Posts tagged stockbox
Posts tagged stockbox
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During my mother’s recent visit from Germany, we spent countless hours soaking up food culture and nutrition information, waxing poetic about our family heritage and how much appreciation of and approach to food differs between generations. We watched mind-blowing documentations about the food industry, and cooked up a storm with our much-anticipated California farmers’ market produce.
Other than changing how you yourself eat, though, my mother raised an interesting question: What can we do to change the food culture that permeates America and most of the world? What can we do to contribute to a return to natural, healthful eating that allows us to listen to our bodies as we were always intended to?
Enter some fabulous and worthwhile projects on Kickstarter.com. For those of you who haven’t heard of it before, Kickstarter is a terrific online avenue for projects of all kinds to raise awareness for their idea and funding to make that idea become a reality. You donate to the cause in exchange for a creator-defined piece of the project. It’s like getting to try on the shoes of an angel investor for a day, minus the billion dollar price tag.
I’d like to share a few of the projects that piqued my interest due to their potential for positive influence on different public health areas - whether further increasing our appreciation of fresh and seasonal meals at a new city-rooted restaurant in San Francisco, providing access to fresh fruits and veggies in the now infamous food deserts across America, or documenting the struggle of farmers in Oaxaca, Mexico to maintain the diversity of their crops. In addition to supporting projects you are interested in, campaigns on Kickstarter actually give you cool things in return. Do good, feel good, be rewarded? Alright!
Without further ado, here are a few interesting initiatives to check out:
Please watch the video above to learn more about this exciting new restaurant, scheduled to launch in San Francisco in the fall of this year. The menu will change with the season, with ingredients sourced fresh from local, California-grown farmers’ markets. Basically, you’ll be eating just like nature wants us to. You’ll get to look forward to a fabulous root vegetable menu in the fall, and regain the excitement of the first fresh strawberries next year rather than grabbing the ever-ready and ever-half-frozen strawberries from your supermarket. Need I mention that the fresh, seasonal sourcing will lead to full-bodied flavor explosions? Yes, explosions. That’s right.
If that’s not reason enough to support AQ, consider some of the benefits you could ream from showing your allegiance: May I interest you in a free drink at opening ($10), your name on a brick in the restaurant ($25), a culinary class at the restaurant ($50) or for those who are truly swept away, twice yearly dinners at the restaurant for as long as it is in business ($1500)?
AQ restaurant needs ca. another $21,000 to realize their vision. You can contribute anything from $1 here.
Stockbox aims to address the challenge that families living in food deserts - areas of the US where there are no grocery stores or markets selling fresh produce, but only convenience stores or big-box stores selling packaged foods - face. While many of us California residents are surrounded my organic farmers markets and have the salaries to cover the associated costs, many individuals involved in harvesting the produce do not have access to these luxuries. The same goes for many rural and urban parts of the country.
The Stockbox project is about $11,000 away from being able to open a test pop-up store and food education center in a parking lot in Delridge of Seattle, WA, where many residents must currently go without access to fresh foods or take two different buses to reach the nearest grocery store. I’m particularly impressed with this project because it combines two of the most important factors of changing the way we eat - we need both the education and access to be able to make healthy choices. Without both, we’re stuck in a fruitless fight, pun intended.
Though this truly is a charitable support you should consider giving, there are also perks if interested - reusable grocery bags, limited edition food-focused art prints, exclusive dinner with the founders of Stockbox, etc. Go take a look here.
Support one woman’s quest to document the shift in farming practices as they contrast with the interest of preserving cultural history in Oaxaca, Mexico. Erica Bacon’s journey will result in an essay, photo essay and be suplemented by a collection of native recipes. In exchange for your support, you can choose to receive a postcard from Erica’s travels, a hand-bound copy of her completed documentation, or a home-cooked Oaxacan meal served by Erica herself. To learn more, click here. Erica needs about $400 more to make the documentation of her trip a reality. I can empathize with this cause because doing something similar one day is a passion and a dream of mine. Go Erica!
Certainly, Kickstarter is full of interesting ideas to address the topics of food, public health and travel. Have you seen any particularly though-provoking or entertaining ones? Are you considering supporting any of the above?
