'Ferment for Food Justice' | Carrot Art 🥕 | Recipe: Zucchini and Apple Crostata
Issue No. 57
Check out Jackie Vitale’s demonstration on sourdough starter maintenance on Sunday at 10:30 a.m. at the virtual Ferment for Food Justice festival.
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I’ve been hiding out from the internet for a minute (besides streaming hours of television everyday, duh). I watched The Social Dilemma and it spooked me. Plus I’m enjoying spending (Covid-safe!) time with humans IRL, after my year of solitude in Captiva. I even started deleting the Instagram app from my phone after each use, forcing me to go through the process of redownloading it every time I fancy a doomscroll (an excellent tip I picked up from my friend Carmella Guiol’s newsletter about social media habits).
But all that to say, magical things do still happen on the internet. I’ll be spending the next two weekends glued to my screen, participating in a stupendous event called Ferment for Food Justice. Organized by Community Cultures,” it’s two full weekends of fermentation-focused demos, lectures, interviews, and art projects involving over 50 presenters from around the globe. The event doubles as a pay-what-you-can fundraiser, with all proceeds going to support five incredible BIPOC food justice organizations: The Okra Project, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NāTIFS), Habitat Sur, National Black Food & Justice Alliance, and La Via Campesina.
I’ll be teaching a workshop on Sourdough Starter Maintenance this upcoming Sunday, October 11th at 10:30 AM on IG Live (@sunshineandmicrobes). I’ll share my tips for a happy, healthy, reliable sourdough starter, and answer audience questions.
There are so many weird and wonderful events taking place, you’ll want to comb through the full schedule for Saturday (Day 1) and Sunday (Day 2). (The second weekend’s full schedule will be out next week.) Here are the sessions I’m most looking forward to:
All presentations can be viewed on Zoom.
Pulque: Consumption and production for self sufficiency and overall health with Gaila Kleiman | Saturday, Oct. 10 from 5 - 5:45 p.m.
Fermentaphone: The Music of Live Microbes with Joshua Rosenstock | Sunday, Oct. 11 from 1:15 - 2 p.m.
Afro Futuristic Conscious Cuisine: The What and Why with Njathi Wa Kabui | Sunday, Oct. 11 from 7:45 - 8:15 p.m.
Adventures in fermenting food waste: nukazuke and waste bran ferments with Johnny Drain | Saturday, Oct. 17 from 12-1 p.m.
Tempeh with Beans from the Pantry with Sarah Arrazola | Saturday, Oct 17 from 6 - 6:30 p.m.
Promenading the decay rolling off the crest of our seasons melodic hum with Justin Lubecki | Sunday Oct. 18 from 12 - 1 p.m.
Your guess is as good as mine as to what that last one is about, but with a title like that (“Promenading the decay…” !), it’s clearly a can’t-miss.
Like the Virtual Ferment Fest we organized in spring, many of the events will be streamed on IG Live straight on the presenters page. But for those of you also hibernating from social media, every single event will also be live-streamed on Zoom. Here’s the access link. If you’re planning to join, the suggested donation is $10, or whatever you’re able to give. Donate via Venmo (@fermentforfoodjustice) or Paypal (fermentforfoodjustice@gmail.com).
love,
Jackie
If you can’t join the festival, at least give us a share 🤗
Digesting Crafts
Your eyes won’t believe this carrot art.
This may look like a giant trash heap of carrots, but it’s actually art. Rafael Perez Evans created this installation, part of the MFA exhibition at the renowned Goldsmith’s College in London. The piece, called “Grounding,” is inspired by a popular French protest tactic called dumping, in which farmers dump masses of crops to create roadblocks and other physical barriers. Those demonstrations occur in response to the devaluation of crop prices, and the goal is to emphasize the tangible but often overlooked value of farm labor. Evans hopes the visceral visual statement will encourage viewers to think about their relationship to food. He says, “looking into peasant culture, ecology, farming, and the soil is a way to reorient my compass into finding other ways of relating which perhaps aren’t so detached from land, plants and foods.”
But interestingly, this protest-inspired art piece has inspired a protest of its own! Fellow Goldsmith’s students concerned with food waste take issue with “Grounding,” questioning whether the carrots, which are animal-grade according to Evans, might not have found a nobler purpose.
They have been busy collecting, peeling, and grating the carrot pile to make vegan carrot cake and carrot soup. The group, which estimated yesterday that it had only used 0.3 percent of the carrots so far, is holding daily bake sales next to the artwork and donating the proceeds—reportedly nearly £700 ($900) over the first two days—to local food banks.
Check out more about the controversial art project here.
(Hat tip to Nibia for sharing the story with us.)
-Jackie
Fresh Links
☠️The Newly Legal Process for Turning Human Corpses to Soil | OneZero
Washington State is leading the way on a new burial trend with ancient roots: composting. Decomposing corpses might seem like a topic best saved for Halloween, but the real terror is the impact cremations and burials have on the environment.
Why hack death? Cremation releases more than 500,000 tons of greenhouse gases annually in the U.S. alone, along with significant levels of mercury emissions. Traditional burial shoves truckfuls worth of metal, concrete, wood, and formaldehyde beneath the ground each year. Cities around the world are running out of traditional cemetery space, and preserving any unmolested open space is hard, even if you’re not trying to get permission to plant corpses in it.
