Utopia is near
December 9, 2008
)
Back in the saddle after a fun and hugely productive work period at the Saint-Étienne Internationale Biënale du Design where I was invited to show the Lucky Mi Fortune Cooking project in the City Eco Lab. John Thackara brought together a burgeoning toolshed of projects that demonstrate how communities and regions are using design to create sustainable local systems for food, energy, water, mobility, education and responsible economics. My work focussed on food systems and optimizing the use of community food flows.
)
One day’s worth of food flow recipe output
In the coming posts I’ll write about some of the other projects that were inspiring to me, expound on why I exhibited pots of kimchi, choucroute and garlic skin oil, and talk about the cookbook I made to document the biennial’s food flow together with the Lucky Mi Fortune Cooking chef du cuisine, Paul Freestone.
)
Chef Paul Freestone shares some sugar-free with young visitors to the biennial.
)
Culiblogger forages turnips at the Biennial
)
Lacto-fermentation as a design solution?
)
Debra Solomon and Paul Freestone
-
Culiblog’s City Eco Lab images on FlickR
All about the City Eco Lab on the Doors of Perception weblog
More images here, including Emmanuel Louisgrand’s installation
Core 77’s Alan Chochinov interview’s Lucky Mi Fortune Cooking’s Debra Solomon
Core 77’s Alan Chochinov interview’s City Eco Lab curator John Thackara, who sums it all up thusly:
City Eco Lab is an event, a market for nomadic projects, dealing with experiments from all over the world which will be combined with initiatives developed in the Saint-Étienne region. These are often small-scale projects which set important examples for the transition to a sustainable world. In its own small way each of these projects is helping to save the planet. They are trying to find practical ways of improving everyday life and they deal with subjects such as food, energy, water, mobility, education and responsible economics. City Eco Lab will offer tools and expertise so that everyone, both visitors and project leaders, will find ways of acting more responsibly.
About the City Eco Lab on Cluster
The art of food proximity: Lucky Mi Fortune Cooking on the Doors of Perception blog
debra at 17:52 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us
Lacto-fermentation, and you?
November 10, 2008
)
Fermentation is a correlative of life and of the production of globules, rather than of their death or putrefaction.
)
Instead of using ceramic sauerkraut pots, I used my Grams’ old Bauerware, covering the shredded/salted cabbage with plates and whatever weighty material I had to press and immerse it under the brine.
)
Towards the end of the week whenever I walked past these stacked Morandi still lives, little bubbles would appear from under the plates now submerged in brine. I understood this to be direct communication from the lactobacilli, that they had in fact fermented the cabbage to my satisfaction.
)
Just like Pasteur said, “It’s the microbes that will have the last word.”
)
)
)
An extract on Pasteur’s Memoire sur la fermentation appelée lactique (1857)City Picklers video on pickling
The Gut Microflora Story, from the European Food Information Council
)
debra at 1:14 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us
Bumper sticker
November 7, 2008
)
My dear friend Carolyn Strauss from Slowlab gifted me up a family heirloom! Now I don’t actually own a bumper, nor do I remember how to drive one, but I sure am going to hop on my bike and find a frame for this artifactual finger wag from the Old Country, a quote from American agrarian Wendell Berry.
debra at 1:57 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us
