Prof. Mary Beaudry and Valerie Ryan
Congratulations to Gastronomy candidate Valeria Ryan. She successfully defended her thesis “Umami, Evolution and Nutritional Inequality” on May 7, 2013.
by Katie Peterson
My family has been raising free-range turkeys in southeastern Minnesota for more than 70 years. Prior to the past few years, though, I doubt any of us planned to be involved in any kind of food movement. That changed when my brother returned to our family’s land and built an on-farm store, Ferndale Market, named after my grandparents Fern and Dale who started the farm. Opening the market was a big step in that it not only gave us direct access to consumers, but also allowed us to partner with and sell food from other local farmers and producers.
Ferndale Market free-range turkeys
In the four years that Ferndale Market has been open, my family has become deeply engaged in advocating for local and sustainable food, and supporting the independent farmers and producers who provide it. As just one small part of a much larger effort, it has been exciting to witness consumers’ growing interest in where their food comes from.
Here are just a few of the positive things we see happening with local food right now:
Farm to School
Restaurants have increasingly focused on sourcing their food locally and now many schools are doing the same. The two largest school districts in Minnesota – Minneapolis and St. Paul – have even gotten on board. Some schools have also implemented education efforts to go along with their local sourcing. For example, my brother has served Ferndale Market turkey burgers and traded “Farmer John” baseball cards with elementary students. These types of activities provide opportunities to teach students important lessons about food, nutrition, and agriculture. (To learn more about Minnesota’s Food to School program, check out the The University of Minnesota Extension’s documentary on the subject.)
Farm to Institution
From Target to Best Buy, a number of Minnesota-based corporations are incorporating local food into their employee cafeteria menus. Ferndale Market provides turkey to many of these institutions, thanks in part to its partnership with Bon Appétit Management Company, a food service company committed to sustainable food. Many hospitals and healthcare organizations – perfect sites for nutrition education – also are exploring how they can improve the food they serve. In Minnesota, a committee made up of farmers and hospitals is looking at how they can better work together to provide food that’s healthy for patients and the environment.
Collaboration
Rather than viewing each other as competitors, many independent farmers, food producers, and retailers have banded together. Being in the minority, they know that helping each other succeed will help build a more sustainable food system and have found ways to champion one another. For example, Valley Natural Foods hosted a screening of Food Inc. followed by a panel discussion featuring a variety of people involved in the local food industry. As a more behind the scenes example, when making deliveries to restaurants, Ferndale Market has hauled product for Thousand Hills Cattle Company and Hidden Stream Farm, and they have done the same. Combining loads saves time and reduces carbon footprints, as well as streamlines the receiving process for chefs.
Education
From panel discussions to “Farmer John” baseball cards, education is the common theme. Independent farmers, producers, and retailers know that they can make a living only if they teach consumers why the food they raise, produce, and sell is different. As food corporations increasingly step up their marketing efforts focused on sustainability claims, it is more important than ever for independent farmers and producers to share their stories and boldly convey points of difference.
My brother, John, inside Ferndale Market
Over the past few years, a number of people have stopped into Ferndale Market to ask what my grandparents would think of the farm’s evolution. As humble Midwesterners, they likely would be embarrassed to have a store named after them. But as hardworking farmers, who built a life and raised a family on the farm, they would be proud to know it has remained environmentally and economically sustainable into its third generation. As consumers increasingly seek out food grown locally on family farms, we hope it will remain sustainable for many years to come.
Katie Peterson will graduate from the Gastronomy program in September 2012. She writes about food and diabetes on her blog, 1LittlePrick.
by Lucia Austria
This past April, I had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Dominican Republic to learn how cacao beans are produced, thanks to my employer, Taza Chocolate. Taza prides itself on being a “bean to bar” company, so I associate the smell of “farm” and “cacao” with the kilo sacks of dried beans we store in the factory, ready to be roasted, ground, and made into chocolate. I never thought I’d have the chance to visit the cacao farm and fermentery where our beans are from!
I’ve learned that it takes a lot of time, labor, and love to produce cacao beans for chocolate consumption. The farmer gives much care to his trees, which require ample moisture and shade from the hot tropical sun. The pods are also prone to fungal blights, so constant attention is necessary. Within each pod are the beans, surrounded by sweet, delicious flesh called “baba.” The beans themselves are bitter and require a week of fermentation to bring out the fruity notes of each bean. I visited Taza’s main source for fermented beans, a small cooperative called La Red Guaconejo, just outside of the town of Nagua. The fermenter’s attention and skill to the process is crucial to developing the right bacteria to bring out the beans’ flavors. They are then dried on large outdoor beds, packed, and shipped right to Somerville, MA.
