Art. Food. Give.

Add to the list of most sought after inauguration events, Alice Waters will be "cooking" a dinner for 80 people on January 19th; the tickets are $500. We all know, however, that Alice doesn't actually cook herself (way to do your research NYT); she just tastes and tells her cooks if it tastes good. In addition, other renowned chefs, who do actually cook themselves, have also agreed to participate in the event and will be cooking dinners for 20-30 people in homes around DC on the same night. In addition, several arts related guests will be in attendance, including Maya Lin.

The event is called Art. Food. Give. and proceeds will benefit D.C. Central Kitchen and Martha's Table, which both operate soup kitchens and help to run FarmFresh Markets, which gave 17,000 pounds of food to emergency food providers during its first year. In addition, in keeping with Water's rhetoric for locally produced foods, the ingredients for the dinners will come from local and sustainable farms. In addition, Alice Waters' organization of this event is significant considering her role in trying to persuade President-elect Barack Obama and Mrs. Obama to plant a victory garden on the White House front lawn. Her role in "cooking" this inaugural dinner indicates her possible role in shaping food and agricultural policy in years to come. Let's hope at least.

Park(ing) Day in San Francisco

This past Friday was national Park(ing) Day, which is an annual, national event centered in San Francisco where artists, land use designers, activists, and citizens collaborate to temporarily transform metered parking spaces into "PARK(ing)" spaces, ie. temporary public parks. REBAR, an interdisciplinary collaborative group of artists, designers, and activists in San Francisco has been organizing Park(ing) Day since 2005 and now collaborates with The Trust for Public Land to create this day long event.

The idea of Park(ing) Day comes from a desire to encourage more public land and works through a "loop hole" in the law regarding metered parking spaces. In November 2005, REBAR rolled out grass sod across a downtown San Francisco, metered parking spot and placed a bench for sitting a a tree for shade on the grass, creating a temporary public park. There is not stipulation in the law that specifies what the object must be that "rents" the metered parking spot for the hour, thus allowing sod and parking benches to take up these parking spaces as long as the meter is filled. The artists/activists of REBAR wanted to comment on dichotomy between the amount of outdoor space dedicated to the private vehicle (70%) and the amount of space dedicated to public park spaces (only a fraction of that) in densely populated, downtown areas. Since Park(ing) Day 2005, the event as grown not only in the city of San Francisco to include close to 50 registered park(ing) spaces but across the country to close to 100 cities.

McCall Design Group, the architecture firm where my friend Emily works, designed one of these parking spaces specifically considering water conservation, by using permeable surface materials (substitutes for asphalt) that would allow water to be recycled back into the watershed system. Their parking space specifically exhibited the various permeable surface materials possible, including bricks that hold gravel so as to stop the gravel from leaving your driveway, as well as several types of plants whose roots halt erosion but don't require being watered as they are native plants, thus decreasing the amount of water we use. A lot of other exciting projects took place as well as a "Jay and Michael's Wedding Day" park at Scott and Waller in celebration of the legalization of gay marriage.

In addition, my dad sent me an Economist article yesterday about San Francisco's new plan for managing public parking spaces, which will include sensors to determine where free spots are open as well as the ability to pay meters by credit card and spots whose cost varies with the hour depending for the depand for parking at that time. The idea behind this program is to ease the move of traffic in congested areas by decreasing the number of people havig to circle to find parking rather than simply looking in a database, which will decrease the carbon dioxide emissions in two ways: one, by decresing the amount of time to find a parking spot, and two by decreasing conjestion caused by people looking for parking.

The Slow Food Taste Pavilions: a Glutonous Display of Food

One of the other events I participated in during Slow Food Nation was the Taste Pavilions. My ticket for this event was a whopping $58 after getting a discount from the original $65 via the Whole Foods discount. When my friend Lora and I arrived at Fort Mason, where the Taste Pavilions were being held, however, we were taken aback by the abundant display of delicious foods and suddenly realized that our $58 was money well spent.

