Regenerative Baking

The final episode of Season 3 features an incredible interview with Rae Gomes (@raegomes), the Executive Director of Community Kitchen, and a real food policy powerhouse. Community Kitchen ran a sliding-scale fine dining restaurant out of the Lower East Side Girls Club earlier this year, and gathered a ton of data from this pilot program, which they’re now reviewing in preparation for their next chapter of this very exciting project. Aside from Community Kitchen, Rae is the Founder & Principal of Cultivating Justice, through which she’s developed community-driven solutions like Root To Wellness, a food-as-medicine project bringing subsidized CSA programs to Central Brooklyn. She’s also the co-founder of Central Brooklyn Food Cooperative; a 2021 Urban Design Forum Fellow with a Food Equity focus; *and* was a member of Mayor Adams’ transition team for food policy. She also has a master’s in creative nonfiction. In this episode, we get into food hubs, why community fridges aren't the solution everyone thinks they are, who's really profiting off the food system, a ton of organizations all working to build a better food system, the challenges of bringing people into food policy, dreams of public restaurants, and so, so much more.    Full show notes and further reading links available at dresslerparsons.com/regenerativebaking Instagram: @regenerativebaking and @dresslerparsons Patreon: patreon.com/regenerativebaking

Jenny Dorsey (@chefjennydorsey) is a professional chef, author, speaker, and researcher on food politics and social justice. She’s currently based in Singapore as a Fulbright-National Geographic Research Scholar studying the impact of government policies on hawker centres, and recently earned her Master’s in Education from Harvard’s Graduate School. I was introduced to her work years ago when her nonprofit, Studio ATAO, announced they were making a Food Systems 101 curriculum. She also makes really great, informative short-form videos on social media about everything from why sodas are fizzy and always served cold, to what vegetables can tell us about national security, to Heated Rivalry and the gendered politics of pleasure.  In this episode we get into some of her research on Singapore’s hawker markets, the argument for state-run restaurants, why Starbucks isn’t a true third space, how the design of a professional kitchen can actively work against you, using VR to enhance a dinner experience, letting people fulfill job roles based on their strengths and capabilities and not necessarily their experience, and so, so much more.   Full show notes and further reading links available at dresslerparsons.com/regenerativebaking Instagram: @regenerativebaking and @dresslerparsons Patreon: patreon.com/regenerativebaking

Continuing with season 3’s topic of alternative economies, Russell Trimmer runs Motzi Bread in Baltimore with his wife, Maya. In 2020, they fully shifted to a pay-what-you-can model, offering their naturally-leavened loaves at accessible prices. This episode is chock-full of great information about millers, bakers and regenerative farmers in the mid-Atlantic region, and everybody mentioned is linked in the show notes below: Full show notes and further reading links available at dresslerparsons.com/regenerativebakingInstagram: @regenerativebaking and @dresslerparsonsPatreon: patreon.com/regenerativebaking

Jim Franks has traveled the world studying whole grain sourdough bread and local food infrastructure centered around ethical and regenerative ingredients. He's also a poet, and last year he released his book Existential Bread, which is completely unlike any cookbook I’ve ever read before, for two reasons. First, it’s written as a long poem. Second, it’s completely non-prescriptive. Instead of telling you exactly how to make bread or giving you a precise recipe, he explains the different factors behind bread-making and invites you to experiment and trust yourself. Tune in for a philosophical discussion of alternative economies, breaking the rules of bread, and why bread could save the world. Full show notes and further reading links available at dresslerparsons.com/regenerativebakingInstagram: @regenerativebaking and @dresslerparsonsPatreon: patreon.com/regenerativebaking

