ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

Before there were foodies, there were hunter-gatherers.

If you were hungry around 10,000 years ago, you likely had a good sharp spear, a stone implement, or a bow and arrow to help. You moved stealthily through grassy inlets, dark forests, and rough waves, or the tall grasses of a savannah, looking for deer, rabbits, fish, elk, anything with a heartbeat. You were a scavenger, too, finding eggs and carcasses. You caught fresh seafood, and you knew what nuts and berries to pick that wouldn’t kill you. Your family had to survive off what you captured, so you had to be good at what you did.

Today, modern day eating includes two kinds of people: those who eat simply because they are hungry and those who grandstand. For the latter, it’s trendy to be aware and hopeful. Want arugula with that?

We are so caught up in our organic, pro-biotic, farm raised, grass fed, locally caught, CLA-rich meats and hydroponically-grown produce that we’ve lost sight of an important aspect of our diet – the courage it takes to know where it comes from. We’re not going to see Portland hipsters in oxfords gutting deer or upper middle class types in North Face jackets slitting a grassfed cow’s throat. We’re not going to see trendy, knee-booted girls in leggings pulling feathers out of chickens for their new, cute hair extension, then eating the meat, nor are we going to see the fedora-topped, sullen-faced musician spear-fishing his wild salmon from the Pacific. (Mark Zuckerberg may be more authentic than any hipster could ever hope to be.)

We are a culture of hypocrites. We shun the real hunter, wrapped in camouflage and Hunter’s Orange. We refuse to meet eye-to-eye the seasoned fisherman at the end of the pier – the one who will gut and fine fillet.

I was at a friend’s dinner party in Brooklyn recently, where long-haired grassfed beef burgers were going to be served at the lively hour of 11:30 p.m. The group’s conversation centered around the hairy cow whom we were to eat momentarily, as we grazed on organic, local cheeses and freshly baked artisanal bread and drank urban winery wine. All of it lovely, to be sure.

Later, biting into the bloody burger, I found myself wanting to be anywhere but with my mouth on the flesh of a once-hairy beast that had roamed a beautiful farm in upstate New York. I ate around the edges, avoiding the cool middle. Within moments of putting down the rare part, it had been snatched by not-so-polite fingers and horrified faces. I wasn’t meaning to be wasteful.

Who was the conscious consumer, and who wasn’t? To be graceless consumers of bespoke foods, as if each bite brings us closer to mindfulness. Some of us eat to survive: Cheez-its and Hamburger Helper. Some of us eat to feel whole: farmers’ market kale and quinoa. In the latter case, we should also ask ourselves if we are doing this to be more conscious, or simply to be more cool.

Between the Lines, is a weekly column navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of life and culture between city and country.

Image: Erik Brett

ColumnCan a bowl of comfort food really be called a “craze?”

I was walking down the street with a friend in Brooklyn, ogling the multitude of good-looking restaurants and resisting the urge to take a photo of every single one of them.

“Do you guys have the ramen trend, too?” my friend asked.

I paused and thought for a second. Had I not just been invited to dinner at a ramen shop a few weeks ago? It was all coming back to me.

“Yeah,” I said, putting out of my mind for the time being the absurdity of the phrase “ramen trend.” At least I could appreciate the fact that Brooklyn wasn’t many steps in front of Portland; they were serving our coffee, after all.

And then a mere 24 hours later, after a cold winter walk, ramen seemed like just the thing we needed, which is how I found myself at Chuko ordering a bowl of miso with a poached egg, scallions and pork, feeding right into what has also been deemed “ramen fever“ and the “ramen craze.”

“That is not ramen,” said my colleague when I texted her a photo of what I was eating along with the words, “Look, ramen is trendy now!”

“Would be better with some fennel,” responded another colleague, to which we both smirked.

For the record, the ramen was delicious, on par with a mean bowl of pho I once ate on the streets of Hanoi, sold of course at one tenth of the price and consumed while sitting on a pink plastic children’s chair. But was I really sitting at a corner restaurant in Brooklyn, watching young couples in well fitting, dark colored jeans and waxed canvas coats out for a walk on a Saturday afternoon eating a dish once reserved for cheap college students? A dish that was now deemed a “craze?” As much as I hate to admit it, yes. And I loved it.

