Blue Hill's cracked pedestal, Currant on the blockchain (jk), & glam kombucha recipes
We're alive, baby!
Hi food friends,
Feeling bloggy so today's message is brought to you by Substack. Hope the email deliverability gods/demons let us through your inbox gates.
During the summers we let the ground lay fallow at Currant. Our team's also out of steam, because you know, life. Geopolitics. Tragedy. Love lust and drama! Etc. Thanks for being here through it all.
Thus today's spontaneous summer letter is an eclectic menu of: glam kombucha recipes, commentary inspired by Eater's unsurprising Blue Hill / Stone Barns exposé, and thinking out loud on Currant's next iteration.
Stay hungry,
Vicky Gu
Founder & Managing Editor
Kombucha Cocktails
By Durham-based Mexican-American photographer, motion director, and stylist Lauren Vied Allen
These don't contain alcohol but we were 11/10 not about to call them mocktails. Call them mixers, spritzers, drnks 4 smmr, whatever else you want. Click through for the recipes.
Piña Canela Passionfruit
Hibiscus Ginger Lime Spritzer
Turmeric Tonic
Guava Paloma
On the cracked pedestal of Dan Barber, Blue Hill, & Stone Barns
"Feed the Rich, Save the Planet? Can This Farm Fix Agriculture If It Can’t Fix Itself? "
...are the questions Eater's Meghan McCarron poses in Unsustainable, a deeply reported three-part series on "the working conditions and storytelling practices at Blue Hill at Stone Barns between 2014 and 2020."
Did we see this coming? No one leaves the the public eye unsinged? Must pedestals command ethical compromise on the way up?
I didn't have strong feelings about Dan Barber beforehand. He seemed less angry-haute chef, more mousy-philosophy professor. I first took his agricultural endeavors seriously in 2018, when Sweetgreen ordered 100,000 koginut squash seeds from his seed company Row 7 to bring the squash to stores nationwide. A Michelin restaurant partnering with the company behind the now ubiquitous DTC brand marketing playbook to "democratize deliciousness"? Sounded legit, though at this point who knows if those are green or yellow or red flags.
In 2020, the Rockefeller Foundation selected Stone Farms as one of their "10 global visionaries looking to improve the world’s food systems from the ground up." The vision in their pitch sounded admirable. Listen to the indigenous history of the valley? Fuse data and storytelling into ecologically sound farming? Design structures for accountability?
It's peak sexy-nerdy messaging. I'd been volunteering as a New York Chapter Organizer for OpenIDEO at the time, and we were tasked with engaging our local community around said Rockefeller-sponsored pitch competition. Peak work for idealists. Look, a pretty chart!
But if there's anything we've learned about nicely packaging messaging and promises (see: the rise and fall of mainstream food media) — it's to proceed with caution. Believe with skepticism. They must coexist.
I've posed a lot of questions and don't know what the answer is to all of this except surely it's not devaluing the humans actually doing the work of the high flying vision. Idealism can meet rigor without mistreatment.
As reported in our climate change series, INNA jam producer Dafna Kory challenges the dominant business ideology:
"On a very basic level, we won’t be able to do much good if we fail as a business. So the question for me is also, how do I sustain INNA and keep it thriving? The answer for me is to keep INNA small, to intentionally not grow the business. I realize that this goes counter to the dominant business ideology! But why is growth always the measure of success? Can we instead measure work’s success by the consistency and quality of the work we produce, and by our respect and care for the people and environment who are part of the work? I think it’s time that as a society we change our value metrics. That’s what sustainable anything-making looks like to me."
The reason why Blue Hill / Stone Farms outpaced their peers in innovation is because they can speak the language of capital. Rockefeller. Sweetgreen. Oil and venture capital, literally granting us to treat our land better, go slow and listen to the seeds sing.
Though we'd also do well to look to producers like INNA to teach us a new song in the process.
On Currant’s next iteration
Private capital and public equity, what a simple noncontroversial dynamic! To tie it back to media — Pfizer funds WebMD research; Snap supports tech pub Real Life Mag, both for content that's meant to be conducted with editorial independence.
It makes me think of what Currant could be. Maybe something like data artist Jer Thorp's Office of Creative Research, focused on solving food issues.
Our content and relationships are what first put us on the map. But we're going to need something stronger to pave the paths connecting us to other digital agoras in food, climate, design, art, tech. Blockchain could facilitate the infrastructure but wouldn't remove the work of sustainability (hi intense ecological ramifications).
Good governance doesn't happen because you have the systems to support it. It requires trust, that pesky little thing that money can't buy. And as we've seen with Stone Farms, orgs that don't embed trust throughout the entire chain will face tumultuous waters of scrutiny, not because crypto crashes or the media exposes their dark spots but because the people wonder why they were there in the first place.
ANYHOW. Last year we relaunched as a collective. This year, we're probably going rethink Currant, again. If you'd like to actively think with us — join our Discord where we are all waiting with bated breath for M. to launch season two of their cake diaries. Or invite a friend to subscribe below. Or just stay tuned.