The composting process of Recompose, the first company to offer the service, feels bucolic in comparison. At the behest of the deceased, bodies are packed in a snug bed of woodchips, straw, and alfalfa, where microbes are able to transform the remains into fertile soil in just 30 days. Surviving loved ones can use the soil as they wish, or it can be delivered to a protected wilderness area in Washington, free of charge. The process costs $5,500, more than a cremation, but about half of a typical burial.
For those of us who can’t take advantage of Recompose’s composting services (fear not...they’re planning to franchise!), reporter Corinne Purtill explores several other green death tech innovations, from carbon neutral “chemical cremation”, to burial garments stitched with mushrooms that speed up the decomposition process.
👦👧‘2020 Really Belongs to Us’ — The Youth Climate Movement’s Plans to Save the Planet | Earther
The young folks — the ones who will have to grow up on a heating planet — are focusing on turning out the climate vote. The meteoric rise of the youth-led Sunrise Movement (an organization that fights for political action on climate change) has seen its fair share of successes. The movement barely existed in 2016 and only started receiving national attention after some protests following the midterms in 2018. But the Sunrise Movement has shown its might this election cycle. They’ve pressured politicians to stop taking fossil fuel money and launched an impressive phone banking operation (boosting progressives in Democratic the primar like Jamaal Bowman and Ed Markey).
To the Sunrise Movement’s political director Evan Weber, Trump is the “final boss.” At the same time, they’re also also looking at pushing turnout in down-ballot races in places like North Carolina that could swing the state legislature. Climate change remains one of the top issues for Democratic voters in 2020, and the youth movement thinks by emphasizing it they can turnout the vaunted youth vote too.
The end goal is not just about defeating the final boss. It’s about setting the vote for the next decade that the climate can’t be ignored.
🛹Nathan Apodaca is the skateboarding, Fleetwood Mac-loving TikTok star that 2020 needs | LA Times
Nathan Apodoca went viral in late September with a glee-inducing, mesmerizing video — of him drinking a large bottle of Ocean Spray’s Cran-Raspberry juice and lip-syncing to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”.
The 37-year-old filmed the clip while riding his longboard to the potato warehouse where he works in Idaho. The video now has more than 26 million views and sales of “Dreams” have tripled in the past couple of weeks. Mick Fleetwood even recreated the video.
Apodoca started using TikTok (he goes by @420doggface208) to bond with his daughters. His recent viral fame not only resulted in enough donations to fix his broken down car, but Ocean Spray even gifted him a cranberry-red car. Before you downplay that as corporate PR, remember that Ocean Spray is actually a cooperative! of more than 700 cranberry farmers. Apodoca said he always snags the gallon-sized cranberry juices because he drinks so much of the tart treat (Matt used to have a similar addiction). It’s paid off for a feel-good story we can all drink to:
Rustic Zucchini and Apple Crostata
This was a fridge clean-out creation. I needed to use up a few random bits before heading off on a leaf-peeping trip to North Carolina. The prospect of those fall colors must be taking over my brain, because the result is wonderfully autumnal.
Serves 2-3
Ingredients
1 stick very cold butter, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
1 1/2 cups flour (whole wheat pastry is great, but whatever you have on hand will work), plus extra for rolling out dough
big pinch salt
1/4 cup ice cold water
For the filling:
1 apple, thinly sliced
1 zucchini, thinly sliced
2-3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
3-4 scallions, thinly sliced
2 eggs
1 cup grated hard cheese of choice (parm, cheddar, gruyere, etc)
1 teaspoon mustard
big pinch salt
1-2 tablespoons chopped herbs of choice (optional)
honey for drizzling
step-by-step
To make pastry dough, mix flour and salt in a bowl. Add butter cubes and work in by hand. Aggressively pinch and mix with your fingers until the butter is roughly the size of peas. Try to work fast to keep everything as cold as possible.
Pour in water, mixing by hand to create a uniform dough. Depending on the flour used, you may need a bit more water or a bit more flour to achieve the right consistency, which should be smooth, firm and fully hydrated, but not tacky. Shape dough into a thick disc.
Allow dough to rest covered in the fridge while prepping the filling. You can also make dough in advance. It will keep in the fridge for several days.
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Mix together all filling ingredients but the honey so the veggies are uniformly coated.
To roll out pastry crust, generously flour work surface and dough. Use a rolling pin to flatten, working from the middle toward the edges in every direction. Flip the dough over and continuously dust with flour, so nothing sticks to the counter. (Or do like my mother and roll the dough out in between two pieces of wax paper!). The goal is a rough circle about a 1/4 inch thick. I often get very uneven jagged edges, which I just rip off and smoosh in where necessary to form a circle-ish shape.
To assemble, place the rolled out pastry dough on a parchment or Silpat-lined baking sheet. Add filling in the middle of the circle, leaving an inch border of dough. Drizzle with honey. Fold dough border over on top of the filling.
Bake for 35-45 minutes until the crust is brown and the zucchini and apple are softened and browning at the edges.
Serenity 🍠
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Sunshine + Microbes team
Jackie Vitale is a cook and kitchen educator based in Stuart, Fla . She is co-founder of the Florida Ferment Fest. Her newsletter explores the intersection of food, culture, environment and community.
Matt Levin is a communications specialist at the ACLU of Texas. He edits Sunshine + Microbes and contributes other scraps to each issue.