Three Local Food Projects

My students have finally articulated what they will work on for the rest of the quarter, and I'm loving each project. Their original task was "to enhance the Western NY food economy in the winter months." But as they dove deep into their research, they made some discoveries that required them to fine-tune their original goal. Now their goal is "to make local food more appealing to main-stream customers," and with that in mind they've got some pretty cool offerings..

Team 1, Top Chef Local
This team decided to host a series of events based on the popular television show Top Chef. They want to create experiences in which newbies to local food could learn about cooking it together. Top Chef is a contest in which three chefs are given only a few ingredients with which to make an elegant meal, a format plays well with local produce and will be even more challenging in the winter. We recently had a winter potluck and man were there a lot of potatoes on the table. So, yes, great challenge.

Team 2, Cracker Barrel Bodega
Wanting to bring local food to the heart of the city, this team took inspiration from Cracker Barrel. I'd never heard of this place before, but apparently it's one part restaurant and one part retail food store. The hook is that if you like something that you eat in the restaurant side, you may go next door and buy it to take home. Put that model into an urban corner store with a deli counter or something, stocked with dishes made from local ingredients, and BAM! I'm there.  

Team 3, Flash Frozen Packaged Food
Wanting to make local food easier to prepare than whole food, this team wants to lightly process and package the food and sell it frozen. Not only does this team include two packaging science students, but they've got an electrical engineer on board who says he can design a flash freezer, normally starting at 10k, for a fraction of the cost. Should be fun. I'm super excited about this one. Well, who am I kidding, I'm excited about them all.

Want to come to our final presentation? Pop me a comment and I'll let you know the deets.

Local food for well-meaning skeptics

It’s winter break at RIT so I finally have a chance to write a post on what my design-thinking students are up to. This quarter, which began just after Thanksgiving, we started with a broad question: “How do we enhance the local food economy in the winter months?” There are many stakeholders to consider with this question. So we went out into the field and observed some of them, specifically farmers and customers at winter markets.

For a lot of the students, this was their first experience at a winter market, which is not surprising because there aren’t many of them to go to. And while the students can articulate many of the economic and social benefits of buying from local producers, the observations they made tell me that they aren’t quite convinced: “The market feels cliquey,” “The carrots were dirty,” “Maple syrup is way more expensive than syrup from the store,” were some of the sentiments they expressed.

Now, a foodie like me could easily feel disheartened by these comments and, in fact, if I had heard them a few years ago they would have depressed me. But today they inspire me. They inspire me to ask a new question: “How do we make local food more appealing to well-meaning skeptics?” Well-meaning skeptics. That’s who these students are and I suspect that there are many more out there in the population. They want to buy local, but they’re not too excited about shopping at obscure winter markets held in secret locations. Make it a little more familiar, they cry--make it a little easier for me and I’ll bite.

On an Diffusion of Innovation curve, the people who willingly go to the farmers markets are called “early adopters.” They are on the cutting edge, willing to bend over backwards to get their local food. The well-meaning skeptics, on the other hand, are called the “early majority.” And it’s the early majority we’re after here. If we can design for and with them, then perhaps local food sales will reach a tipping point and flow freely into the main stream.

Got an idea on how to appeal to the early majority? Come and share it at our local food potluck on 1/17. Cheers!

RIT Locavore Potluck

In September, the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) issued a call for "Locavore Potlucks" across New York State. Since my students and I are working with organic farmers this quarter, we rose to that challenge and hosted a local-food potluck in RIT Innovation Center on 9/29. We had a great turn out, about 30 people, and enjoyed some incredible dishes made from locally grown ingredients. We also had some great conversation with folks from the RIT community and the Rochester food economy about how best to support the people at the heart of the local food movement, our small-to-mid size organic farmers. Support them not only with consumer dollars, but with innovations like developing affordable tools for tillage and food processing and better channels for sales and distribution of their products.

The potluck turned out to be a great venue for knowledge sharing and it was also a lot of fun. We're planning to do it again on January 17 from 12-2 so save the date and keep your eye on the RIT events calendar for details. (Worried that you won't be able to find local food in January? Never fear, just sign up for a winter share from the Good Food Collective).

