How can we learn to forage in cities—and use Instagram to get to know the living world around us?
Artist, organizer, urban forager, and social media ninja Candace Thompson (Collaborative Urban Resilience Banquet) joins Wythe and Melissa to dig into a variety of practical and visionary topics about what wild foods we can harvest in urban areas and preservation techniques from pickling to making your own beer. Candace tells us about plants that we are usually blind to in urban areas—weeds. Some weeds are not only edible but can have fewer toxins in them than store-bought foods! To educate the world about her citizen-science experiments and her unusual foods of choice, she uses Instagram to tell the stories of weeds. This episode dives into foraging in NYC, testing and cleaning up polluted soils, learning from hundreds of growers on Instagram, and how one a-ha! moment in nature led to a lifelong curiosity about the world around her. This episode goes all over the place, like a rhizome: give it a listen and subscribe for more!
“Candace Thompson: You’re already facing food apartheid before Covid came along, and now many of the food banks are overtaxed. And so it felt really good to do that, even if it was raining and I did pick a fight with a fire hydrant and now I have a giant welt on my leg. But it was it’s really awesome. And we’re almost done. We only have about 700 crates left, so we’ve done about 2,000. Wow. So there was 2,000 in total. 2,700 in total.
Wythe Marschall: Can you tell us about the origins of this? Like why did this farm exist in the first place and then why wasn’t it maintained? Like why out of nowhere was this need to move a farm at JFK Airport. I mean it’s amazing what you’re doing. Let me just say that also.
Candace: Do you want my cynical answer? I honestly don’t know.’
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