You can read the full “innovation” issue here. It also includes stories from Edible East End, Edible Manhattan, and Edible Brooklyn. Use this map to find a hard copy near you, or better yet, subscribe here.
Close your eyes and imagine the perfect farm-to-table dinner. The produce sourced from a field just a few feet away. The effortlessly elegant place settings upon which every course is served. The erudite company gathered around the table in a beautiful place on a warm summer day.
Now, open your eyes. Would you believe me if I told you that you were sitting in the trailer of an 18-wheeler?
This is exactly the position I found myself in last summer—when I attended a farm-to-truck dinner aboard Big Mama, the vehicular home of Blocks, Trucks + Art, a learning-through-play program envisioned and operated by learning specialist Angela De Vincenzo and her husband, artist and former pro BMX rider Jeff Mayer.
The couple purchased the truck a few years ago and have since transformed it into the most incredible space (imagine all the best parts of Brooklyn in the back of a big old truck parked in a gorgeous field in Bridgehampton) and for the most incredible reason: Their son, Luca, was born with a cleft palate, and trucks were—for a long time—the only sight that would inspire him to try to speak.
The moral, as I see it? Necessity may be the mother of invention, but the parents of innovation have always been love and hope.
The veracity of this reveals itself in every story in this issue. In East Hampton, where love for neighbors manifests itself in the fields of Share the Harvest Farm, where the next generation of female farmers grows alongside gorgeous, organic vegetables. In Northport and Copiague, where love for animals inspires vegan chefs to create food even the most ardent of carnivores can enjoy and crave. In the waters off Southampton, where love for our food system has inspired one woman to build the nation’s first certified organic fish farm, supplementing the bounty that nature naturally provides. And, come November, in Brooklyn, where Edible’s own Food Loves Tech expo will return for two history-making days focused on the future of food and drink—with the hopeful, warm-hearted ambition of harnessing technology to improve that future’s forecast.
It’s a tall order, but together we can build tall things. We just have to keep hoping and loving and innovating—or, as it says on the side of Big Mama—“Keep On Truckin’.”
There’s no limit, then, to what the future might bring.
Yours,
For more on Blocks, Trucks + Art, please visit their website (blockstrucksandart.com) and stay tuned to Edible East End.
