Sustainablitiy

She calls the business Flotsam, a maritime term for what floats to the surface after a shipwreck. The things left behind that still have somewhere to go. It is a fitting name for a studio built entirely on wood that someone else gave up on. Amy spent a decade at sea, most recently as a mate for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Living in Boston between voyages, she kept noticing furniture put out on the streets for trash pickup.

When I visited, that philosophy was visible in the simplest way: a mountain of ground mushroom compost alive with worms, insects, and pollinators, a living ecosystem with nothing artificial pushing it along. Sixteen acres stretch from the farmhouse down to the river. A geodesic dome keeps beets, kale, Swiss chard, and herbs growing year-round. Lemon trees thrive there too, over a hundred lemons last year, along with figs and even bananas.

Food stopped tasting good. And somewhere along the way, we stopped expecting it to. It makes total sense how we got here. For decades, the scientists behind the seeds we plant and the food we eat were asked to optimize for the needs of the supply chain, not the needs of our taste buds: how well a tomato survives a three-thousand-mile truck ride...

Every June, the Menus of Change Leadership Summit becomes a think tank, gathering the chefs, scientists, entrepreneurs, and policy makers who are actively reshaping how the world grows, cooks, and eats. Now in its fourteenth year, the summit has called the Culinary Institute of America’s Hudson Valley campus home for the past twelve. This year, I was in that room. What I heard was too important not to bring you into the conversation too.

FeedHV celebrated its greatest milestone in the program’s history, surpassing one million pounds of food rescued. FeedHV is the Hudson Valley’s community food rescue and harvesting network dedicated to meeting the needs of neighbors while mitigating the impacts of food waste. The program is administered by Hudson Valley Agribusiness Development Corporation (HVADC) and operates across Dutchess, Columbia, Greene, Orange, Putnam, Sullivan, and Ulster counties in New York State.

On Sunday, Liberty Farms in Ghent hosted Wild Hudson Valley, a spring benefit for Slow Food Hudson Valley. The barn was filled with chefs, farmers, and community leaders who care deeply about the future of food in our region. Slow Food, for anyone new to the movement, is a global organization working to protect biodiversity, preserve food traditions, and build a food system that is good, clean, and fair.