The organizers of Slow Food Nation convinced local architects to create designs to convert one of the Fort Mason warehouses into a series of food specific rooms or "pavilions" where visitors can taste and learn about artisan versions of their favorite foods. Taste wise, my favorite of all of the pavilions was, by far, the ice cream pavilion. There were two "flights" of ice cream scoops, and I chose the Dark Chocolate, Olive Oil, and Fresh Blueberry flight, which was most definitely the best of the flights. The chocolate was creaming and wonderfully flavorful, the olive oil subtlety sweet and extra creamy with the fat of the oil, and the blueberry actually tasted like blueberries--what a concept!

My other favorite pavilions were the Olive Oil, Chocolate, Fish, and Wine, each for different reasons. The Olive Oil pavilion was in my opinion the best designed of the pavilions: the designers used everyday construction materials such as orange netting, raw wood, and crates to create a beautifully lit space that truly transported you away from the rest of the pavilions. More specifically, the front of the pavilion was occupied by a tasting station while the back of the space was equipped with an educational space where trained olive oil experts told about how to properly taste olive oil, which is a process reasonably similar to wine tasting, just involving smaller tastes (I mean, would you really want to drink a glass of olive oil in one sitting?). This pairing of spaces made it nice to go back to the tasting part of the pavilion so that you could taste each olive oil, knowing which undertones to look for. The chocolate pavilion was great because of the variety of tasting they gave you; it was also interesting how the flavors of each chocolate changed as you ate the other pieces, your taste pallet changing with each bite of chocolate. The wine pavilion, while not a wonderfully designed space, was wonderfully fun to go to with my friend Lora who can look at an absurdly long wine list and pick out the most expensive bottles to try, and boy, were some of them amazing. The fish was also a delicious stop for the creativity of each dish and was especially tasty after the disappointing charcuterie pavilion.

And so yes, the charcuterie was very disappointing. While the prosciutto we had was tasty, but it's pretty hard to have prosciutto not be tasty. We were also given beef jerky (really?) and something that resembled pate, but wasn't. Each were fine, but none had any wow factor. Charcuterie truly was a pavilion with so much potential (just off the top of my head, why no lardo?) that was totally not taken advantage of, while also in the midst of other pavilions that were totally pushing the envelop of their respective food products.

One of the most fun parts of the night, however, was are mistaken crashing of the employee party. After the official ending of the Taste Pavilions at 9, people congregated outside the event in front of the beer pavilion, and Lora and I thought it appropriate to join them. Eventually, it went on past 10 and a lot of people had left, and those remaining started to ask us which pavilion we had worked in. After enough people asked us, we realized we were in fact crashing the staff party, which was more than fine with the good natured foodies. The great part about the party was that all the beer, bread, and opened bottles of wine not used during the event were now being given out for free for all to take, which we might have taken advantage of just a bit.

Relating this back to the Slow Food movement as a whole, Slow Food is often criticized for being an exclusive or bougie movement; due to the expensive price of the ticket for the pavilions, this point is valid. While it was a wonderful experience to taste such delicious food, the polished designs of the pavilions, the high end food products, and the well dressed visitors seemed a little removed from some of the movement's "roots". On the other hand, having such a celebration of food brings delicious food and the necessary steps to obtain this food (good, clean, fair being the moto of the slow food movement) to the attention of a greater public than it would have otherwise. In this manner, it is great that it is more prevelent to be a conscientious food consumer but I would agree with one of the speakers I saw in a panel during the weekend (which will be the subject of my next posting) who said that one of the greatest obstacles to the movement is fashion. As fashions change and flux, we do not want the slow food movement to be a fad that will simply pass with time.

Also, I should mention that Alice Waters was there. She signed my ticket. Swoon.

Eliason's Waterfalls

I think this will be my first post unrelated to food but I wanted to write about Olafur Eliason's waterfalls I saw on my most recent trip to New York. Olafur Eliason is one of my most favorite artists; his recent exhibition at the SFMOMA, which traveled to the New York MoMA, amazed me. I had always been interested in the concepts behind Eliason's work, but walking through the once white walled gallery spaces turned misting, stone chamber totally took my breath away as my imagination went wild. I loved these pieces when I saw them in person for the illusions they created in spaces that I had once thought were so controlled; after my initial wonder, I then attempted to decipher how in fact he did make the temperature of the SFMOMA gallery suddenly drop 10 degrees when walking between rooms.