Welcome to the Dominican Republic!
Theobroma Cacao seedling
Baby cacao pod
This is the second post in a two-part series on effective food blog reading. Check out the first post, Five Habits of Highly Effective Food Blog Readers.
by Sarah Morrow
To aid you in the critical process of selecting food blogs and news sites to follow, this post provides discretionary tips for both navigating and participating in online food communities.
These tips cannot only help you pick and choose what sites to follow, but if you’re considering starting a site of your own, they can also provide a framework for your own work.
Timeliness
How frequently is the site updated? If a site is updated multiple times in a day, keeping up with it can be daunting. If it is updated infrequently, it can be difficult to maintain a core audience, let alone attract newcomers. It is important to find a balanced medium between these two extremes. How many articles are you comfortable reading in a sitting? How many articles do you think your readers want to read at a time?
Content Quality
What information is being presented and how? Is this information original or not? If there is another source, has s/he been cited? How clearly and grammatically well-written are the articles? Is the author’s voice engaging? Do anecdotes relate to the rest of the post, or are they filler content? What is actually written in a blog post is just as important as if a blog post is written.
Presentation Quality
This may sound a little strange, but the layout and design of a site can not only attract or dissuade repeat visitors, but it can also actually clue readers into a site’s credibility and usefulness and the author’s dedication. While it’s true that not every poorly designed blog is useless or every sleek site is trustworthy, the care food bloggers put into their site often reflects the time and care they put into their other work. Pictures can also persuade or dissuade readership. While not all food is pretty, having a clear, well-lit photo can still encourage your readers to try your recipe for an Asian-spice infused gumbo or to check out the new sub shop on the corner.
Audience
Who else is reading these sites? You can keep track of this by browsing through reader comments. For your own site, moderating is key. Responding to your audience can encourage return readership. Likewise, how a food blogger responds to his/her own audience can help you decide is s/he is someone you want to read or interact with. Having a dedicated core audience can be more valuable than encouraging high traffic. If readers are staying to comment and the author is interacting with them, it’s usually a clear sign that the content being presented is encouraging discussion.
Purpose and Intent
What is the point of the site —and does it live up to that intention? If you’re writing a food blog, know why you’re making and sharing the recipes chosen, and understand what makes your work unique. With the ever-growing number of food blogs out there, it’s easy to be part of the crowd. If you know why your work is different and important, you can use that same reasoning to pick other engaging food bloggers to follow.
If you’re just getting into the online food community, whether writing or reading, here are my starting site picks. These sites are wonderful examples of authors who provide strong, timely, relevant content.
Recipe Sites
Food News and Recipe Hubs
Food Writing
Sarah Morrow is a BU Gastronomy student and the head writer at inthecactusgarden.com.
This is the first post in a two-part series on effectively reading food blogs.
by Sarah Morrow
These days, food blogs are everywhere. As gastronomy students, we have an urge to not only read all the food news and recipes we come across, but to participate in the myriad of online food communities. This urge, however, leads us to a very difficult question: How do we handle the wealth of information out there? This post looks at the general logistics of processing news and information from food sites and offers tips for synthesizing those particulars.
1. Organize from the start
Clutter is the ultimate evil. If you collect recipes, using a virtual journal (such as MacJournal) or online mediums (such as Pinterest or Evernote) to sort links, save directions, and tag entries can cut down on that clutter. By making definitive decisions from the start about how and where you will maintain data, you can effectively save yourself time later. Saving full recipes offline is useful because not only can you retain the direct link to the original recipe, but also because occasionally sites are discontinued, server crashes lose posts, or authors decidedly remove content. Saving recipes to your own files can help ensure information won’t disappear.
2. Find an RSS feed reader that works for you
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed readers direct new content from sites to your own personal hub. Different feed reader provide different features. Google Reader, one of the more popular readers online, can be used from any device, yet searchability for saved articles within the reader can be cumbersome and difficult. Articles that have been deleted are sometimes re-downloaded to the reader. Programs such as Vienna (which, full disclosure, I use) save articles to your computer rather than to an online cloud, but, in the reverse of Google Reader, provides more sophisticated tagging and marking features, as well as permanently deletes unnecessary articles. These might sound like trivial factors, but organization processes can affect both how we read and how efficiently we process and understand materials. RSS readers are particularly helpful when it comes to following high-content sites, such as The Kitchn, Serious Eats, and YumSugar. These sites often post anywhere between 3 to 10 (sometimes more!) articles a day. By using a feed reader, you not only ensure that you don’t miss any posts, but that relevant or interesting information is saved for later.