The photos above were taken by one of my very talented students, Blayke Morrow. To see more of her work, go to this link: http://www.blaykemorrow.com/galleries/

Design-thinking with Local Food Entrepreneurs

There's a movement in the Rochester metro area to transform our local food economy. Transforming the local food economy presents three major questions: 1. How do we help small and mid size farmers do what they do best - grow delicious food using sustainable farming techniques,  2. How do we help customers get that food, 3. How do we keep food dollars in our region and create food-related jobs.

This fall my design-thinking class at RIT is working with three different stakeholders in this transformation: 1. The Good Food Collective which handles sales and distribution from 8 farms to 500 members, 2. FreshWise Farms, a social enterprise of Foodlink that delivers food education and healthy locally grown food to underserved populations, and 3. Mud Creek Farm/Small World Bakery, a medium sized farm that offers CSAs and makes some great processed food like KimChi!

We're super excited about the diversity of food entrepreneurs we get to work with. Each enterprise has different problems for us to explore. For example, Good Food has an awesome distribution truck, the Green Bean Machine, but winter's coming so they need to fit it with accessories that stand up to our Western New York winters. Mud Creek Farm has a great problem too - lack of access to tools that fit their mid-sized farm. It turns out that there are many tools for serious gardeners but they're too small. And there are many tools for industrial farms but they're too big (insert Goldielocks joke here). And then FreshWise is trying to think up innovative ways to engage K-12 students with the healthy locally grown food that's finding its way into their after school meals.

The list of problems here illuminates the complexities we navigate when trying shift from a well established model to an alternative model. And it's in these kinds of spaces, working with these kinds of problems, that innovation happens. It's dirty and gritty and messy and fun.

So three cheers for our new adventure. I'll be reporting on our process as we dig deeper into the projects. Its bound to be full of surprises.

PS - Please come to our Local Food Potluck on 9/29. Details here: https://nofany.org/

First Garlic of the Year

from Monroe Ave Farmers' Market. And mint and peas and berries and flowers. Joy!

Designers Love Their Thumbnails

This past Tuesday, my class and I went on our second field trip into the city, this time to Foodlnk's R&D facility, on Joseph Avenue. It's exciting to be collecting so much great data for the ROC2020 project. However, our ultimate task is not just to collect the data, but to communicate it in an engaging way. How do we get from here to there?

Here's what we found on Tuesday. Foodlink, as you may know, is a food bank in Rochester that provides emergency food to eleven counties in the region. But their long-term goal is to transform the regional food system so that emergency food won't be needed. This means heavy investment in R&D.

We visited their Skunk Works and talked with some impressive people about the transformative work they are doing there. Previously a bottling facility for Pepsi, it holds three social business start-ups focused on the following goals: provide healthy food for school kids; train and place Rochester citizens in green jobs; and convert food waste (of which Foodlink has an endless supply) into green fuel, compost, and animal feed.

To try to make sense of all this data, on Thursday we came back to the RIT Innovation Center and started a knowledge-sharing session, in which we wrote down every current urban innovation that we had discovered through our primary and secondary research. Then we took all of these innovations - each one written on an individual post-it - and began sorting them into an affinity diagram. Then the students each chose two innovations that resonate with them. And finally, we embarked on the task of figuring out how to communicate these innovations in an engaging way.

What may separate design processes from processes in other disciplines is that it generates hundreds of ideas each step of the way. The rationale behind this process is that if we generate hundred of ideas, then we increase the chances of finding a truly innovative one. Think of a photographer and how many pictures she takes to get that perfect shot. Or a film maker and the hundreds of hours of footage she shoots toward the end of delivering a two-hour film. The same principle applies to design. Go for quantity and select the best for further development.

This is where thumbnails come in. At the beginning of a project, designers generate hundreds of little sketches, a visual brainstorm of ideas caught on paper. Thumbnails are small, no larger than one inch by one inch. Once we have enough thumbnails, the next step is to choose a few of them for further development. If the deliverable is a poster, and in this case it is, we choose three thumbs to develop into rough comprehensives. Again, we don't choose one thumbnail that we think is the best; we choose, instead, a few options that show the most potential.

