At next weekend’s Maker Faire, each of us editors will one of more beats. My beats include young makers, sustainability, and food. Food and cooking were my entrees (get it?) to making and I’m particularly excited about the line-up of culinary related presentations and makers scheduled for Maker Faire.
The Homegrown Village is the one-stop shop for DIY food at Maker Faire, everything from how to make cheese, kimchi, pickles, raise chicken and bees, and how to make Chinese hand-pulled noodles–the original spaghetti.
The Homegrown Village is a mainstay of Maker Faire, but new this year will be a host of exhibits curated by San Francisco’s Forage SF. Forage SF is in the process of building a Tech Shop-style culinary workspace/classroom/food business incubator called Forage Kitchen. In a previous incarnation, Forage SF hosted an underground farmers market. Many of the vendors that will be in the Homegrown Village grew out of that underground market. The list includes Cocoa Collection, Sweet Lauren Cakes, Suite Foods, McVicker Pickles, and Oren’s Artisan Nuts. Cocoa Collection, Sweet Lauren Cakes, Suite Foods, and McVicker Pickles will be giving presentations on either the Maker Square or Hands-on Homegrown stage.
Meanwhile, Forage Kitchen will be talking about its plans and the classes it offers like mushroom hunting, urban sea foraging, and wild plant foraging.
Also new to the Homegrown Village this year is the Food and Farm Film Fest, a series of short documentaries about, well, food and farming. The films include Nourish: Food and Community, Symphony of the Soil, Udderly Direct, Farm Shorts, and Food Forward. Food Forward just so happens to be a documentary on urban agriculture I co-created for PBS. It picked up a Jame Beard nomination this year. I’ll be introducing the film and participating in a short Q&A after the screening.
Over on the Make: Live stage on Sunday at 3:30pm, I’ll be moderating what I think will be great panel called “The Future of Food.” The panelists will include Christopher Ying, editor-in-chief of the world’s coolest food mag—Lucky Peach; Lisa Fetterman, co-creator of a much anticipated immersion circulator/sous vide device Nomiku; and Andras Foragacs, CEO of Modern Meadow, a Missouri company that is pioneering lab grown, 3D printed meat. How’s that for food forward?
On the Make: Electronics stage on Saturday at 4:30pm, be sure to check out Peter Vieth and Eric Anzelc’s “How We Made an Open Source Brewery” presentation. Home brew fanatics Eric and Peter didn’t want to study under a local brewmaster for minimum wage so they figured the difference between amateur and expert beer making is control, controlling temperature, cooling, etc. To do that they turned to Arduino and the open source community. Peter has documented his work here. He and Eric will be talking about their project and what he sees as the untapped (there I go again with the food double entendres) potential for Arduino and large scale, industrial projects like brewing beer.
That’s just a slice of some food attractions. I’m hungry–and a little thirsty– already. See you at Maker Faire.
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