The Food Issue 2013
South Burlington Anticipates Trader Joe’s; The Meteoric Rise of Hard Cider; Chocolate Reigns at 3 Squares
Champlain College Gaming Students Take Top Honors at GameFest
Vermont’s burgeoning video game development scene got another boost over the weekend — students from the Champlain College Game Studio in Burlington won top honors at GameFest, a regional game development competition hosted by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. Twenty teams from Champlain, Becker College, Rochester Institute of Technology and RPI vied for prizes.…
With Dominican Cacao, 3 Squares Chef Matt Birong Makes Vermont Farm-to-Table International
What happens to a Vermonter when he tries to leave the Dominican Republic with nothing but 20 kilos and a hunting knife in his bag? He’s detained — but only briefly, because the contents of the bag are pure cacao. “I got held up in the back room, but pretty soon they were laughing at…
News Quirks
Curses, Foiled Again After someone broke into a church in St. Charles, Mo., and stole an undetermined amount of ice cream from a freezer, police spotted Andrew Steven Jung, 24, three blocks away, with ice cream all over his face and clothing. Jung told officers he was an “ice cream junkie.” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) A…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): How we react to the sound of the wind gives clues to our temperament, said philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. The unhappy person thinks of “the fragility of his house and suffers from shallow sleep and violent dreams.” But for the happy person, the wind sings “the song of protectedness: its furious…
WTF: Is “Salad-Bar Syndrome” a Real Thing?
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: We just had to ask…
Demand for Hard Cider Surges, and the Industry Organizes
Finding Citizen Cider isn’t easy. But on a recent Friday night, dozens of people undertake the search, for the company’s weekly cider-tasting party. First they find the wooden sign in Essex’s Fort Ethan Allen that reads “Drink Cider”; then they push open a heavy wooden door at the back of the building and enter a…
Montpelier’s Summit School of Traditional Music and Culture Extends Its Reach
Despite Vermont’s reputation as a jam-band haven, traditional music has been a cultural force here since European settlers arrived in the 1700s. The genre gained momentum in the 1960s, when hippies hauling six-string flattops, Doc Watson records and African drums settled among Québecois fiddlers, church singers and guitar-pickin’ dairy hands. The Americana movement of the…
Book Review: Some Far Country by Partridge Boswell
Woodstock poet Partridge Boswell’s debut collection is titled Some Far Country, which raises a question right from the start. Are these poems about a desire for distance, a longing to escape to “some far country” of the mind or geography? Or are they about being consigned to distance, banished? Readers of Boswell’s precise, luminous poems…
Art Review: “User Required” at BCA Center
Step into Burlington’s BCA Center on the Saturday Night Fever-style illuminated-glass-brick flooring, and one thing becomes clear: The new exhibit, called “User Required,” is less about What does it mean? than about What does it do? And how? The floor is mesmerizing. When no one’s standing on it, it flashes a complicated series of color…
When Kitchen Calamities Strike, King Arthur Flour’s Baking Hotline Comes to the Rescue
My biggest kitchen catastrophe to date struck two weeks before my wedding day in 2011. I was elbow-deep in flour and cocoa powder, daydreaming of crafting my own three-tiered cake. At a particularly grim moment — and sporting a nasty burn on my forearm — I drank a glass of wine and ate a fistful…
Opinion: America’s Heritage: Going, Going, Gone
This month, I’ve noticed a fire sale on America’s heritage. New York City is selling its public libraries and schools — unique, historic, beloved neighborhood institutions — to private developers. They will tear them down, construct steel-and-glass luxury condos and office towers in their places, and tuck the books and kids back in on the…
How Doug Davis Revolutionized the Burlington School Food Program
On a recent Thursday evening in the Burlington High School cafeteria, Burlington School Food Project director Doug Davis stood before a small group of Burmese and Bhutanese families. The New Americans were recent additions to the greater Burlington community; each had been in the country for less than a year and a half, and so…
Letters to the Editor
Read to Secede Fear not, Mr. McClaughry [Feedback, “Pro-‘Union,’” April 10]: Should our fair state ever secede from the union, we have a most excellent Constitution already in place. Our Vermont Constitution is so excellent that there is no need for a Bill of Rights, as those rights are already enumerated in the Constitution. In…
A Ferrisburgh Farmer Aims to Bring Vermont Food to Urban Markets by Wind-Powered Barge
The hulking, unpainted plywood box that protrudes from an open-sided barn on Burroughs Farm Road in Ferrisburgh is just starting to look like a boat, if not an attractive one. But for farmer Erik Andrus, who conceived of the idea of building a 19th-century-style, wind-powered cargo barge to transport locally grown food from the Champlain…
