FINAL PROJECT

Final Project (Share Unit)

The final assignment for this class was to make a dish out of ingredients that were found at most 50 miles away. Last Friday, I went to Maple Avenue Market located in Vienna where I found that they didn't sell many products grown 50 miles from George Mason University or even in the state of Virginia. The store owner told me that I should try the store "Local Market" which is located in Falls Church. She told me that they may have more products grown in the state of Virginia. I went over the "Local Market" and found that they also didn't have the ingredients I was looking for and not a very big selection of locally grown products in the state of Virginia. I told the shop owner that I have an assignment in a class in university where I need to find ingredients grown at most fifty miles from my university. She also told me that most of their ingredients are not grown in the state of Virginia or even fifty miles away from Fairfax except their scallions, spices, and meat. I looked around the store and found that they were selling sea salt that was from Falls Church so I purchased it from the store for $1.50. On Saturday, I woke up early in the morning to go to farmers' markets that I found to be happening that day online. The first farmer's market I went to was in Old Town Fairfax. I followed the signs that pointed towards where it would be but when I walked around to try to find it I wasn't able to find anything so I headed to the next farmer's market on my list located in Burke. The Burke Farmer's Market had many different vendors from all around Virginia and in neighboring states. I found spring onions and cilantro from a vendor who lives in Oak Grove, Virginia. After looking around for a little more and not finding anything else I went to the next farmer's market that was found to be happening at Springfield Town Center. I found this farmer's market to only have about ten vendors and not anything I was looking for so I left pretty disappointed because I spent a lot of time driving to this particular farmer's market. At this point it was 11:15am so I wanted to hit one more farmer's market in Falls Church. Due to my bad sense of direction, I got to the Falls Church farmer's market fifteen minutes before many of the vendors were closing up. I quickly looked around what each vendor was selling and decided to go for two vendors. I bought about two pounds of sweet potatoes for $2.50 from a person who wintered them from Gainesville, Virginia. A vendor from Berryville, Virginia was selling meat, pasta, and eggs (which were sold out when I got to her station). I asked her about the meats she was selling and the different types of pasta that were made from all natural ingredients off of the farm. I ended up getting almost a pound of sirloin steak and two packages of herb pasta. My total purchase ended up being $24.99. 


Financial Information of Ingredients
Sea Salt: $1.50
Spring Onions and Cilantro: $6.50
Sweet Potatoes: $2.50
Sirloin Steak: $14.99
Two Packages of Herb Pasta: $10.00
Total Amount of All Ingredients: $35.49


Ingredients Used Baked Sweet Potatoes





Baked Sweet Potatoes



Ingredients Used For Cut Sirloin Steak Chunks 



Spring Onions













Sea Salt





Sirloin Steak Taken from the Package



Ingredients Used For Herb Pasta With Pesto





Two Images of Herb Pasta Still in Packaging

                                                                                                  







Green Garlic Pesto Sauce


Project Summary


I learned a lot of things about negative and positive aspects of getting locally grown ingredients for this project. When I was looking for recipes or possible dishes to make from looking at cooking and food websites online, I found that many of the ingredients that I wanted to make for this project were automatically ruled out because I knew I wouldn't be able obtain them around this area. For example, I wanted to make a dish that required olive oil but I know for a fact that olive oil is not produced in Virginia but in Italy or other parts of Europe. Even when it came to finding salt or food that isn't grown during this season like potatoes or mushrooms, the possibility of finding these ingredients are slim as it is not grown at this time and the number of people who have these items may not have it anymore. Lastly, buying locally grown ingredients that I found at farmer's markets I went to were more expensive than the same things you could find at the super market. I can list many other cons of just eating locally grown ingredients but I want to acknowledge that there is value in buying locally grown ingredients. First of all, locally grown ingredients allow you to know where you are getting your ingredients instead of just relying on the information you see on the food container. Secondly, the people that buy locally grown ingredients are able to talk to the farmer and ask questions about how they grew them and if they used any pesticides. Thirdly, many products you buy in the grocery store are not locally grown so local vendors are losing business when they are having to compete with ingredients that are grown and shipped from outside the United States. After working on this project, it has got me interested in going to farmer's markets to buy locally grown ingredients even though they are expensive. I'm the kind of person who likes to know where there food is coming from. So when I was able to talk to vendors about their products it was great to hear it from an actual person rather than leaving me confused with the ingredients listed on the side of the food container. Most importantly, this project has helped me to realize how I take grocery stores for granted. When I need to get potatoes to make a potato salad or mushrooms for a pasta dish I'm making, I can just get these ingredients at the store at any time even if its not grown during the time I buy it. The convenience and the ease I have in obtaining any product I want at anytime compared to the difficulty in obtaining one or more products at farmer's markets and locally grown food markets has helped me to see food shopping in two very different ways. 