If you look at the photos above, it's not clear that these designers are loving their thumbnails as I claim in the title of this post. That's because making thumbnails is hard. "Art is Work," claims one of my favorite illustrators, Milton Glaser. He is right. It is work. But while generating thumbnails can be an exhausting task, we eventually come to love them as evidence that remarkable ideas don’t just fall into our laps, but, rather, emerge from hard work.

Kimchi and Soft Hearts

I've been making some fun things at home these days. For one, I'm trying to find a nice little something to give for Valentines Day which is one of my favorite holidays. I enjoy sending out valentines to my friends to remind them that I love them. I'm not crazy about these hearts yet, but new designs tend to get better after I make about a dozen or so. I'll get there.

I've been making kimchi too though I don't think I can put it in the mail. This is unfortunate because, I mean, what says "I love you" more than a stinky jar of fermenting cabbage?

This batch here is made of nappa cabbage, daikon, carrot, bonito, a splash of rice vinegar, pressed garlic, grated ginger (I love my ginger grater, btw. I think it needs its own post soon), and a heaping tablespoon of that Korean red pepper sauce they make dukboki with.

Let's just say that I'm having fun.

A Systems Approach to Hunger

Just before the Thanksgiving holiday I met with the head honchos at Foodlink - Executive Director Tom Ferraro and CEO Jeanette Batiste. Foodlink is probably best known as Rochester's premier food bank but really it's so much more. Tom and Jeanette spent two hours with me showing me around the facility, an old oil refinery on the Genesee River, and telling me about the breadth of work that they do. 

A plain old food bank, as I understand it, takes food donations and then distributes those donations to organizations that feed hungry people. Foodlink does that, for sure. They have a gigantic warehouse, a fleet of trucks, and food sorting system that seems, to me, to operate like a well-oiled machine. 

But then Jeanette and Tom told me about their R&D. This non-profit has some cutting edge R&D that just about blew my mind. For starters, they have a pesticide-free farm just 10 miles out of town called Freshwise. Not only is the farm environmentally-friendly, but it's socially responsible because they employ developmentally disabled folks with farm work. 

Then there is Freshwise Catering. I'm not completely filled in on all that they do. I know that part of what they do is a "backpack" program - they feed kids healthy food when school is not in session and school lunch is not available. I also think they have, or are about to launch, a straight-up catering business. More on this when I find out more. A sustainable catering business is a dream project of mine and Freshwise is way ahead of me on implementation. In addition to healthy locally produced food, Freshwise and Foodlink are very interested in job creation. So I'm curious to find out about who is working in the kitchen. 

And then, just as I was about to leave, Tom walked me over to the warehouse across the parking lot where they've got - get this - a small business called Epiphergy whose founders are turning food waste into fuel. This is fantastic because Foodlink has a fleet of trucks for distribution that need, you guessed it, fuel! And guess what else Foodlink has? Access to a lot of food waste. 

In the sustainability literature, all of this coordination is called "Industrial Symbiosis." But it my mind, it's just effing awesome. Foodlink is way beyond a plain old food bank. It's on the verge of implementing and entirely new system for food production and consumption - a system that not only has a positive impact on the environment but is incredibly sensitive to the needs of people from a wide range of economic and social backgrounds. People at the base of the economic pyramid need good food and they need meaningful work. Foodlink is working on it and they are succeeding. Cheers!

Summer Rules.

A few local foodie pictures to share. This morning we went to market in Dewitt Park and were o so happy to see garlic. And carrots. Lookit how pretty!

Additionally, we picked up duck eggs from the Daring Drake Farm folks. Mmmmm. Duck eggs.

After the market we went out to Eco-Village because we have a berry share there. They have all kinds of small businesses running out of Eco-Village. It's impressive. The one we support most is Kestral Perch U-pick Berries. How it works from our end is that we pay them a lump sum at the beginning of the season and the owner/operator, Katie Kreeger, emails us every week telling us what and how much we can pick. We're very impressed with how Katie runs her business. It's an honor to support her.

Today we got to pick two quarts of strawberries (actually Cory picked them - I roamed around). The strawberries taste even "sweeter" this year as last year it rained too much and there was no season.  Strawberries grow very close to the ground so when they get too wet they mold and mush up : (

What to do with my silly little dog is always an issue when we go out to Eco-Village. Often I tie her up to the posts that frame the blackberry patch. Here she is glaring at me. On the left of the glaring image are the beginnings of raspberry season which is almost always super plentiful. The darn things make fruit in summer and then again in fall. 