As it turns out, the basics are back. Gussied up burgers are everywhere, upscale food markets sell syrups for homemade soda and even five star restaurants offer fries. But as a smart woman once indicated, even if you call a scarf “fabulous” it’s still a piece of fabric wrapped around your neck, just as a bowl of macaroni and cheese is still a bowl of macaroni and cheese, no matter how much imported aged cheddar and truffle oil you add.

If recent reports are true, even burgers are for rich people. And so are doughnuts – if they’re covered in a blood orange glaze, that is.

Comfort food will always be comfort food. Some of us just don’t want to talk about the fact that we actually like it. So we spruce it up to feel good about eating it. Call it a guilty food complex, but plenty of us refuse to admit to stooping to the levels of fast food – horrors! – yet we’re more than happy to eat a burger made with long-haired oxen meat and doused in a generous dollop of handmade mayonnaise. It’s artisanal, after all.

And when we’re feeling down, even the smartest, healthiest food lover might be tempted by a bowl of cookie dough.

The fact that people of all manner of socioeconomic status like the same foods is nothing extraordinary. A burger is still a burger, a quesadilla is still a quesadilla, a grilled cheese sandwich is still a grilled cheese sandwich and a fry is still a deep fried potato; they all hit a spot that a beet salad sprinkled with goat cheese just can’t.

So, when you’re feeling your winter funk, reach for that bowl of ramen and feel good about the fact that you’re helping to bring basics back. Just make sure to add fennel.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s weekly column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground, discovering what’s new and different in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to the culinary avant garde.

Images: Anna Brones, Nona Brooklyn, Anna Brones, Week of Menus

Yield’s “Making Fashion Without Waste” exhibit, a closer look at an art and a movement.

In the midst of Fashion Week here in New York, it might seem contradictory to go to a show on producing less waste when all around, fashion is flying. In eco-fashion, however, it’s always good to keep things in balance and to have a reality-grounded perspective about the fashion industry. However beautiful, however sustainable, designers have got to keep themselves in check when it comes to the waste they produce with every collection.

Some designers are better at this than others.

The Textile Arts Center launched Yield: Making Fashion Without Waste, on Friday night at their Brooklyn location, featuring zero waste designers Holly McQuillan, Caroline Priebe, Timo Rissanen, Julian Roberts, Tara St. James, David Telfer, Yeohlee Teng, Jennifer Whitty, Natalie Chanin, Carla Fernandez, Sam Formo, and Julia Lumsden.

Holly McQuillan, Yield Curator, designer and lecturer in the fashion design program at Massey University’s College of Creative Arts in Wellington, New Zealand was available to answer some questions pre-show about the exhibit and just how zero waste can be that when by the simple act of design and creation, there is excess.

Here’s what she had to say.

Yield curator and designer, Holly McQuillan

Would you consider zero waste design an art?
No, it’s a technique. Painting is a technique and can be an art form or a way to decorate your home. It depends on what you do with it, like any technique, its up to the practitioner. So some zero waste design could be considered art, but much of it is commercial design.

Julian Roberts and Holy McQuillan

Why don’t more designers use it if it helps maximize fabric use and create less waste?
Primarily for 2 reasons.
A: When you first start it is difficult to do well. Like any new skill that requires a bit of effort, zero waste can begin badly, many students try it once, it doesn’t meet their expectations and they assume its not possible. The reality is that it’s a technique, like standard pattern cutting and draping on a dress form and sewing, learning it takes time.

B: Because of this, the assumption is that you have no control over the aesthetic – something all designers want. The more you practice zero waste fashion the more you can shape the outcomes. Many good designers have spent 3-4 years being taught the skills of traditional fashion design (sketching, design development, drape, pattern cutting, construction) and then go into industry and continue to have at least some of these skills developed. This enables designers/pattern cutters to have control over the outcomes; a layman has a great deal more difficulty resolving a garment design because they don’t have the skill base.

Julian Roberts

Designers want to be able to immediately be as good at zero waste design as they already are at the traditional models, but of course most won’t be as they haven’t had years of learning in education or industry. So they assume the outcomes they initially see from their attempts are all they will be able to achieve. They also assume that the outcomes they see out there by existing zero waste designers are all that can be achieved, but every designer approaches it differently and therefore has different outcomes.