3. Skim
Just as we must pick and choose the amount of attention we give to various readings for class (It’s true!), it’s also important to remember that not every news piece or recipe requires your full attention. In many cases the title of a post can provide you with enough information to decide if the post is save-worthy or not. Sites such as The Huffington Post’s Food Section (which used to be Slashfood years ago) publish anywhere from 10 or more posts a day, yet many of these posts are merely blurbs, poorer versions of articles written on other sites, or reposted articles. Being able to quickly discern whether an article is a useful read or not is not only a major time saver, but it can also save you from utilizing less-than-worthy sources.
4. Don’t be afraid to remove sites from your reading roster
If you find a site isn’t providing the content you need, don’t hold onto it. Likewise, if a writer has stopped writing for several months let it go. Ironically, while sustainability is a hot food blogging topic, it does not always apply to the bloggers themselves. Many food bloggers start writing with the best of intentions — be it to share their personal experiences, develop kitchen skills, or to connect with other food enthusiasts — but an impressive number of these bloggers disappear after only a couple of months. Holding onto dead sites is holding onto clutter.
5. That said, archives can be sources
This is especially true when it comes to recipe collecting. Even if a site is essentially dormant, looking through past posts can provide a treasure trove of ideas and information.
While these are just starting suggestions, it can be important to decide how you are going to read before you decide what you are going to read. Online food blogs, news sites, and commentary are pervasive and ever-growing and there is no way any one person can tackle it all. By creating your own system, though, you can effectively process a good chunk of it.
Sarah Morrow is a BU Gastronomy student and the head writer at inthecactusgarden.com.
by Meg Jones Wall
The past few years have held some wonderful, life-changing experiences for me. I got married. I realized that working in retail does not suit my personality. I entered the BU Gastronomy program. I even had some food that I helped prepare and style published in the Boston Globe’s Thanksgiving cover story.
And as thankful as I am for these experiences, nothing quite compares to picking up your life, grabbing your crisp new master’s degree, and moving to Budapest for almost four months.
Crazy? Yup. Difficult? Incredibly. Worth it? Without a doubt.
As a foodie, a writer, and a photographer, having the opportunity to spend several months living in and traveling through Europe was something of a dream come true. This was my very first time in Europe, and I was determined to take advantage of it — particularly by using my blog to record all of our adventures. I traveled to incredible cities like Barcelona, Rome, Dublin, and Vienna. I took a road trip through Prague, Paris, Lyon, Nice, Venice… I even got to see the beautiful Alps.
But one of the coolest parts of our European adventure was the fact that we were living in a small apartment in Budapest, a city that I really never thought I would see. Most people talk about their dreams of visiting Western Europe (and trust me, I’m thrilled that we saw countries such as France, Italy, and Spain), but having the opportunity to live, work, and eat in Eastern Europe was something I’ll never forget.
Hungarian food is different than anything I’ve had in the States. Meat-based, creamy, rich, and filling, this cuisine focuses on poultry, pork, spices, and a lot of sour cream. Most of the more well-known dishes, like stuffed peppers, chicken paprikas, and potato stew, are fairly inexpensive to prepare, but are filling enough to feed a family for several meals — or in the case of my husband and I, almost a week. I had a blast collecting family recipes from people that I met, trying to get an “authentic” cooking experience in between sampling some of the city’s best restaurants. Of course, there were also plenty of American fast food chains – Burger King, Starbucks, and (to my surprise) T.G.I. Fridays.
Food shopping was such a joy. Beautiful farmer’s markets are everywhere, bursting with produce — huge potatoes, bright cabbage, and a surprising amount of fruit. The small market that I went to most often, just a mile from the apartment we were living in, even had a butcher shop, spice shop, and several cheese shops inside, making it easy for me to get most of the things I needed for any recipe I could come up with. Of course, certain things just aren’t available, and it’s odd what I found myself missing — peanut butter, spinach, and bagels were essentially impossible to find.
