kitchenmage

Help Me Help Hyperlocavore

Wow! She did it! The fundraising goal was just reached, although you can still donate if you would like to. Huge thanks to everyone who donated or helped spread the word.

You probably now what a locavore is, heck the term is years old, almost forever in Internet years. But do you know what a Hyperlocavore is?

The brainchild of Liz McLellan, Hyperlocavore has at its heart a simple idea: Some people have yards they aren't using to grow food, while others want to grow food but have no space. Liz calls it yard-sharing. I call it genius!

Liz has big plans for her site, and the yard-sharing movement as a whole. The first thing she needs is, of course, money. She has set a goal of raising $6200 to fund the next stage of Hyperlocavore development, details of which can be found here: We need your help! Hyperlocavore

She's using Kickstarter, which lets you set funding goals for a project and only charges people if the project is fully funded by the deadline. This 'all or nothing' approach avoids those partially funded things, where you give money but the organization doesn't get enough to complete a project. It also means deadlines matter: no goal, no money.

So how's she doing?

Here Are The Great Women Chefs!

This post is part of Blog for International Women’s Day put on by Gender Across Borders. A list of all the participants is available here: International Women’s Day Bloggers Directory

Apparently the world has lost track of its great women chefs. At least, that is my interpretation of the incessant stream of articles with titles like Missing: Great Women Chefs in New York, Where have all the women chefs gone? and oh so many similar articles.

Lots of people are helping in the search for the missing female chefs, too. Seattle Tall Poppy is looking for them. Regina Schrambling found some toiling away in kitchens of ethnic restaurants. Gastronomista finds some of the elusive creatures at the Bocuse d’Or competition in Where the Great Women Chefs Are,

In Why Are There No Great Women Chefs?, whose name echoes Linda Nochlin’s "Why Are There No Great Women Artists?" Charlotte Druckman examines not just the search, but the question itself. You really should grab the PDF of that article and give it a read next time you put your feet up for a few minutes.

While searching for the women chefs, one often hears that women do pastry, while men do savory, and there does seem to be some truth to this. It is also true that pastry chefs seem to get much less fame and fortune than savory chefs, but is this related to the higher proportion of women in the sweet kitchen? Maybe. Then again, maybe not.