For the benefit of everyone here and also myself with just your rundown of how did you decide to start this magazine and the website before it, and the Instagram before it, and also how does that tie into the work that you were doing before as a food writer and journalist?

Yeah, so it's actually perfect because Ray and I were working together at this incredible website called Core 77. We were editing, for those of you who might not be familiar with it, it is an incredible industrial design resource. It's one of the oldest design websites on the internet. And it was my crash course into the thrilling world of industrial design. And this was in 2010ish. And at the time, most design websites beyond Core 77 were really focused on furniture and lighting as the kind of primary example of design.

But what we were seeing when we were traveling to different design fairs and seeing student work is that there was a lot of really interesting food design projects that were coming out. So design students in Stockholm who were rethinking food storage without a refrigerator and looking at terracotta as a naturally cooling material or design students in the Netherlands looking at apple production and what that might mean.

And it was this burgeoning kind of interesting intersection and there weren't really boundaries around it and no one was really writing about it. And I'm a first generation Chinese-American woman. My parents immigrated from Taiwan, and food has always been a central part of the way I self-identify and understand culture. And so food has always been very, very important to me.

And at the time I was also like, do you remember the Brooklyn Flea? Everybody had a popup restaurant moment that was also happening at this time. And so I was part of a Brooklyn flea popup food business called Lone Star Empire with another Asian American from Houston, Texas. And the two of us were making Texas style barbecue sandwiches at the Brooklyn Flea. And so I had this kind of ongoing love affair with food, and I was obsessed with industrial design and I was like, well, I also like a side hustle.

And so I thought, well, maybe I'll just start a little nights and weekend project where I will start documenting and writing about these small projects that were kind of appearing in the ether. And that's what became MOLD. It was supposed to be like a Tumblr page, and I asked a friend to help me re-skin a theme for Tumblr, and the friend that she connected me with was like, you know for the amount of energy it's going to take for me to re-skin a Tumblr page, I might as well just build a website for you. And I was like, oh, okay, cool...

...and that was the first iteration of MOLD.

So why do you call it MOLD?

I thought about a gazillion different ideas, and I landed on MOLD because I wanted it to be an anti-food site because it's kind of this weird gray territory and people still don't really understand what it is. They were like, ‘Food design? Is that plating food?’ And I was like, ‘Yes and…’ So I wanted it to feel a bit provocative and as those designers in the building know, we use molds as a way to give form and shape to the amorphous. And so molds are very much part of the industrial design process too. So that's where I landed on the name.

Oh, nice. Double entendre. Okay, the question that I really want to know, and it's kind of a two part question, is… going through your work… obviously MOLD is perhaps what people know you for the most?

For sure.

But you started this new work with Field Meridians, and then also I learned recently that you were a restauranteur of sorts? And you have a book club that's featured on your website and you have this nature school… a lot of your nature school participants are here. Can you raise your hand if you’ve been to Nature School? I talked to a couple of people, I know they're here. And you also have a calendar on the website that documents relevant events around the city. And you have dabbled it seems like in product design or maybe more than dabbled, I don't know, but recently anyway?

You seem to have all of these identities, and I did make a list of these identities for you… Educator, Advocate, Artist, Designer, Curator, Publisher, Writer, Professor, Editor, Gardener, Eater. Are you all of those? And from the perspective of Standard Issue, which is a firm founded on multidisciplinary work. Do you see yourself as multidisciplinary? Are you one discipline that just sits at the center of everything?

I think this is a question that I'm continuously wrestling with. And it's funny because I am an educator. I teach at Parsons, I teach industrial design students and they just wrapped their final project, which is a manifesto. Everybody has to write a manifesto about who you are as a designer, and I have to often take my own advice. And I just basically said to them, this is not set in stone. It's something that you'll revisit all the time. It will always change, it will always unfold.

And whenever I go to a cocktail party, I just say ‘I make magazines for myself and for other people.’ But the way I actually think about my work is I think of myself more as a facilitator and I kind of think of myself as the person who builds the scaffolding, and then I work with really smart, talented, interesting people to then build the thing behind it or fill in what's in between. And so that's definitely my superpower—I think it is just working with really, really talented, interesting collaborators.

Cool. Yeah. So out of all of the media that you have used— print, digital, meetings, education systems, calendars, food, what do you think has been the most effective medium for you? Or is that a trick question?

I think it depends on effective in what way? I think that my brain is naturally organized to make a magazine. If anybody ever has a problem they want to solve, I'm like, ‘Oh, we should make a magazine.’

I've been obsessed with magazines since I was in high school. I grew up in suburban Houston. Houston, for those of you who may not know, is quite diverse, but very first generation. I grew up with a lot of kids who are children of immigrants and magazines...this is in the nineties... magazines were really my window to the world. And so I was obsessed with magazines. I would beg my mom to let me have subscriptions to magazines, and she would always say no. And so I would go to weird places and look at magazines from Hong Kong or look at magazines from New York, and it just was always the kind of thing I wanted to do.