Recently I’ve been in conversation with one of the worlds best known producers of clothing about implementing a zero waste fashion collection to their ranges. If these guys can do it, anyone can.

Timo Rissanen

Can you talk about “cultural memory” inherent in our clothing and how that ties into zero waste?
I stumbled into zero waste while completing my Masters of Design at Massey University in 2004/2005. My masters (called First Son) wasn’t on zero waste fashion at all – it was exploring the role clothing can play in communicating cultural and collective memory. How clothing can tell a story and the appropriateness of garments as a medium for that. I was interested in the flexibility inherent in cloth, the intimacy of wearing clothing next to the skin, its ability to tell people about who or what you are, the multi-layered, adaptable possibilities of cloth and garments, and importantly the way garments, more than most other personal items, seem to be able to ‘hold’ the memory of the person who wore them.

Sam Formo

All of this combined into a collection of five garments that told a story collected from a group of people about a person important in my life – my father. He was an ordinary husband, father, farmer and friend who grew up in post WWII New Zealand and died in 1993 after a battle with cancer. I was using his life and the memories people had of him as representative of (masculine) culture in post war New Zealand and testing how clothing could be used to transcend time, to communicate narratives and loss to contemporary New Zealanders.

To achieve this I used a process of cutting 2D cloth (landscape) without cutting any part off, and transforming the cloth into five different garment designs that told a different story about my father and the time he lived in. The garments are not fixed, they can be ‘unmade’ and ‘made’ again and again using the relatively complex fastenings, folds and twists, so to be able to make them the way I intended them you need to know the story behind them. However, someone else could make a completely different garment with a different interpretation of a similar ‘story.’’ The garments were zero waste because nothing in memory or time is cut off and removed, nothing is ‘wasted,’ it all comes together to make us who we are, what our cultures are, both good and bad, whether we like it or not.

I didn’t know what zero waste fashion was, my manifestation of what we now call Zero Waste Fashion came about from my research into memory and a chance encounter with a pattern for a Kimono (which are usually zero waste). There were no sustainable goals in my master project, just a respect for craft, time, landscape and a desire to communicate an idea.

Yeohlee Teng

Do all the designers featured design with zero waste in mind all the time or was this just a challenge for some for Yield?
Not all the designers are always zero waste designers. All but Julian Roberts had garments that were zero waste in some way, which is why they were selected back in early 2010. Julian Roberts uses a technique he invented called Subtraction Cutting which lends itself well to zero waste fashion, and has been inspirational to Timo and myself in the work we do. So we challenged Julian to attempt a zero waste piece for this exhibition, it is not quite zero waste, but a vast improvement on his usual yield.

David Telfer explores a range of innovative approaches, one of which is zero waste design. Yeohlee Teng and Zandra Rhodes do not always design with zero waste in mind, but are always extremely mindful of how they use cloth. The garments in YIELD are demonstrations of what is possible. Today we could add many more examples, as more and more designers attempt this process, but that’s a whole other project.

Carla Fernandez

How does a fashion designer one day decide to call what they are creating “zero waste” when by the very act of designing they are creating waste?

I’m not even sure where the term came from! It should probably be called Zero Waste Garment Design or Zero Waste Pattern Design. We intentionally didn’t call our exhibition Zero Waste Fashion because not all the designers are zero waste fashion designers, so instead it’s YIELD: Making Fashion Without Making Waste. So when we make the garments in the show we don’t make any (or much) waste. It’s the easiest way to explain what the premise for the show is, and for what we do in general, so it seems to stick.

Principals of waste management ask that you first don’t produce any waste, then you reduce waste, then you reuse it and then you recycle it. So this process targets the first step in waste management, we don’t produce waste in production. Now a company/designer/consumer can choose to follow through with other equally important steps to reduce their environmental impact, or not. Obviously I’d prefer they used organic, recycled or otherwise sustainable fabrics. That they designed timeless garments that encouraged their consumers to buy less and local, That they transported their locally made garments in biodegradable packaging using transportation methods with minimized impacts on the environment.