Reading Assignment for Project #5 (Share)

Reading Assignment for Project #5- SHARE

Michelle Fuerst "Homemade Cook" website

The "Taste of Place" project was created by Laura Parker who is an established cook in the Bay area where she has worked at both Zuni Cafe and Chez Panisse which are two places that are known as the pioneers of the local and sustainable food movement. Parker's writings have appeared in the Slow Food Guide to San Francisco and the Civil Eats blog. She has been profiled on Chow.com and the California Report as well as the San Francisco Chronicle. On her website, the homemade cook has shown to have been part of a lot of different projects but only five projects are shown under the projects section of the website. The "Eatsy Chef" project was created during the Winter of 2010 of Etsy's in-house lunch program called Eatsy. The project was planned and executed to have a diverse range of seasonally-influenced meals that served family's style for the company's 180 employees. The meals were sustainable sourced, diverse, and deliciously enjoyed by the employees as well as the whole community. The "Yes We Can" project created recipes and had workshops on how to safely preserve fruits and vegetables. The project allowed large numbers of people to participate in communal food production and in its inaugural year, the project canned over a thousand pounds of tomatoes, Blenheim apricot jam and bread & butter pickles. There are about three other projects listed on her website but they all show Fuerst's desire to provide ingredient-driven, responsibly sourced, and traditional handmade cooking methods to provide delicious food to people. The response to her projects and others that she has taken part in has been outstanding and rewarding in allowing her to share food that is healthy to you and the environment. 


Source: http://www.lauraparkerstudio.com/tasteofplace/index.html 

Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves of Temescal Amity Works

The Temescal Amity Works was a four year project that lasted from July 2004 to January 2007 in the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland, California. The idea behind this project came to Cockrell and Purves when they wanted this to be a way to localize people's attention and to restructure people's attention to work in a community that many people are not used to. The project was designed to be a social sculpture that got inspiration from historical models of mutual-aid societies, barn-raisings, DIY collectives, and urban communism. The Big Back Yard and Reading Room are two interlocking programs that were created to see how a specific community built relationships through essentially personal and casually tailored economies. The Big Back Yard was constructed as an Italian-American immigrant community that had citrus and fruit trees all around it. To this day, the fruit trees still bear fruit while the culture behind those who planted has faded away. On the website, a picture of the hand-built, steel pushcart that was made to collect surplus fruits and vegetables from neighborhood yards which was given away fresh or re-distributed in form of fruit butters and collective marmalades. Whereas the other room (The Reading Room) which is located at a storefront area just off of Telegraph Avenue made a contextualized ongoing experience of the Big Backyard through casual contact during the hours they were open. In addition to that, a series of public events, film screenings, and a small resource library was found to be provided by The Reading Room. Many artists, historians, and others gathered together to make projects that overlaid themselves onto Temescal Amity Works in a productive way.

The project could have continued for a long time but in January of 2007, the creators made the decision to close the storefront and end the "public" phase of the Temescal Amity Works. After seeing the amount of the time the storefront remained in operation, the two projects captured the identity of service which became more ingrained in the neighborhood's "consciousness". The creators had the plan of having neighbors circulate their backyard surplus among each other but the desired outcome was not found to be the case among the neighbors. The creators hosted a final discussion in the space on the closing weekend. Many who attended the meeting felt like the dialogue and concepts generated through the two projects (storefront and programs) was what got the neighborhood really interested but others felt like the project didn't create a harvesting service for all. While many of these ideas and opinions were conveyed at the meeting, the input the creators received highlighted the core issues of practicing as artists in a community context.  

Source: https://fieldfaring.wordpress.com/temescal-amity-works/

Dying for the Other by Beatriz da Costa

Beatriz da Costa's project "Dying for the Other" was three channel video installation that dealt with the artist's lifelong battle with cancer. This was one her of last works of art before she passed away on December 27th, 2012. While watching da Costa's video, I heard the echoes of self-mutilating artist Bob Flanagan. Also, video clips of mice that were used in cancer research was projected and shown throughout different video segment's of the artist's life as she was going through physical and cognitive therapy after having a brain surgery. This particular project conveyed da Cost'a last days of life in a beautifully bittersweet way. Unfortunately, many of us have been touched by someone who died from cancer or someone who is currently going through it. The battle of any type of cancer is one of the darkest and most personal times in which the emotional toll is heaviest for those closest to the patient. A lot of times, the immense medical traumas are hidden away from the world and usually the pain is internalized by the suffering person. As it is shown in the video where da Coasta is walking with a walker to help her to get around. As she is walking on the street, people star at her and in a way she is exposed to the world and seen as not the same as everyone else. Few people want to be seen in public fighting this battle, losing their hair, fighting for their lives, all the while knowing that this may be a fight they don't win. 

Source: https://vimeo.com/33170755