Today’s guest is community-supported baker Don Guerra, founder of Barrio Bread in Tucson, Arizona. He won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Baker in 2022, and takes pride in bringing together a network of farmers, millers, wholesale buyers and consumers to support each other and build a resilient and diverse local grain chain. Listen in for an interview jam-packed with information about heritage grains of the Southwest, Don’s journey with entrepreneurship and history with anthropology, how he got connected with Native Seeds Search and became a major part of the effort to bring back Sonoran White Wheat, and much much more. Full show notes and further reading links available at dresslerparsons.com/regenerativebakingInstagram: @regenerativebaking and @dresslerparsonsPatreon: patreon.com/regenerativebaking

What is a seed bank if not both the original economy AND a model for a regenerative economy? The seeds are saved, shared with farmers and gardeners, and then as the crops grow, a portion of those seeds also get saved and re-circulated. In this week's episode, Dressler is joined by Amy Smith, the E-Commerce Manager of Native Seeds/SEARCH in Tucson, Arizona. Native Seeds/SEARCH was founded in 1983 in response to the concern of farmers, gardeners, Indigenous community members, and conservationists about the loss of seed diversity. They currently steward more than 1800 regional seed varieties in a climate-controlled seed bank, all of which are uniquely adapted to the arid landscapes that extend from southern Colorado to central Mexico. Tune in for a discussion about Southwest agriculture, harvesting mesquite pods, the importance of arid-adapted seeds as the climate warms, the resurgence of Sonoran White Wheat, and so much more. Full show notes and further reading links available at dresslerparsons.com/regenerativebakingPatreon ($5 tier: get a brand new watercolor-illustrated postcard every month!): patreon.com/regenerativebakingInstagram: @regenerativebaking and @dresslerparsons 

Could a fine dining restaurant be a place to feel at home, to eat for free? Telly Justice, head chef and co-owner of HAGS, says absolutely. Centering queerness in every corner of the restaurant and subsidizing a weekly pay-what-you-can brunch via a vibrant tasting menu the rest of the week, Telly and the rest of the HAGS team have created something remarkable in Lower Manhattan. Tune in for a chat about the freedom of pop-ups, burnout in restaurant kitchens, building a completely different kind of fine dining space, how the HAGS team collaborates on the menu, and so much more. Full show notes and further reading links available at dresslerparsons.com/regenerativebakingInstagram: @regenerativebaking and @dresslerparsonsPatreon: patreon.com/regenerativebaking 

How can the scaffolding and infrastructure of our world be repurposed to build a better future? How can social practice art open avenues for collaboration and and cooperation? This episode features an interview with Caroline Woolard, an artist, educator and technologist who's currently the Head of Strategy at Pollinator.coop. We discuss her past and current projects, all of which focus on building networks between people in one way or another, glimpsing alternative economies. Full show notes and further reading links available at dresslerparsons.com/regenerativebakingInstagram: @regenerativebaking and @dresslerparsonsPatreon: patreon.com/regenerativebaking

We're kicking off Season 3 of Regenerative Baking with Raeghn Draper, the executive director of CHAAD (Chicago Hospitality Accountability and Advocacy Database), an organization providing resources and information to restaurant workers, as well as, in Raeghn's words, imagining a hospitality industry that supports thriving and sustainable lives for the people who put in the bulk of the labor. Tune in for a discussion that clearly illustrates the current hospitality industry, as well as bright and expansive future possibilities. Full show notes and further reading links available at dresslerparsons.com/regenerativebakingInstagram: @regenerativebaking and @dresslerparsonsPatreon: patreon.com/regenerativebaking

We're back with another thematically-organized summary of Regenerative Baking's last nine episodes, as told via clips of guests that felt like they were in conversation with each other. This season’s theme was, “What does it look like to bake with place in mind?”, and the clips in this summary cover the concept of “place” from every angle: from being involved with your local community, to making desserts on a glacier in Alaska, to the effects of gentrification and colonization on food cultures, to yourself and your own food memories as "place," and how that connects you to the food system around you, and much, much more. Full show notes and further reading links (for each excerpted episode) available at dresslerparsons.com/regenerativebakingInstagram: @regenerativebaking and @dresslerparsons