To know how food is grown — and how to grow it — to know who grows it, how it’s processed and shipped, and how far it might be coming from to get to our plates… we like finding videos that chronicle how these systems happen.
The Perennial Plate is a great resource for not only learning about food’s origins, but how people eat and endeavor in cultures around the world. Chef Daniel Klein and camerawoman Mirra Fine are currently traveling the globe to tell these stories.
From Splendid Table, Mirra and Daniel talk about their experience filming Coconut: Nose to Tail, and how efficient the use of a tree can be:
MF: For the people of Sri Lanka, the coconut is really a source of life. Not only because it is an ingredient that is found in most Sri Lankan foods, but also because the coconut tree itself, from the trunk to the leaves to the actual nut, is used in non-food elements of their life…
DK: They are selling really every part of the coconut. They are selling the toddy to a toddy producer, they are selling their husks to a rope producer, they are selling the oil to an oil producer, and then they use the coconuts for their own cooking and also to build huts and things like that.
Watch another Perennial Plate video: Lifen Yang’s small farm to table restaurant in Kunming, China, and then spend time on some farms around the globe.
Shaggy Lawn Mowers - Paris Tries an Eco-Friendly Way of Maintaining Park Lawns… the New York Times reports on a sustainable idea:
Mayor Bertrand Delanoë has made the environment a priority since his election in 2001, with popular bike- and car-sharing programs, an expanded network of designated lanes for bicycles and buses, and an enormous project to pedestrianize the banks along much of the Seine.
The sheep, which are to mow (and, not inconsequentially, fertilize) an airy half-acre patch in the 19th Arrondissement are intended in the same spirit. City Hall refers to the project as “eco-grazing,” and it notes that the four ewes will prevent the use of noisy, gas-guzzling mowers and cut down on the use of herbicides.
via Grist.
Part one of the award-winning nature film Microcosmos: Le peuple de l’herbe, directed by French biologists Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou.
One hour and fifteen minutes on an unknown planet: Earth, rediscovered on a scale of centimetres. The inhabitants are incredible creatures: insects and other animals living in the grass and in the water. The landscape: impenetrable forest, tufts of grass, drops of dew as big as balloons… A land where the animals walk on water, stroll with their head down and fall without fear from over a hundred times their height, slowed down only by the resistance of the air. In this world the hourglass of time moves faster: one hour equals one day, one day equals one season, one season equals one lifetime. This is a voyage from the inside, leading the spectator to the heart of the action, as though he/she was the size of an insect. In making the spectator forget their human condition - within the framework of film - he/she can better delve into this marvellous reality, normally inaccessible.
The kid should also see part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and part 6. And/or find it on Amazon.