So that's my local food report for early-mid June. We pick up our first CSA delivery later this week. As for the Rochester falcons, Archer and Beauty ended up having two girls. They grow bigger by the minute and are due to fledge by the end of this month. You can check in on them here. Maker Faire project is moving along and hope to report on that soon. 

Summer rules. 

TEXTILES and TECHNOLOGY

Yesterday we had our 3rd annual Imagine RIT Innovation and Creativity festival with a record breaking 23,000 visitors to campus. Wow. The event was amazing and too much for me to report on in entirety. I do, however, want to give props to one little corner of the Innovation Center that caught my attention.

In a sea of hi-tech games and robots, I really appreciated three textile exhibits. One was put on by my students. Above is a picture of Lauren and Sarah with their concept called RocSmock. It's a retail concept in which they assume that digital textile technology lives in the retail space. This technology allows common folks to design and print their own patterns on fabric. But even more interesting than the technology itself is how Lauren and Sarah employed it. They propose that locally grown produce can live in the store for sale and consumption but also it can serve as inspiration for textile designs. When you can design your own clothes with inspiration from your local produce, you are likely to grow your values as you transfer them from one aspect of your (what you eat) life to another (what you wear). 

Just a stone's throw away from the RocSmock group was textile guru Andrea Handy. Andrea was generously teaching folks how to work this awesome knitting machine. I didn't get the full scoop on this, but I see Andrea later this week so more to come. Here's a pic. Andrea's on the right.

And finally I was just thrilled to see this young woman from the Young Entrepreneurs Academy displaying her quilted saddle blankets. I didn't catch her name, the one seated on the left, but I will and post a link soon. Just in case you know any riders in need of a super hip blanket.

As I said earlier, the entire festival was great and you can read more about it here. Just wanted to make sure that this sweet spot of textiles people got their moment in the spotlight.

Farmer's Market continued

Just a few pictures today.

Radishes, Ramps, and Random Craft

Picked up these radishes at the market today from. um. I did it again. I forgot the farmer's name. I would totally recognize his face. But anyways.

I got some ramps too and I cooked them up with some piggery confit and frozen root veggie puree from last season's farm share. It was tasty although the ramps are pretty strong. They are referred to as wild leeks, but they behave much more like garlic. This puree calls for something more subtle, like shallots. Next time.

I also picked up some embroidery thread and I'm just playing with the stuff. Here's is a little felt container that I made.

Not anything to write home about unless you like to write home about your process (and I do).

So, this is where I'm starting. It's a 3 sided container and in the first version (this is altered), the sides were made from square pieces of felt. Thus, it didn't have much stability when standing, so I snipped the upper edges and tapered them in.

It's fun to play with this stuff. I've never been much of a crafter, but I used to sculpt in other media. I see this as an extension of that.

Last season's roots, new greens, and tough guy soap

Dinner last night was an in-between seasons meal. As our CSA deliveries don't start up until June, we're left to fend for ourselves. LAMB is the official meat of spring though I'm not sure where we picked it up (this happens once in a blue moon). We rubbed it with olive oil and chives from the yard and broiled the chops - 6 minutes/side. Guilty pleasure: we topped it off with mustard from France. The ROOT VEGETABLE PUREE is the second to last bag we processed from our  winter CSA.  CSA deliveries definitely changed our cooking patterns. The pattern that worked for us was to let the veggies pile up, then every few weekends cook 'em down in a big pot, mash em up, and divi the puree into freezer bags and freeze. The frozen puree makes a great base for soup or a replacement for potatoes. Just add butter! The SPINACH was from yesterday's market - opening day! We braised that on low heat over some minced chives and garlic we picked up at Eddydale Farms a few weeks back.

I don't remember who we bought the spinach from or from whom we bought this bread. I think from here on out I'll pay even closer attention to these things.

I DO know where I got this soap. I LOVE this soap. 17th Century Suds - they make incredible products. Especially this Tough Guy soap. Too bad I can post how it smells and feels. You'll just have to imagine.