Inside the fence of a Lower East Side garden, I worked the late shift at my New York City neighborhood’s community-supported agriculture share last night. I loved every minute. I weighed out potatoes and Italian long beans as members picked out ears of corn, basil, kale, lettuce, peppers and radishes. I welcomed folks to the line of produce and even tried out some jokes. Don’t you look radishing!
Things turned serious when I whispered with another member about declining sign-ups and how to step up efforts to get more neighbors involved. Online advertising had failed in the past because too many people outside the neighborhood saw the ads the members had paid for. But then, one member picking out kale introduced himself as a specialist in digital advertising, as it turned out, and offered his help. Targeting a small radius around our garden pick-up location may be what the organization needs to find all those environmentally conscious neighborhood eaters who have been evading us. Or maybe we just need to refer more friends directly.
I’ll take all the glimmers of hope I can get. Next week is Climate Week here in New York City, then there’s the White House’s big nutrition conference the week after in D.C., plus Cop27 in Egypt only a few weeks later. A lot of decisions made before the end of this year will decide how bad climate change may get in the future.
— Chloe Sorvino, Staff Writer
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A zesty bite of yellowtail.
Chloe Sorvino
I loved this seared yellowtail with cumin yogurt, cured herbs, radish, and chili, prepared by Ali Saboor of Brooklyn-based restaurant Eyval. The bite indulged me earlier this week while scouting out 30 under 30 food list nominees at the James Beard Foundation’s 13-chef event, Taste America: New York City. The event went all-in on decadence – from caviar bumps to pasta spun in a parmesan wheel and topped with black truffles. I lapped it up, along with fresher bites like blue sticky rice (tinted thanks to butterfly pea flower tea) and topped with steak green curry from chef Hong Thaimee of Thaimee Love.
Chloe Sorvino leads coverage of food and agriculture as a staff writer on the enterprise team at Forbes. Her book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat , will publish in December 2022 with Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books. Her eight years of reporting at Forbes has brought her to In-N-Out Burger’s secret test kitchen, drought-ridden farms in California’s Central Valley, burnt-out national forests logged by a timber billionaire, a century-old slaughterhouse in Omaha, and even a chocolate croissant factory designed like a medieval castle in Northern France.
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