One unexpected benefit of being surrounded by meat and dairy products in almost every meal? I found myself spending a lot of time considering my own diet and food choices, especially after taking Warren Belasco’s The Many Meanings of Meat course in my last semester at BU. With such a severe language barrier, I found it extremely difficult to know where the food I was purchasing came from. Additionally, I found myself eating much more meat and dairy that I was used to, and wrestled with the plant-based diet that we had talked so much about in Belasco’s course. Food and diet considerations aren’t always reached overnight, or even over the course of several months, but I now find myself moving towards a vegetarian diet — something I may not have seriously considered before arriving in Budapest.
Now that I’m back in Boston, settled back at home and searching for the food career of my dreams, it seems a bit surreal that I lived in a country where I didn’t speak the language and didn’t know a soul for several months. But I made a few great friends, had some incredible adventures, and learned at least a few Hungarian words.
And now that I can easily buy peanut butter again, I find myself really missing spaetzle.
Meg Jones Wall is a recent graduate of Boston University’s MLA Gastronomy program, and worked as Communications Graduate Assistant and blog editor during the fall semester of 2011. You can find her recipes, photographs, and thoughts on food at her blog, ginger-snapped.
by Allison Schultz
It was ten a.m. on a Saturday morning, and I was raring to go—hiking boots? Camera? Check. Rather than blissfully slumbering through the early hours of what felt like my first week off in a long time, I was sitting in the tiny gift shop at the Tyler Arboretum in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, eagerly awaiting our tour guide.
Carole Counihan’s Food Activism class teaches anthropological research methods, and explores the concept of activism and its relationship to gastronomy. When I chose to research foraging for wild food as a form of activism, I did not give a second thought to my personal involvement with the subject, but it was on Steve Tessler’s “Critter Hunt” that the significance of my search really began to sink in.
Wild Ramp
Steve is both a mushroom hunter and wild ramp enthusiast. As I have come to learn, caution and certainty come first in the life of the mushroom forager. Though identifying the unique qualities of various shelving fungi was fun, Steve’s tale of a lip-numbing fungi-induced experience was discouraging. Ramps were what I longed for.
It has amazed me to discover that many varieties of plant life that I play-cooked as a child in Pennsylvania were edible. I could name them, but I was at least one generation removed from a parental unit that would allow me to engage in culinary experiments in the wild. Until that Saturday, that is. Steve explained that wild leeks are one of the first signs of spring, sporting long green leaves in little groups of three that look similar to the leaves of lilies, but smaller. A great debate surrounds wild ramps. What was once a well-kept secret has now been widely publicized, and annual ramps festivals threaten to wipe out the species in many areas. Picking one or two leaves per plant and leaving the bulb intact is a way to avoid wiping them out entirely. Continue reading
by Natalie Shmulik
Breakfast, lunch and dinner — that’s what you’ll get at any good food show. And, let’s be honest, that’s why most of us go. We sneak our way toward the less chatty sales reps for a sample of creamy bisque, a spoonful of ravioli, and a “please fill up the entire plastic cup” tasting of any alcoholic beverage. And yes, we are all eyeing the coupons for “free” products tucked behind the lavish displays of new-age culinary snacks. But, as hard as it is to believe, there is oh so much more to digest at these extravagant food shows than the food.
After attending the Canadian Restaurant Food Association (CRFA) Show, the New England Food Show, and the International Boston Seafood Show in the first couple weeks of March, I couldn’t help but notice some distinct trends that every North American cook, shopper, and eater should be aware of. Even after stealing an hour of everyone’s sleep, daylight savings did not keep vendors from showcasing their best and boldest product lines. Electric oyster shucking, multi-colored caviar, and full sized chunks of shrimp, lobster, clam, and crab wrapped in buttery rolls doled out by tall, leggy Russian models made it clear that hungry eyes are worth more than hungry bellies.
Keeping up with demand, each of these shows was laden with new and advanced mechanized contraptions pumping, prepping, and pouring foods. Suffering from an intense food coma at the CRFA show, I hazily wandered into unfamiliar territory — a booth with no visible fare. As if they had crawled their way out of a Transformers film, robotic boxes filled with soups, shakes, and instant-meals hummed familiar sultry songs of convenience. From automatic cupcake dispensers to hotdog grills and the latest instant oatmeal dispensers, we have certainly come a long way from the pop and chip machines of yesteryear. You would think with all this technology we could finally perfect the everlasting gobstopper without any inflated-Violet tragedies. But alas, even in this wonderland of spectacular automations, Willy Wonka was nowhere to be found; after all, he too is replaceable.
