Delicious Revolution

Amy Franceschini is an artist and educator who creates formats for exchange and production that question and challenge the social, cultural and environmental systems that surround her. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between humans and nature, and her projects reveal the ways that local politics are affected by globalization. In 1995, Amy founded Futurefarmers and in 2004, she co-founded Free Soil, an international collective of artists, activists, researchers, and gardeners who work together to propose alternatives to the social, political and environmental organization of space. In 2008, Amy worked with the City of San Francisco to transform the plaza in front of City Hall into a modern victory garden, and to build gardens in people’s back yards. She is currently sailing from Oslo to Istanbul as part of Seed Journey, bringing seeds found in Norway and other points in the northern hemisphere to their center of origin in the Middle East and connecting with seed savers, farmers, bakers, activists and others along the way. Amy grew up on a farm in the Central Valley of California. In this episode, Amy talks with Chelsea about her victory gardens project in San Francisco, a Seed Journey to the Middle East, and the importance of not finding a common language.Photo: RS 10 Christiania by Martin Høy

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Jezra Thompson is the Program Supervisor of the Berkeley Public School Gardening & Cooking Program, where she leads a team of garden educators and works with schools and community organizations to provide hands-on, place-based education to all students. She is a food system planner who focuses on community development, land use planning, and education. Jezra has worked on healthy food access and education at DC Greens, the California Farmers Market Association, and the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, and she writes for Civil Eats. In this episode, Delicious Revolution intern Rebecca Murillo talks with Jezra about the ways school gardens and kitchens provide a unique learning environment and an opportunity for students to be their own leaders in the world.

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Kristyn Leach runs Namu Farm at the Sunol AgPark east of the San Francisco Bay. She grows vegetables for San Francisco restaurant Namu Gaji and seeds for the Kitazawa Seed Company. Kristyn grows both traditional and whimsical produce, focusing on Korean varieties and using organic, biodynamic, and permaculture practices without any fossil fuels. She discovered the foods of her Korean heritage further on in her life, as she was adopted as an infant and grew up in New York, where she later became a part of the urban gardening movement. Her fascination with shiso led her back to her roots and connected her with her Korean roots. In this episode, Devon talks with Kristyn about finding roots and community through plants, adapting Korean vegetables to California, and figuring out farming without fossil fuels.

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Fallen Fruit is an art collaboration originally conceived in 2004 by David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young. Since 2013, David and Austin have continued the collaborative work. Fallen Fruit began by mapping fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles. The collaboration has expanded to include serialized public projects and site-specific installations and happenings in various cities around the world. By always working with fruit as a material or media, the projects reimagine public interactions with the margins of urban space, systems of community and narrative real-time experience. Fallen Fruit’s visual work includes an ongoing series of narrative photographs, wallpapers, everyday objects and video works that explore the social and political implications of our relationship to fruit and world around us. Their current project The Endless Orchard is a massive, collaborative effort to plant fruit trees in shared spaces around the world. In this episode, Chelsea talks with David and Austin about planting public orchards around the world, and fruit as an art medium and subject.

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Inspired by the the United Farm Workers struggle for justice and an emerging environmental movement, Jim Cochran started Swanton Berry Farm in 1983 on four leased acres on the California coast. At the time, everyone said it was impossible to make a living growing organic strawberries, but after some creative experimentation and a collaboration with agroecologists Steve Gliessman and Sean Swezey at UC Santa Cruz, Swanton became the first certified organic strawberry farm in California. As the organic berry industry boomed in California, Jim kept implementing his vision for a more sustainable agriculture, signing a contract with the United Farm Workers that covers all of his full-time employees, and offering them a stock ownership program. He aims to set an example with his commercially viable, socially just and sustainable farming business. Jim is currently in the process of retiring from Swanton Berry Farm, and working on The Food Commons, a model for supporting local food systems with a pilot food hub in Fresno, California. In this episode, Jim talks to Devon about working with the United Farm Workers and growing organic when everyone says it’s impossible.

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Ron Reed is a Karuk dipnet fisherman and a cultural biologist for the Karuk Tribe of California, where he develops plans for eco-cultural revitalization, leads youth cultural education camps, and fosters collaborative research at the nexus of traditional ecological knowledge and western science. Ron plays a critical role in increasing public awareness about the impacts of colonization on the spiritual and physical health of his people and on the ecological integrity of the Karuk ancestral lands. He is a co-founder of the Karuk-UC Berkeley Collaborative and works with the nearby tribes, UC Berkeley and the USDA on the Klamath Basin Tribal Food Security Project. In this episode, Ron talks with Devon about re-discovering traditional knowledge, the trouble with and power of expertise, and renewing the forest and our culture with sacred fire.

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DR Special #1: Kathleen of the Homeless Garden Project by Chelsea Wills and Devon Sampson

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Darrie Ganzhorn is the executive director of the Homeless Garden Project, a 3-acre organic farm and garden in Santa Cruz, California where, as the mission statement reads, “people find the tools they need to build a home in the world.” The project provides job training, transitional employment, and support services. Trainees and volunteers grow and harvest fruits and vegetables that sustain daily lunches and fundraising farm dinners. The Homeless Garden Project also provides fresh produce for low income families and nonprofits, from the AIDS Project to a program working with foster youth. Darrie came to the Homeless Garden Project in 1991, when she started working one-on-one with Project trainees. In this episode, Darrie speaks with Chelsea about the farm as a sanctuary and job training site.

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Lexa Walsh is a longtime artist and cultural worker based in the Bay Area. She has also lived, worked, exhibited and toured internationally. She founded the experimental music, performance and film venue the Heinz Afterworld Lounge, worked for many years as a curator and administrator at CESTA, an international art center in Czech republic, whose team created radical curatorial projects to foster cross-cultural understanding. She co-founded and conceived of the all women, all toy instrument ensemble Toychestra. She founded and organizes Oakland Stock, the Oakland branch of the Sunday Soup network micro-granting dinner series that supports artists’ projects, and launched the Librarification tumblr, which hosts artist resources. Her silo-busting project Meal Ticket brings people who don't normally eat with each other together for a meal. In this episode, Lexa talks to Chelsea about meals that bring people together across difference, creating temporary utopias, and collecting recipes for food end everything.

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Jessica Prentice is a founder of Three Stone Hearth, a Community Supported Kitchen and worker-owned cooperative in Berkeley, California. She has loved cooking for as long as she can remember. In 1996 she completed the professional Chef’s Training at the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York. She worked as the Chef of the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin from 1997-2001, where she founded the Headlands Hearth Bakery and Café in 2001. Jessica educated herself in sustainable agriculture issues, and in 2002 was hired as the first Director of Education Programs for the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco. Jessica coined the word “locavore” and co-created the Local Foods Wheels. She is the author of Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection. Recently, she has been writing about new and very old models of cooperative work. In this episode, Jessica talks with Chelsea about making a worker-owned and community supported kitchen, and inviting people into their own kitchens with good ingredients

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