Natalie Chanin

I’d like it if they encouraged their consumers to wash less, in cold water, and to not use the dryer. I would encourage designers and consumers to support mending services and local craft. And, when the garment can no longer be mended, for it to be reused in another capacity until its eventual disposal – ideally being recycled or composted. Zero Waste Fashion is one step in a possible series of steps. Zero waste fashion can also be about using the scraps for other purposes – such as what Natalie Chanin does, or designers could use textiles that can be recycled into new fabrics. Sustainable designers need to deal somehow with the resources they waste in the production of their garments. There are so many opportunities for designers, consumers and retailers to make a difference, zero waste fashion is one such opportunity.

Tara St James

There a number of important repercussions from designing in this way also:

Designing a zero waste garment is slower: It would be extremely difficult have a lead-time (from design to delivery) of 14 days (such as Zara has) for all but the most simple zero waste fashion design. While the waste reduction from this process would benefit from the vast scale of fast fashion – the more zero waste garments you make the greater the reduction of waste – the negative impacts of fast fashions speed of change would cancel this out. It’s quite the conundrum and something I struggle with a lot. I guess it depends if you believe its possible for designers to stop people from consuming/disposing of clothing the way they currently do.

It requires all members of a design team to consider every decision they make. The production of clothing has long separated out the roles of design and production. To successfully achieve a zero waste garment either the line needs to be developed by a person with strength in pattern cutting, 3D design and construction, or the team needs to work as one in a truly collaborative way. The pattern for a zero waste garment is the 3D design, the pattern and the marker all in one – the design is not a sketch.

You can’t copy an existing design easily: following fads can be difficult. The value in a zero waste design is its originality, its craft and its embedded energy. Garments designed through a zero waste design process will have moments that are unexpected, they wont look exactly like everything else you see in stores because it is difficult to draw a design or to look at an existing garment and say “I want to design something like that.”

ColumnFoodspotting’s top pick for a locavore in Brooklyn.

We launched our Locavore Guide to Brooklyn on Foodspotting this week. It’s full of all the local foodie hits in one of our favorite boroughs. Not following us on Foodspotting? You’re missing out on plenty of goodness.

Foodspotting sent us their own Brooklyn locavore find, from popular hotspot, Seersucker:

Carrot Soup, Purple Potatoes & Local Yogurt @ Seersucker Restaurant

In a borough known for its hip, locally-minded restaurants, foodspotter Ben H. recommends Seersucker’s simple carrot soup. Combining vegetable ingredients with a yogurt base, this soup is not only healthful, but makes for a filling, satisfying dish, too. -Amy Cao

Spotted by Ben H.

Check out the full guide and enjoy!

In Foodspotting Friday we highlight one of Foodspotting’s top picks from our Foodspotting guides. Be sure to check them out and tip us off to your own favorites in our Readers’ Picks guide. Want to start spotting food on your own? Join Foodspotting and take part in the food spotting revolution. It’s visual, it’s positive, it’s global and we are in love with it.

Images: David Berkowitz, Foodspotting

Made by hand in small batches in Brooklyn, NY.

Taking inspiration from things like native ritual medicine, Americana, outdated lore and geography, D.S. & Durga’s handcrafted perfumes and colognes make us swoon.

I was sent a few samples a year or so ago and just opened their Coriander for the first time to wear and was smitten.

Green Leaf, cracked Coriander seed and Magnolia are married into the most lush scent that’s hardly describable except to say it’s a floral meets almost masculine scent with the balance of both perfect. The minute I arrived at my get together, everyone got up close to smell.

I was thankful I’d showered…

Look for Lustables daily at EcoSalon. 100% gorgeous green finds, and never sponsored. Submit your favorite to tips@ecosalon.com

St. Kilda, founded in 2004 by Nora Kogan, incorporates recycled metals and conflict-free stones into all her jewelry. Based in the ever-blooming designer borough of Brooklyn, each piece is heritage worthy.

Loved Ring, $315

Last week we gave you Part 1 of  “Using Your Hands to Soothe the Brain,” featuring designer and author Natalie Chanin, textile artist and Ecco Eco founder Abigail Doan, and Jill Danyelle, Occupational Therapist and founder of FiftyRX3.

When I came across this blog entry from sustainable designer and writer Natalie Chanin, it not only piqued my perception of the positive effects of “women’s work,” but it brought to light a real aspect of how using our hands to do meaningful tasks can benefit our overall health and well being.