I did occasionally wonder at the New England Food Show: amidst the French fruit purees, Italian sparkling beverages and coffees, Canadian cheeses, and Spanish cured meats, where were all the New England companies? Luckily there were some familiar New England edibles, including the always delightful Pete & Gerry’s Eggs (my favorite!), who displayed a cracked heirloom variety with its glowing sapphire yolk; a line surrounded Harpoon and its micro-brewery neighbors; clam chowdahs appeared by the bucket load; and locally roasted coffee companies kept serious snackers alert as they made their way from booth to booth.
The food show is truly a spectacular arena to taste, discover, and observe all the latest in ingredients, packaging, and technology. And although metallic hands are rapidly replacing human hands in food production, and getting a quick and hot dish from an electric box is tempting, I still like my machines to dispense money, not meals.
Read more about the latest food trends, according to Natalie –>
Natalie Shmulik is a Gastronomy student. After successfully running her own restaurant for two years and working in one of the largest grocery chains in Toronto, Canada, Natalie ventured into the culinary world of New England. She is currently a member of the Gastronomy Students’ Association and is working on several food related projects.
by Natalie Shmulik
Here are some noteworthy trends popping up and sticking around in the current marketplace:
Natalie Shmulik is a Gastronomy student. After successfully running her own restaurant for two years and working in one of the largest grocery chains in Toronto, Canada, Natalie ventured into the culinary world of New England. She is currently a member of the Gastronomy Students’ Association and is working on several food related projects.
Rachel Greenberger (left) and Carole Counihan at the Food and the City Conference.
by Aubree DuPlessis
“It’s about acting your way into a new way of thinking, not thinking your way into a new way of acting,” Rachel Greenberger, Director of Food Sol, an action-tank at Babson College, reminded us at last month’s Food and the City Conference. Flashes of Lorenz’s butterfly effect and quantum leaps come to mind as I reflect on her words and how one moment, sentence, or even shared experience can take us from a virtual state to a manifest state. From thought to action.
Naturally, as graduate students we spend a lot of time in a thinking state. However, wouldn’t it be nice to get outside the ivory tower once in a while? As the spirit of spring knocks at our door, I can’t help but wonder – what better way to get into an action state than by getting our hands dirty in the garden?
Whether motivated by economic reasons, city beautification, or dreams of an alternative food system, more and more people are growing their own food in what is often referred to as the D.I.Y or back to the land movement. Although this concept is nothing new, we urbanites face an interesting set of obstacles, especially when it comes to space. The lack of growing space may discourage some D.I.Y. folks from taking root, but Bostonians are resourceful and as a result, community garden participation around the city is at an all-time high.
Community gardens are an excellent way to utilize limited city space, but with increased demand, we must also consider who has access to these green spaces. My work at Boston Natural Areas Network (BNAN) has illuminated the fact that although there are thousands of community garden plots, waitlists for up to a year are common. This reality makes me all the more grateful for our Gastronomy program’s privileged access to a plot at the Fenway Victory Gardens.
The Gastronomy Garden Club manifested out of the Summer 2011 Urban Agriculture course, and we started to make an impressive dent in the once-abandoned plot. As students, we theorize about issues of access and how we will improve the food system, but why wait until graduation to act on it? We have a unique opportunity to put our learning into practice right in our very own community.
The BU Gastronomy plot is roughly 30’x15,’ which is about 450 square feet and has potential to yield one ton or 2,000 pounds of produce. It’s fun to imagine all the possible ways we could enjoy 2,000 pounds of vine-ripened tomatoes, nutritious greens, and other culinary delights. Should we donate our produce to a local food pantry? Sell it at the BU Farmer’s Market? Or conduct an “Experiencing Food through the Senses” class amidst the fresh herbaceous aromas? The potential is ripe.
So let us remember: Non Satis Scire. To know is not enough. Join us on Monday, April 2, from 5-6p at 808 Commonwealth as we start making our garden a reality (no experience necessary!) Oh, and by the way, I’m over D.I.Y. – let’s D.I.T. (Do-It-Together).
Aubree is a Gastronomy student, the Produce to Pantries Intern at Boston Natural Areas Network, and a proud maker of an in-home vermicomposting system. She dreams of someday opening the lid to find the industrious worms taking a break – dressed in bow-ties and top hats, dancin’ like no one’s watching.
