Beginning in January 2012, CityLab7 will design and build their Fertile Grounds pop-up in collaboration with Olson Kundig Architects and Schuchart/Dow in an installation called [storefront] Mushroom Farm.

Invoking the Pause Grant Partners Gary Nabhan of Taco Diplomacy and Stephen Antupit, Chris Saleeba and Critter Thompson of CityLab7 reach across interstate borders to unite the Northwest and Southwest at Tucson’s Meet Yourself festival. Both teams reminisce separately about their cross-collaborative work and the birth of the Taco Diplomacy Food Wagon.

Gary Nabhan/Taco Diplomacy/Sabores Sin Fronteras:

City 7 Lab meets Sabores Sin Fronteras and Celebrates

When Stephen, Critter and Chris of City7Lab parachuted into Tucson for the Tucson Meet Yourself mega-festival in mid-October, the Taco Diplomacy Food Wagon had just had only come out of the womb at Dust Design studio of Jesus Robles and Cade Hayes a few hours before. It was still learning how to walk on it own four tires, let alone talk to the 100,000 people already arriving for the Southwest’s largest homegrown food-and-music fest. Stephen, Critter and Chris quickly became the nannies and voice coaches for Taco Diplomacy’s newest baby, helping the Sabores Sin Fronteras Foodways Alliance imagine how to nourish its identity and broaden its impact.

CityLab7 further expanded its repertoire of participatory engagement techniques with their recent Cross-Pollination collaboration with the Taco Diplomacy Truck at Tucson’s Meet Yourself Festival in October. Visit CityLab7′s multimedia blog to get a “taste” of what dozens of Taco Diplomats had to say. Coming up next in the collaboration will be the Tucson team’s border-to-border participation in the Seattle-based Fertile Grounds Urban Food Utility Pop-Up.

Thanks from Chris, Critter and Stephen to Maggie Kaplan and her generous support through ITP’s Blossoming Possibilities Fund for making this collaboration possible.

Are you a “taco diplomat?”

Do you savor, celebrate and promote the foods we share across the U.S/Mexico border to acknowledge our debts and gratitude to the indigenous and mestizo peoples of the Desert Borderlands for enriching our lives?  Are you ready to support their efforts toward greater food justice, food security, food democracy and food sovereignty?  Then you are a “taco diplomat”!

Gary Paul Nabhan is an internationally celebrated nature writer, seed saver, conservation biologist and sustainable agriculture activist who has been called “the father of the local food movement” by Mother Earth News. Gary spoke at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City, Oregon on redesigning our local food traditions and deepening out sense sustainable agriculture.

VIEW THE LECTURE VIDEO HERE

Gary Nabhan, a research social scientist at the University of Arizona’s Southwest Center, has been named the Sustainable Food Systems Endowed Chair following a nearly $1.6 million grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Please click here to read the announcement.

Tucson Meet Yourself’s Sabores Sin Fronteras Farming and Foodways Alliance is a novel mobile exhibit in the form of a “heritage food wagon” or “taco diplomacy truck” to stimulate public discourse and community discussion at Arizona festivals and other events with regard to the sustainability and “foodprint” of traditional foods historically and currently eaten and produced in Arizona.
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Pause. Seed. Blossom. Or, in this case: Roast, Grow, Repair.

Fertile Grounds is the connective tissue that unites key components of existing businesses – coffee suppliers, retailers, farmers markets, city utilities – to develop and brand an urban food system process that is less wasteful, less carbon intensive, profitable and replicable. In this way, we hope to reduce the carbon impact of daily lifestyle choices related to food while promoting a sense of community and repairing the natural environment.

There was a frost expected here two weeks ago, but Gary Nabhan of Taco Diplomacy a conservation biologist and inveterate seed-saver, was out in his hardscrabble garden anyway, planting his favorite food, hot chilies.  Chiltepin, chile de arbol, Tabasco, serrano, pasilla, Chimayo.  These are only a few of the pungent peppers that Mr. Nabhan and two other chili lovers, Kurt Michael Friese, a chef from Iowa City, and Kraig Kraft, an agro-ecologist studying the origin of hot peppers, collected on a journey that began two years ago in northern Mexico, and took them across the hot spots of this country…

Click here to go directly to the New York Times Article

 
Gary Nabhan of Taco Diplomacy spoke candidly with us about the impact of the 2010 Convening on his work.

“What surprised me is how sophisticated the integration of art and science & public participation are in a lot of the projects here.

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