Rebecca Wood is smitten with baking. I can imagine her measuring her ingredients with care, tipping out each one into a big welcoming bowl, and happily mixing these into a wonderful blend ready for the oven, her face smiling gently as she adds her final ingredient, a pinch of absolute and utter love.
Check out our favorite photos from the past week – and then share your photos of a farm, food artisan or farmers market. You might be one of our favorites next week!
Olakai Hawaii – Kahuku, HI
5 Mile Farms – Austin, TX
Laloo’s Goat Milk Ice Cream – Petaluma, CA
South River Miso – Conway, MA
Bill Ferry Ranches – Woodlake, CA
Say you want to start a local brewery. You network with local farmers, you have access to local grains, there’s nothing stopping you. Au contrare, my friend. In order to make the grains usable in the beer brewing process, they must first be malted. Did you know that if you live in Massachusetts, the closest malthouses are in Canada or Wisconsin? That’s where Valley Malt saw their opportunity.
“Today, my favorite bread is the baguette,” Mark Pollard, co-owner of Bread Euphoria in Haydenville, Massachusetts tells me. He explains that his favorite loaf changes almost daily, and by looking at the fully stocked shelf of golden crusts and flaky white centers, I can see why. The baguette, a traditional French bread, is a fitting favorite, as it embodies the mission and inspiration for couple Mark and Geri Pollard’s café.
Check out our favorite photos from the past week – and then share your photos of a farm, food artisan or farmers market. You might be one of our favorites next week!
South Texas Heritage Pork – Floresville, TX
Diamond Y Farm – South Smithville, TX
Rain Lily Farm – Austin, TX
Skyelark Ranch – Brooks, CA
Planted Rock Farm – Palmetto, GA
Real Time Farms, an online crowd-sourced food guide, is currently hiring interns for the Summer 2012 Food Warrior internship program, which will run from May 21st through August 20th. We are hiring Food Warriors in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Providence and Washington DC.
The goal of Real Time Farms is to collectively document the entire food system, so whether eating in, or dining out, you can trace your food back to the farm it came from and feel good about the food you eat. Our Food Warrior Program is integral to this social mission.
Description
Food Warriors work to bring the stories of their local food producers and artisans to life, through photos, video, stories, and growing practices. In so doing, you will be connecting everyday consumers to the information they need to make informed decisions about what they eat. You will learn about food photography, food blogging, and documentary film, and have a chance to apply your new skills while directly interacting with local producers: taking photos, recording and editing video, collecting information on growing practices and personal stories, and contributing to the Real Time Farms blog. Exemplary work may be considered for inclusion in Slow Food USA’s blog.
Food Warriors will work approximately 15-20 hours each week and will be responsible for uploading all the information, photos, and video compiled to the Real Time Farms website. The internship is unpaid, but students may earn academic credit for completing the internship. I am willing to work with individuals to adjust program expectations to better meet academic requirements.
Interns are able to adjust the internship around their own schedules, but should be available for one 1-hour virtual group meeting each Monday. Internet access and a camera are essential.
Enthusiasm, a strong work ethic, and passion for food transparency are a must. Writing, videography, and photography experience are a plus.
How to Apply
Email me at lindsayp@realtimefarms.com with “Food Warrior Application” and your city in the subject line.
Please attach a copy of your resume and answers to the following questions:
1) Why do you care about food transparency?
2) What else will you be doing with your time this summer and how will you fit the internship in to your schedule?
3) Sample blog post on a related topic (be creative!) with sample photos (taken by you) OR sample short video (filmed/edited by you)
Please inform me of any previous experience with interviewing, blogging, journalism, photography, videography, or work within the food system. Also, please let me know if you have access to a car (Not necessarily required, but we need to make sure at least one intern in each area has a car to travel to farms.)
Applications are due April 13th and will be considered on a rolling basis, so the sooner you apply, the greater your chances of acceptance to the program.
Stay Fresh,
Lindsay Partridge
Kernel Colonel: Food Warrior Program
Third Coast Coffee Roasting Company occupies an unpretentious space in a small office complex outside of the bustle of downtown Austin. Although the company has a small coffee bar and a wall of coffee mugs to entice coffee drinkers, the place appears to be all about the making of coffee. Pallets of green coffee beans arrive from Cooperative Coffees, a collective of 24 roasters who purchase coffee according to Fair Trade relationships with their farming communities. Stacks of jute bags display the Cooperative Coffees logo and a description of the beans inside each bag. The five employees of the company take care to select, taste, re-taste, and taste again samples of beans that come from their growers. This process of tasting is called cupping by those in the trade and transforms Third Coast Roasting Company into a producer of something you drink rather than make. Clearly, Mr. Strand failed to imagine that some roasters could be occupied with both the making and drinking of coffee.
Once beyond the small coffee counter, a large floor-to-ceiling world map belies their main passion, the connection between the drinking and the producing of their coffee. Bright red pushpins mark each grower, most huddled in Central America, then down to South America, and a few sprinkled in Africa and Indonesia. And as if a colossal map weren’t enough to make their point, the roasters link their website to each of their growers through Know Your Grower (You’ll need Google Earth to view this). For these roasters, the urge to connect people to their coffee is irresistible and everywhere you turn you’ll find traces that lead from cup to country … and a little red pushpin.
