Civil Eats

This Saturday, New York City will be the first participant in a series of international conversations surrounding food and the city. The event is organized by The Foodprint Project, a collaboration between Nicola Twilley and Sarah Rich, a founder of Civil Eats. Their objective is to use food as a lens to study local connections between food and geography, food and social behavior, and food and our future.

Taking their cue from the research of Kathe Newman, who theorized that a spatial analysis of cupcake proliferation could also reveal the flow of capital investment in cities, Twilley and Rich hope to navigate through and uncover New York City’s changing socio-economic patterns by inviting panelists and curious New Yorkers to engage in a discussion centered on the city’s foodscape. Read More

I’m always amazed by the number of folks who think that most of Central Park is some kind of natural habitat of indigenous plants, a pristine terrain onto which we plunked our bike paths, boathouses and pretzel vendors.

In reality, nearly every square inch of Central Park was painstakingly landscaped back in the mid-nineteenth century to the specifications of Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux. A massive public works project, it required some 20,000 workers to subvert existing swamps and blow up bluffs to create a soothing pastoral landscape in the English romantic tradition.

Oh, and there was the little matter of evicting the Irish pig farmers and German gardeners who’d built shantytowns on the land. And destroying Seneca Village, the “first significant community of African American property owners on Manhattan”. The five acre settlement, which included three churches and a school, was seized through eminent domain and demolished.

All this, so that cooped-up city dwellers could get their fix of “nature”. Our civilized way of life is so removed from the natural world that Central Park’s manicured, manipulated acres are as close to a bit of wilderness as we can hope to get within the borough of Manhattan.

But you can catch a glimpse of what Manhattan was really like before we invaded it and tamed it by watching the fascinating video that architect/educator Fritz Haeg’s created in collaboration with The Mannahatta Project. The video documents Haeg’s Lenape Edible Estate installation, which was designed to “provide a view back to the lives of the native Lenape people, how they lived off the land 400 years ago” on the island that was then called Mannahatta. Read More

On Sunday, September 13, New Amsterdam Market will inaugurate its first season of monthly, one-day markets in New York City. New Amsterdam Market is a non-profit organization dedicated to reinventing the indoor public market as a civic institution, in the City of New York. The market inauguration will coincide with New York City’s celebration of Harbor Day, which this year honors the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage to the New World. New Amsterdam Market and its diverse vendors will join the Harbor Day festivities by representing the agricultural bounty of the lands visited by Hudson in 1609. Farmers, producers, and purveyors will sell fresh seasonal produce, meats and dairy, wild-gathered greens, breads, cheeses and cured meats, fruits, wine, and cider all from the Northeast, and with a special emphasis on the Hudson Valley. Read More

Cities, now the home to half of the world’s growing population, are poised to redefine how we produce and supply our food. Food is now a social movement, with a particularly urban flavor. Living in southern Vermont for the past year after living in New York City for nearly a decade, I learned that in New York City it is easier to purchase a diet of regionally produced foods than in the food producing regions themselves because of the structure of our food supply chains. Cities are where people are demanding more farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture groups. Cities are where there is a local agriculture craze. But I fear that the politics of “local foods” as the antidote to the ills of “Big Ag” obscures other solutions as well as alienates people who may otherwise be for changes in the structure of agriculture. Read More

Last Sunday, I had the pleasure of lending a hand as a volunteer at Rooftop Farms in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The name says it all: it is a 6000 square foot urban vegetable farm on the roof of an industrial building, growing rows inter-cropped with lettuces, tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers, kale and much more, which they sell directly to restaurants and at a farm stand inside the building every Sunday from 9am – 4pm.

Annie Novak and Ben Flanner are the farming minds behind the project. Both are passionate about how food gets to our table (Novak works with farmer with Kira Kenney of Evolutionary Organics at the Greenmarket, and works as the Children’s Gardening Program Coordinator at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. Flanner is new to farming but seems to get a kick out of hawking produce). Chris and Lisa Goode of Goode Green, a green roofing company, found the roof and funded Rooftop Farms as a test. With this project, the team hopes to determine what is possible in terms of scale for growing on rooftops in the city. Read More

I’ve always admired honeybees for their elegant cooperation, and of course because they make more honey than they need out of sheer industriousness, which I love to eat.  So I was excited when I heard that I could learn to keep bees myself, in the city. (after the jump: how to build a hive) Read More

New Amsterdam Market is a non-profit organization dedicated to reinventing the indoor public market as a civic institution, in the City of New York. To date, we have held three seasonal market events that have drawn thousands of supporters from all five boroughs and beyond. Beginning this summer, we will hold monthly markets at a public site, whereby the aim is to increase the visibility of and demand for regional food, thus making the case to the city and the public alike for a permanent site. Read More

There’s nothing New Yorkers love more than a secret, but best things in this city you can’t find, you have to just stumble upon. And boy did I just fall into something amazing.

I’d heard about “secret” supper clubs. The basic concept is that it’s an under the radar local, organic foodie evening seasoned with camaraderie, where you pay a (usually low) flat fee for a dinner in someone’s apartment cooked by seriously talented chefs. Read More

I sat down with Annie Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch over pancakes at the NYC icon Tom’s Restaurant in Brooklyn to discuss their delicious new book, Gastropolis: Food and New York City. Read More