4. Foodways Darmstadt: In Bewegung

The in Bewegung was a day-long distributed symposium that began with pancakes at sunrise and ended with cinnamon toast at sunset.  In between, we made ten stops at farms and gardens, restaurants and stores, food distribution centers and community picnic grounds. We liked title because it refers to movement in both its physical and political senses.  Our goal was to showcase a variety of local foodways.  At each site, we shared a map (created in phase one) and a snack, most often provided by the co-host who also gave a tour or brief talk.

At the IWZ (where we were living) we mounted a small exhibition of the maps and served sourdough pancakes with Wisconsin maple syrup:

At Eichwaldhoff, a family farm run along anthroposophic principles, Michael Förster gave a tour that included a newly born calf; we ate potato salad from his potatoes:

At Hofgut Oberfeld Saisongarten, farm director Jens Müller Cuendet taught us about a different form of community garden than we’ve seen in the United States, where the farmer plants long rows of two dozen different crops and then individuals maintain the cross section of these that is their farmshare.

Annika Schönecker, a lead gardener at Prinz-Georg-Garten, talked to us about the way they grow edible plants in an ornamental garden setting:

At the Darmstadt Wochenmarkt, market manager Berthold Peter and vendor Jakob Shartner of Gärtnerhof Shartner talked with us about both how the market as a whole works, and how one vendor negotiates between an interest in own-grown produce and customer demand for variety:

Chris und Marion Pepper, proprietors of Whiskykoch Laden, prepared a stunning cocktail of lentils that was perfectly matched to the Ardbeg whisky we tasted.  Their understanding of our project was nowhere more evident than in the barley map visible in the second picture.

Miriam Heil (right) gathered ten enthusiastic volunteers at the Foodsharing Fairteiler organization made us smoothies to demonstrate how they fight food waste by gathering and distributing discarded but still edible foods from grocery stores and bakeries.

The animated duo of Christine Eisenhauer and Claudia van Lier at the Solidarische Landwirtschaft Darmstadt were persuasive spokespeople for the burgeoning movement of Community Supported Agriculture in Germany.

Monika Müller’s brilliant map on a plate at Café Rodenstein showcased all her local, regional and global sources in one dish.

Saturdays are far too busy for the staff at Yazgülü Supermarkt  to be available to talk directly with our group, but we were able to eat their homemade baklava and drink tea while reviewing with participants the map of their global network our sources that we had created earlier in the week with Fatma Bagatur.

One of the highlights of the day was the dinner BBQ at Datterich-klause where consummate host Michael Bode-Böckenhauer embraces the concepts of community in his visionary project.

We could not have a better finale than Ute Ritschel‘s cinnamon performance in the gathering darkness, with half her kitchen hauled out into a courtyard and half her neighborhood gathered for the event.

You can find a link to the complete program here.

Soon, you will be able to find an active link [HERE] to Hans-Peter Wollman’s video of Part Three.  He was actually on vacation and returned to Darmstadt for the day of the in Bewegung, tirelessly traveling with us from dawn to dusk to comprehensively record the project–but then he went back on vacation so editing will have to wait. We’ll also announce it on our blog where you can already see the step by step updates we posted as the project evolved, in reverse order of course, and in German.

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