Rice + beans + What’s on Your Plate? + cute babies + curious kids + rainy fall afternoon = Kids Day at the Brooklyn Kitchen
A crowd of families and foodies gathered at the Brooklyn Kitchen to watch What’s On Your Plate? last Saturday.
The Brooklyn Kitchen, for those who don’t know, is actually three operations:
The Meat Hook is a full service butcher shop The Brooklyn Kitchen Labs is their new kitchen and laboratory offering cooking classes The Brooklyn Kitchen proper is a kitchen wares shop
At our WOYP? event we heard from The Meat Hook’s Brent Young, who told us about The Meat Hook’s philosophy, and the pork tenderloin we’d be having for lunch. The Meat Hook is all about sustainable meat — they buy only whole animals from small farms, make sure the living conditions at farms are humane, and use every part of the animal. After the screening and a word from Brent we enjoyed our lunch at the Labs.
P.S. Upcoming classes at The Brooklyn Kitchen Labs include a Holiday Cookie workshop, sourdough bread, and pickling. Sweet.
Cristine C. Quinn to Unveil Policy on Food for the City Council Speaker goes above and beyond to improve the production of our food.
What I Do: Food Truck Driver Who’s responsible for getting our food to us?
Plan to Add Supermarkets, to poor areas, With Healthy Results New York neighborhoods lacking fresh food get an upgrade.
Shifting Paradigms at the Young Farmers Conference in New York Farmers get educated on growing and maintaining healthy food.
Catching Water Save water while reducing storm water runoff!
USA Today on School Lunch Chef Ann’s take on meat being served at our schools.
Tweet What You Eat? Tweet clouds are a fun way to see your food habits!
No one seems to know what should be done about E. Coli.
E. Coli, a bacterium found in cow meat, has been the subject of food-safety controversy for some time. While these bacteria could live in a cow’s digestive tract without making it sick, it could make humans ill if taken in large doses. Agencies such as Epitopix, a Minnesota company, and Bioniche Life Science in Canada, are producing vaccinations that decrease the chances of E. Coli bacteria by 75%. By injecting the formula into a cow, they are diminishing the risk of cattle bringing the bacteria into the slaughterhouse.
However, this vaccination reached a gray area in the boundaries between animal medicine and human health. Initially, there was a dispute between the Agriculture Department and the FDA, both claiming that the choice was not within their jurisdiction. Neither were accountable for animal vaccination under federal law. The Agriculture Department decided that it would consider the vaccination, with the condition that there had to be a 90% reduction rate in the cattle carrying the infection, as well as a 99.9% decrease in the bacteria being carried. This was a very unrealistic goal, and in the meantime people were getting sick. At long last, the Agriculture Department came to a final decision and allowed the farmers to give cows the vaccinations,
Although the vaccines appear to be the quickest and somewhat cheapest solution, what will it really do to our health in the long run? Wouldn’t it be safer to just stick to an old fashioned HACCP procedure, in which each individual cow would be tested for the bacteria and then turned to the slaughterhouse?
If you want to know more about cows, Nate posted a blog about meat in the food system the other day. Chef Anne also had an interesting take on meat in our school lunches. Check out what they had to say!
If you are around Washington Square Park this Saturday, expect to see swarms of food-growin’ and policy-changin’ folk in the neighborhood.
It’s the NYC Food and Climate Change Summit — a convergence of “family farmers, community gardeners, concerned citizens, activists, advocates, parents food experts, policy makers, environmentalists, nutritionists, educators, urban planners, urban designers, government, community, business and civic leaders, educators, elected officials, city government leaders.” In other words, our peeps!
The event is particularly genius because it bridges food politics and climate change. We know how important it is to imagine solutions and strategies that merge these issues — and this is a great opportunity to get food activists and climate change activists together in the same room. Literally.
WOYP will be there, along with our partners Just Food, Small Planet Institute Founder Anna Lappe, and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. In addition to talks, panels, info sessions and other conference type occurrences, there will be a food drive and sustainable bagged lunches.
You can follow the action at their Twitter page. And we’ll report back on all the juicy details.
Videos of cows planning a daring escape from the factory farm system. From your friends at the Organic Valley Family of Farms.
Listen up, internet: we just found the most excellent website ever. whatisfresh.com. It’s a directory of all the farmer’s markets in New York City, sorted by what day of the week they operate, plus it’s got organic food vendors listed for pretty much the whole northeast. Nice.
Most of the time here at the WOYP blog, we like to talk about food, because we’re a movie about food. But we’re also a movie, particularly a movie by, about, and for kids (and also for anyone else, but definitely by and about kids) so we want everybody on the internet to read Alternative Films for Kids. It’s a really excellent blog about taking kids to see movies. The author is N.O. Graham, a New York City mom, and she reviews everything from big studio pictures (Coraline was awesome, Star Trek was a bit loud and a bit niche-y) to great rentals (remember The Point? Or The Dark Crystal?) to things you never even thought to watch with your 9-year old (the 19-disc series Beckett on Film and the subtitled, 60 year-old The Bicycle Thief were both big hits with the under-10 set). It’s almost strange to see a blog that writes about media for kids without focusing entirely on bright colors, fart jokes, and easy-to-understand morals, and we’re pretty glad it’s out there!
The movement for food reform struggles on, and it’s important to stay impassioned about the changes we must make in our food systems, but every once in a while, it’s good to take a step back and thank the powers that be when they deserve it. The folks at Roots of Change have drafted a letter to USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan, and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack thanking them for the work they’ve been doing in the past year. The White House’s organic garden, the USDA’s “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” program, and several other programs focused on encouraging local and organic food production across the country represent the change we’ve all been asking for. While the work is by no means done, it’s good to let people know we appreciate their work, and the attitude of the USDA toward food reform is changing, something we’re all grateful for.
Listen up, internet: Kiwi Magazine (which is great in general) just posted a recipe for ginger cookies on their website. Ginger cookies are my all-time favorite variety of cookies, ever. Bar none. If anyone out there wants to use this recipe and send the results to WOYP HQ, I promise to write a special blog post about how pleased I am with them.
For those of you who live in New York City and celebrate christmas, we’ve found a pretty cool website. I might be empathizing too strongly with evergreens, but personally, I’ve always felt a little weird about dragging a perfectly healthy tree into my house, keeping it barely alive for a few weeks with a bucket of water, dressing it in lights and nicknacks, and then junking it at the landfill when i’ve grown bored of it. So I’m pretty excited about Charitytree. It’s a website where you can buy a christmas tree, have it delivered right to your home, and your money goes to Amber and Variety, two children’s charities. I’m glad such a company exists, even for the delivery option alone! And what could be nicer than having a weird tradition like indoor trees benefit kids on the side? Probably nothing. Happy Holidays, folks.