Chanin cites neuroscientist Kelly Lambert, author of Lifting Depression:

“Lambert shows how when you knit a sweater or plant a garden, when you prepare a meal or simply repair a lamp, you are bathing your brain in feel-good chemicals and creating a kind of mental vitamin. Our grandparents and great grandparents, who had to work hard for basic resources, developed more resilience against depression; even those who suffered great hardships had much lower rates of this mood disorder. But with today’s overly-mechanized lifestyle, we have forgotten that our brains crave the well-being that comes from meaningful effort.”

Here in Part 2, Owyn Ruck, one of the founders of Brooklyn’s widely respected Textile Arts Center weighs in on how using our hands not only enhances our sense of well being, but how it also creates a sense of self-sufficiency.

I think it is inherently human to desire self-sufficiency. Behind it all, we are just trying to survive. It may be cheesy and a half-way joke when people talk about the “apocalypse” and being able to construct a house or make clothing, but knowing how to use your hands to create things that are useful, never mind beautiful, is vital to our self-worth and provides a feeling that we can survive anything. As kids, we want to shoo the adult away (“I can do it myself”, “let me do it!”) and that continues through our lives, though as technology advances, we become more and more dependent on machines, or others, doing things for us.

We are often so removed from the process of creating, that we miss out on knowing the basic satisfaction of taking the time, care, and knowledge that it requires. Everything is so fast-paced, we are able to skip so many steps, that we forget how simply even knowing how to fix something gives us power. The act of being able to fix something we love, even if we didn’t create it from scratch, gives us a glimpse into the knowledge behind an objects making. It takes the power and control out of the hands of someone else and gives it right back to us – we get to relate to an object, and ensure that it is built to last. It’s a great sense of freedom. Even in a sense of finances, we are taught to feel that money equals freedom, but what if you didn’t even to need to buy half the things you did, you could make them or simply make something last longer? That’s freedom.

When we first started Textile Arts Center, a lot of the trust we had in the whole venture was this gut feeling that there was a general stirring and change within people, that they’d want to take classes and have the meeting place. Maybe it’s the same as you, we are around a lot of creative people in New York City and Brooklyn in particular and have seen this DIY trend growing for years now.

Without a doubt, I think that it’s because we have distanced ourselves from creating. Not only the feeling of creating, but people are sick of the same machine-made objects. Technology has allowed us to become lazy. We’re told it makes life “simpler”, but I think all it’s done is left us yearning for more meaning from the things we own and the objects we surround ourselves with. We place so much importance on the object itself, when we could feel much more satisfaction from the process of creating. It seems life is actually much more emotionally difficult and sad as we constantly search for more stimulation, and make an empty monetary exchange for objects that actually mean nothing.

In our not so distant past, grandparents and great-grandparents (depending on your age) still made their clothing, or at least knew how to mend them. Handmade items were more the norm but they treated these objects lovingly. My grandfather likes to retell the story of when he lost one of his few button-down school shirts that had been hand made and how much trouble he was in! Or Isa often recounts the sheets and towels that she still has of her grandmothers, that are all hand embroidered. A once common practice by young women who were beginning to create items for their home and married life.

We’re so absent from these ideas now, that they are hyper-romantic to us. A desire to go back to these days, where things seemed more lovely, I think is very common for 20-40 somethings. I think his has been a growing trend, and spans a lot of age ranges depending on where you live, but I can definitely say that it seems people are more adamant about it. In recent years, we’ve seen some great changes in attitude toward independent designers and fully hand made clothing. A willingness to buy less, higher quality, classic pieces for our closets, as our appreciation for the work increases. We desire uniqueness and rely on fashion and the things we adorn our bodies with to express it. What better way than with “one of a kind” and hand made items?

What do you think of the idea that working with our hands and the idea of it being a “mental vitamin?’

What do I think? It’s amazing! And it’s such a great visual. Going to your fridge in the morning popping a giant, sunny pill of creative energy. The new year rolls around and we resolve to make sure we exercise enough, and eat right. While these are important aspects of our physical and mental health, creativity is sadly often forgotten from this equation.

I wish trades would come back, where it was expected that we decide at an early age what we want to learn to be really good at so that we can rely on it for our livelihood. Something that allows us to exercise our right brain, and makes us money? What is better than that? And isn’t that the dream?

