recipes for critical practices: "Foraging", "Fermenting", "Emulsification", "Commoning" etc.; Plus there are short asides on topics: On Grinding, On Gleaning, On Plants... What excites us at SPURSE in seeing this list is the range of practices that we can have in one cookbook: ABUNDANCE APPLE COMPOTE WITH BLOSSOMS APPLE LEATHER ARCTIC HARE PIE ASAK-LUK...

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On walking away from the “Native+Invasive” Paradigm

The last two weeks we in SPURSE have been foraging quite a bit of Japanese Knotweed. Everyday we spread it on our sourdough as a chutney, and improvise some other delicious treat. Next we are making some pickles and wine using the basic methodologies we talk about in the cookbook.  Knotweed is a delicious tart plant when picked young perfectly named by Samuel Beckett. A quick google and you will find a thousand online recipes, as well as reports of its success in the world of fine dining from all over the globe (including our friends at Noma/MAD and Forage). It also has a long history as a powerful medicinal plant, as Timothy Lee Scott documents wonderfully in Invasive Plant...

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Workers of the world — insects, plants, animals, fungi, bacteria — unite!

Around May Day there is always a good deal of attention to the question of labor, which is a great thing. As part of all these events last night we saw the documentary Dolores about Dolores Huerta and all the transformative activities she has done -- primarily her co-founding of the National Farmworkers  Association (later the UFW) and their early struggles. It is a powerful and necessary movie which I will not try to summarize. I would strongly recommend finding where it is showing and watch it if you can.  Two things really struck me from the movie as I was thinking about our own work around Eat Your Sidewalk: (1) that it was, as she says it “the poorest of...

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For new Cosmologies (Earth Day is not Science Day)

No, this is not a critique of science, nor is this post a critique of the need for a “day for science” — this is certainly necessary in these times. We at SPURSE get that. But, earth day should not be conflated with a day for science. Nor should we ever think that science is our primary or best means of engaging with the earth. More than ever we need to multiply the different ways of being alive and engaged with the earth. We do not need a "best" way.  Certainly the sciences are very important modes of engagement with the earth and they are critical to ecology. We have no issue with any of this. That said, science has...

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