With my love for Eliason's work in mind, I sadly did not love these waterfalls. A lot of what I love about Eliason's work is his ability to make the seemingly impossible happen in the strangest of places, ie. making a soft mist descend for the ceiling of the SFMOMA gallery, a place where one isn't even allowed to drink water from a bottle. I had also been terribly excited for the waterfalls since the New York Sun covered the projected installation this past January and I thus realize my expectations were a little high. The waterfalls, in contrast with the image in the NY Sun article, were constructed of scaffolding with water pouring off of one side. At night, I realize, the waterfalls are illuminated from behind and the scaffolding seems to disappear, but when I saw the waterfalls during the day, the advent of having a mettle structure coming out of the east river was a little less amazing than having mist indoors. So, in this manner, the first aspect I love about Eliason's work, the sheer miracles he creates in the oddest of places, was missing.

On the other hand, the second aspect of his work I enjoy, the construction behind his work, was
pretty amazing, although not unnecessarily visible at first glance. One of the challenges of constructing the waterfalls was the location in the New York's East River, where natural aquatic life must be taken into consideration. In this manner, the team behind the construction of the waterfalls used a material permeable to water but with holes too small for aquatic life to move through to create a basin from which water was pumped. Obviously, the materials and technology for creating such a basin were not already created as this request was unprecedented. What I thus find interesting about Eliason's East River installation is the creative sourcing of materials that had to go into the creation of these waterfalls.

Here also are two videos of the waterfalls; in the first one, you can the Pier 35 waterfall, while in the second, I scan between the Pier 35 waterfall and the Brooklyn Bridge waterfall, finally landing on my friend Danish who visited the waterfalls with me.

It's as if the NYT was reading my mind...

In today's NYTimes, April Dembosky writes about P.S.1's Public Farm 1, which I wrote about my posting yesterday. The article, entitled Fun on the Farm Down Home in Long Island City, discusses in more depth P.S.1's weekly Warm Up event and the interactions that occurs between the visitors and the urban farm during these happenings. A few things I learned while reading the article that I wish I had known while I was visiting is that you can actually pick the plants and lay on the grass filled cylinders. When I went on a quiet Friday afternoon with my friend Danish, we were frequently the only people walking around the structure. I think with more people filling up the space, visitors begin to naturally experiment. With only a few people in the space, one is conscious of being outside an art institution and our trained sense to not touch "art" prevails. If only I had known, I could have actually eaten those strawberries! Thanks NYT for the follow up...

P.F.1

On a recent trip to New York, I visited my ever favorite art space, P.S.1, excited to see this summer's courtyard installation. This year, the architecture project chosen for the MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program was WORK Architecture's P.F.1. P.F.1, standing for Public Farm 1, is an urban farm space constructed of large cardboard tubes that form a v-shaped plat form that dips in the middle around a central pool. The top surface of the structure acts as a working farm, producing produce and plants that are used in P.S.1's cafe as well as sold at an "absurdly local" farmer's market right in front of of P.S.1's entrance. The structure as also built totally of recycled materials, is powered 100% by solar power, and utilizes rain water for irrigation, bringing together sustainable agriculture with sustainable construction.

In addition, P.F.1 includes a small chicken coop as well as some fun interactive features. I particularly like the chicken coop; it smelled clean and had lots of space per chicken, obviously standing in stark contrast to any industrial farming chicken coop--these were happy chickens! There were also recordings of farm noises, such as cows mooing and sheep baaing, which were probably intended for little kids judging by how low they were to the grown, but were pretty darn enjoyable to play with during a Friday afternoon.

What I really liked about this project is how it makes principles of sustainable agriculture not only accessible in an urban environment, but visually engaging. In addition, I like that during the Saturdays of the summer season, New York's hipsters will be gathering in the quirky urban/agricultural space during Warm Up, making sustainable agriculture just a little bit cooler. So, if you're in New York at some point before September 15th, I would suggest visiting this rather nifty Urban Farm! Maybe you'll catch little kids swimming in the pool like I did...which I thought was a little strange, even if it was hot...