I see sort of an epidemic among my peers/young adults my age, of discontent with jobs and a “career path.” The most common answer I feel I hear to the big question of “what do you want to do?” is to simply not work in an office, or to “work for myself”. And I can understand the annoyance with us from an older generation – it comes off as entitled, that we shouldn’t have to work hard, we have enough experience and intelligence to do exactly what we want when we want to.

But what I’m starting to feel is that maybe it is about greater desire to get back in touch with this idea of trades, and using our hands. Or maybe just getting our “hands dirty” in theory. Even if not within a technically creative business, allowing the creation of ideas to be the creative part. Maybe there can be more emphasis put on this as we search for jobs, and what to do with our lives, rather than climbing the ranks to higher salaries at jobs that we could care less about. The emphasis is on getting the “good job” rather than the job that feels good. I think there is a chance that we are deterred not by the idea and fight of “climbing the ladder”, but where the ladder ends up.

Of course this comes hand in hand with a full change to our society and giving up such a consumerist and materialistic mentality. But I think that’s where the desire to make things, even as a hobby, comes in. There has to be a way that as a society we can foster this “mental vitamin” idea and add it to the list of things you automatically associate with good health and force yourself to make time for.

Image: Mr T In DC

I thought my hometown of Oakland, CA (home to the Eat Real Festival and famous urban farmers like Novella Carpenter) was pretty food obsessed. Then I went to Brooklyn.

It seems you can’t walk down a street in Brooklyn without stumbling over an artisan food purveyor or a fresh new take on the farm-to-table restaurant concept.

On a recent whirlwind trip to New York’s hippest borough, I kept getting whiplash trying to take in all the interesting foodie storefronts. The chilly air whipped around all the good smells and it made me hungry. I know I’m always thinking about food, but it seems, in Brooklyn, everyone else is too. The best thing about the food scene in Brooklyn is the way old school and new school blend together into a non-hierarchical whole. Deliciousness is deliciousness after all.

Here’s a random (not meant to be comprehensive) rundown of some of my favorite discoveries and some of my Brooklyn contacts’ not-so-secret faves:

Specialty Food:

Sahadi’s, specializing in Middle Eastern foods and bulk goods has been around since 1948. Still family-owned and still one of Brooklyn’s oldest and still best specialty food stores.

At the Brooklyn Kitchen you can buy cookbooks, housewares, brewing equipment and really good meat and housemade charcuterie from The Meat Hook, the store’s butcher shop. You can also learn skills like sourdough bread baking, beer brewing, fermenting, and culturing.

Urban Rustic, a grocery store and café dedicated to sustainable local foods, was founded by Aaron Woolf, co-director of the excellent food movement documentary, King Corn. With those ownership credentials, it’s not surprising that the store was built from hand-harvested and milled local wood, is powered by wind, and eschews the use of disposables. A model for the future!

Stinky Bklyn specializes in the stinkiest and best cheeses from all over the world, artisanal meats from hidden corners of the U.S. and beyond, as well as local pickles and other goodies.

Green Markets:

I visited the Sunday market at Smith and Carroll, where I was treated to the best pasteurized milk I’ve ever tasted from Milk Thistle Farm and enjoyed the “never-in-California” experience of buying carrots so cold they were frozen.

Locals also like The Borough Hall market and the Grand Army Plaza Market near Prospect Park.

Restaurants:

Though I didn’t make it to many restaurants, I’m glad I hit up Henry Public a modern take on a casual supperclub with delicious cocktails and juicy “hamburger sandwiches” with homemade buns, sustainable meat, and crispy fries.

Sorry I missed Henry Public’s sister restaurant, Brooklyn Social, modeled after the area’s old time private Italian social clubs.

Coexisting with the modern Supperclub trend, are the twin trends of lighter, healthier, soul food at Peaches and New York style barbecue at The Smoke Joint. Also sister restaurants.

Roberta’s features a tasty, schizophrenic menu of interesting pizzas (mozzarella, pancetta, pecorino, and Brussels sprouts (!)) alongside entrees like sea urchin with carrot granita, vanilla oil, and mizuna, and venison with persimmon, farro, and chestnut.

