Shared Learning & Translation
Making the Best of It: Dandelion is a year-long series of site-specific pop up food refuges and community dinners that will span NS16-17. The project features climate-change enabled (and often unwanted) edible indicator species, in order to engage publics in tastings and conversation about the risks of climate chaos, our business-as-usual food system, and the short term food innovations at our disposal.
Making the Best of It: Dandelion elected as its poster child the humble dandelion, Taraxacum officinale. Abundant, nutritious, adorable, symbolic, and disliked by lawn-owners, this invasive plant offers a model of eating and thinking about human and interspecies well-being on a variety of levels. It is highly adaptable, does well in disturbed ecosystems, and is of significant interest to a variety of species, from bees to our gut microbiome. In addition, its anatomical response to different environmental conditions makes it an interesting guide for exploring the complexity of climate instability.
At Northern Spark 2016, a custom pop-up “refuge” will offer free servings of dandelion, in food and beverage forms, and accompanied by a graphical system of information, provocations, and recipes.
Health Benefits of the Dandelion
Minnesota’s Changing Climate: a curriculum guide
- This guide was created by Hamline's Center for Global Environmental Education (CGEE) in cooperation with the Will Steeger Foundation.
- convention theory
- environmental justice
- food sovereignty
Food Advocates - practice crew
- feeding a crowd (education program)
- practicing, scenario play, trying different modes of documentation and sharing them for feedback