Linking drinking to making coffee, the roasters work several roasting machines in the back of their space. Plastic buckets of green beans marked with flags of their country of origin line up aside each roaster, waiting the approval of Joe, the master roaster, as he fiddles with his roasting “recipes” on his laptop computer perched aside the active roasting oven. Joe’s background in the food business shaped his approach to roasting. He thinks of beans as food, assessing his roasts according to a bean’s texture, greenness, and a multitude of other characteristics that coffee aficionados boast about during their cupping sessions. Self-taught and intensely engaged with his custom roasts, he says he appreciates the knowledge a roaster builds up and would like someday to spend more time with the growers, enabling more collaboration and education within the coffee bean community.
Admiring his completed lists of roasts on the day of my visit, Joe swung open the overhead door next to his ovens and stood in the sunshine that poured into his shop after three days of rain. His looked up, took in the fresh air, and returned to bagging the just-roasted beans for wholesale customers, restaurants and farmers markets. The combination of making and drinking coffee seems easy for these roasters.
Winter 2012 Austin Food Warrior
This post is from one of the interns in the Real Time Farms Food Warrior Internship Program. These interns are collecting data, pictures, and video on the growing practices of our nation’s farms, gathering food artisans’ stories, and documenting farmers markets. We all deserve to know where our food comes from!
When the locavore movement got underway, people told Ron Marks he was crazy to
think that the same concepts and quality could be applied to cultured dairy. Well, with
about 1000 cases of handmade all natural yogurt sold every week, Marks definitely
showed them.
Marks established AtlantaFresh in late 2008, soon after the stock market crash. Before
AtlantaFresh’s inception, Marks worked for Focus on Food, a culinary consultant and
marketing firm for fast food restaurants and chains. Performing consumer research at the
Norcross location, Marks developed functioning menus and branding strategies for an
array of clients.
“The more I worked there, the more left-winged my food politics became” Marks asserts.
Frustrated by the conglomerate mentality to produce cheaper, faster, and “less real” food, Marks took the sudden dissolution of the firm as an opportunity to find a way to make food as good as he possibly could again.
Joining the Slow Food and Georgia Organics organizations a few years prior, Marks
became acquainted with like-minded individuals, most importantly Russell Johnston of
Johnston Family Farms of Newborn, GA. The relationship seemed “just providence”
Marks looks back; now AtlantaFresh is the largest buyer of Johnston’s milk.
Johnston Family Farms provides all-natural grass-fed milk, produced right on the farm.
Delivered raw to the AtlantaFresh Creamery (the very same rehabilitated space of Focus
on Food firm in Norcross), the skim milk is first pasteurized, using a lower temperature
than most commercial dairies choose. After incubating for eight hours, the whey is then
removed, and this separation is precisely what separates Greek yogurt from regular
yogurt. Marks upcycles this would-be waste, selling the whey to local hog farmers as
feed.
Flavor additions of cooked natural fruits are added next, and then the yogurt is distributed into 6 oz, 16 oz, or 32 oz containers and finally labeled and packaged. From farm to adorably designed cup, the entire process takes approximately 36 hours. This freshness is what makes AtlantaFresh yogurt so different and special from other yogurts. It’s not the same heavy thickness as typical Greek yogurts, having a consistency closer to regular yogurt, but still maintaining that smooth creamy taste.
The flavor profiles, all developed by Marks himself, also set AtlantaFresh above the rest.
Ginger Peach, Black Cherry Port Wine, Wildflower Honey are just a few of the mouth-watering staples. Marks expressed excitement to release his newest flavors this spring: Maple Bacon and French Roast Coffee.
Raised in the foothills of the Allegany mountains in Western Pennsylvania, Marks is first
generation American to Czech and Hungarian parents. Trained as a butcher and sausage
maker in his family-owned general store, Marks has been in the food business his whole
life. The strong childhood impressions of the sour creams, milks, and Laban from the
small dairy producers on homesteads in the north, fueled Marks’ desire to fill that missing niche in the southeast.
And filling it he is, AtlantaFresh continues to grow every year, with the Creamery at
only 15% capacity. New products like Greek yogurt-based salad dressings and hard
frozen packed yogurts are in the works. While the recent discontinuation of the hand-
made mozzarella cheeses may have upset many local chefs and fans, Marks describes
the decision as financially an easy one, giving the Creamery more time and space for the
high-selling yogurt products.
Sold at every Whole Foods, several Krogers, markets, coffee shops and the like,
AtlantaFresh is making quite the imprint on Atlanta’s local food community. Marks
intends to further penetrate the southeast, but all the while asking ethically, “ credibility-
wise, how many miles can you go without losing the original intent of the product?”
The AtlantaFresh Creamery in Norcross recently opened a storefront, so die-hard fans
can purchase all the yogurt they want year-round at farmer market prices and possibly
have a chance to meet the man behind the yogurt.
And that’s all I have to say about that,
Winter 2012 Atlanta Food Warrior
This post is from one of the interns in the Real Time Farms Food Warrior Internship Program. These interns are collecting data, pictures, and video on the growing practices of our nation’s farms, gathering food artisans’ stories, and documenting farmers markets. We all deserve to know where our food comes from!
Last week, our Food Warriors got together and cooked dinners using the produce and meat from some of their favorite local producers. Food Warrior dinner galas were held in Atlanta, Austin, San Francisco, Oahu, Tampa Bay and Western Massachusetts.
Click on the menu to see what they came up with and exactly where they got their ingredients from!
Check out our favorite photos from the past week – and then share your photos of a farm, food artisan or farmers market. You might be one of our favorites next week!
Martin’s Angus Beef – The Plains, VA
Balsam Farms, LLC – Amagansett, NY
Countryside Family Farm – Bastrop, TX
Visser Farms – Zeeland, MI
Dillwood Farms – Loganville, GA
The Real Time Farms Blog 