Bakeries and Coffee:

One bleary morning I walked out of my host’s house depending on my inner good coffee compass to find the best coffee around. With nothing to go on, I had to pat myself on the back when I managed to wander right to Café Pedlar, which features Stumptown Coffee roasted right there in Brooklyn.

I didn’t make it to the famous Gorilla Coffee outpost but wish I had.

Word on the street is that Marquet Patisserie has the best French pastries outside France. I didn’t get the opportunity to find out.

Likewise, I ran out of time before I could visit Baked New York, which seems to be the hands-down favorite of a number of my sources.

Miscellaneous Foodie Fun:

Next time I visit Brooklyn, I’d like to time it to hit up the Unfancy Food Show, which was started as a response to the excess of the Fancy Food Show and features uber-local goodies from small-scale producers. It started in a bar and has grown up quite a bit. 2011 will mark year five of the extravaganza.

I wish I’d known about Nona Brooklyn before I returned home. It’s a one-stop web-based clearinghouse for deliciousness that lets users find their favorite bakers, butchers, cheesemakers, picklers, and brewers at local farmers’ markets, street corners, and other alternative venues.

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

Image: BL Photography

In a tight economy, small businesses need to think outside the box just to exist, never mind to thrive.

So one might consider it pretty bold of Kate McGregor, owner and founder of (sustainable haven and four-year-old) Kaight in Manhattan to open a second location in Brooklyn. Others would say it’s a positive step in the right direction for sustainably minded boutiques worldwide, including the emerging designers that fill those spaces.

I caught up with her this week and asked a few questions about her shop’s evolving success. Here’s what she had to say:

Do you think naming your store Kaight has given the shop an opportunity for people other than those searching for sustainable designs to come in?

I definitely made a conscious effort to exclude any eco terms from the name of the store. I wanted the clothes and accessories to appeal to customers based on their quality, design and aesthetic. I don’t like the idea of promoting something only because it’s eco-conscious. I think it comes across as gimmicky.

What are some interesting ways you’ve been able to keep Kaight in the limelight?

I am very much aware that the traditional retail format is becoming outdated. I have launched several initiatives at the store and with designers to keep things fresh, and I’m always considering ways to make shopping at Kaight an experience rather than simply a commerce-driven event.

Kate McGregor, founder of Kaight holds a TimeOut NY accolade

Do you work with other designers/leaders in the NYC sustainable scene? Do you think that’s been part of your success

I do participate in a lot of events in the green community and work closely with many designers here.

Why the new shop in Brooklyn?

I’ve been considering a second location for awhile. I flirted with the idea of opening a store on the West Coast. The idea for the Brooklyn store developed during a random bike ride. It just clicked that this is where Kaight and I should be right now.

What’s your secret for success?

I think the biggest reason for my success is my physical presence in the store. Customers really like interacting with the businesses owner (me!) and I’m able to communicate my vision, as well as the stories of all of the products, better than anyone. I try to make each interaction with my customers as personal as possible and I think that’s why they keep coming back.

You can meet Kate at the Manhattan Kaight at her next event October 7th from 6-9 p.m. featuring Matt & Nat founder and creative director Inder Bedi as well as peruse the shop’s new fall line up.

Dear Rebecka:

Did you know I had a thing for Swedish designers? For years this has been true.
Don’t think I’m stalking you, but I think the combination of this and the fact that you live in Brooklyn, a place I’ve really come to love, makes my heart soar. I even like the fact you spell your first name with a k.

I also like how your jewelry is sort of raw and yet stunning with all your recycled metals and stones being transformed from potential ugly ducklings into handcrafted, beautiful swans. I’m smitten.

And what’s this I hear you base your lines on “Fairytale narratives?” Taking your line the extra step into fantasy? Oh you.

I love you, I mean, what I mean is that I love your line and your ideas for inspiration and even though I’ve already tied the knot almost 14 years ago, I still think the idea of using recycled platinum for custom engagement rings and wedding bands sounds divine.

I would’ve done that had I known you.

Can I commission you to create an exclusive EcoSalon Shops! pendant for everyone to wear so that we shine like no other at our event in New York City on June 4th? I’d really like everyone to come meet you, and I for one hope to be first in line. Don’t be scared, I’m really harmless.