I think as I've gotten older, I also recognize that education and being in conversation with young people who want to change the world is also very grounding and important to me and my practice. And I teach this class. I've taught it for six years on and off I think. And for the most part, we've read many of the same texts over and over again. And every year when I read them I'm like, ‘Wow, I didn't think about it that way.’ One of my students two days ago… part of her manifesto was ‘Design with the trouble.’ And I was like, ‘Whoa, what is that about?’ And she was like, ‘This is from that reading, blah, blah, blah.’ And I was like, ‘Really?’ She was basically saying designers don't need to have solutions. Part of the work of design is pointing a finger and highlighting the troubles of the world. I told her, ‘I'm just going to use your line everywhere I go.’

That's so interesting. I feel like I taught art history a couple times at the undergraduate level and my students would see paintings that I'd seen a thousand times completely differently than I ever had. So I can definitely empathize with that.

Yeah, it's just so important for us to consistently be having these conversations. And unfortunately, I don't think culturally we have a lot of spaces to be in dialogue with people and hold space for varying opinions. And unless you are a religious person, you don't get to read a text with other people and be like, ‘This is what I thought about this text. What did you think about it?’ And I really find joy in being able to do that because I’m really a nerd at heart, and I really love having those conversations and leading those conversations.

So is that where the Earthseed Book Club came from?

Yes. And I am just bossy and I just want everyone to read Parable of the Sower. I was like, this is the most important book for everyone to read right now. And it ended up kind of being true. I have always had a deep connection with the book Parable of the Sower because it opens on the main character, Lauren Olamina's birthday, it's also her father's birthday who's a pastor, and it's July 20th and my birthday is July 20th. So I was like, ‘Oh my God, Octavia Butler speaking to me!’ And so I also this very intimate relationship with this book, but I hadn't read it in so long. And then I was like, ‘Oh my God, July 20th, 2024 is happening. We need to revisit this text.’ And so we started this process of having this book club to do a community reading of the book together.

And then as MOLD is, we were kind of late. We were supposed to just publish everything in July and it's November, we're still publishing. But it was insane the timing because in the book there is this kind of demigod who's like a media star that gets put into public office, and it happens in November. I don't even know what day it was, but it’s the same day that Trump is reelected. And so all of a sudden on the internet, on social media, people are posting passages from Parable of the Sower. And I was like, what's going on?

I feel like it's a book that's about what it means to survive very uncertain and quite violent times. And the answer is a varied community and a certain kind of trust. And there's been incredible people who have talked about this. If you're really interested, adrienne maree brown and Toshi Reagon have a podcast about the book, so you could also read the book with them. But I just think there's also so much about food and seeds and the critical importance of being able to grow your own food that is woven into that book. And so it felt like a good text for us to read as a community in MOLD.

Are you planning to read other books? Is it a one-time thing?

We don't have any planned.

We were like, maybe we should read Parable of the Talents together. I've never read it, but my colleague said that it's really hardcore. So I was like, I don't know, we might need a little softness right now.

Well, in line with I guess the lifespan of MOLD, and I mean your work obviously spans longer than this, but the lifespan of the MOLD Magazine starts in 2017, which is obviously a very intense moment in the world. Trump was just elected and now it spans to 2024.

I feel like so much has changed since 2017 in terms of the political environment, the economic environment, the way that people relate to each other or don't relate to each other, technology in good ways, in bad ways, AI in good ways, in bad ways. So did you notice a change either in yourself and the way that you wanted to put ideas out there or in the readers and the people who were engaging with your work in that span of time?

Wow I didn’t even think about that, but yes, for sure. We actually started MOLD in 2013. We published our very first set of stories, and in 2014, I learned about the student work. I wrote a story about the student work. It was a graduate project from this Australian student at the time, Gemma Warriner. And she put together a series of posters that was basically alerting people to this white paper that the United Nations had put out that basically saying here's 10 things we have to do right now in order to avoid the coming food crisis. And I was like, ‘What? A food crisis? What are you talking about?’ And the UN basically said that if we keep eating the way we do, we won't be able to produce enough calories as a human population to feed all the people. And that just sounded terrible. They predicted that this would happen by 2030, which is now around the corner…

And I don't know if we're going to make it to 2030. But that project did what it was supposed to do. It just totally shifted my consciousness. And so because of that project, I reoriented the editorial focus and MOLD to being an invitation to designers to offer solutions for the coming food crisis.

With every problem I ever want to solve, a magazine is the answer. The problem I was having in that moment, with the first issue, from a brand perspective, was people were still like, what is food design? What are you doing? Why are you writing about food and design together? It was very confusing for people. So I was like, well, let me just make a magazine and we can just explore different facets of what it could be together as a community. The first issue was about designing for the microbiome.

And you can look at it, and it's all these new fangled ideas… like lab grown meat and hydroponic farms and these kind of technological solutions for the food crisis. And you can see the evolution over the course of the six issues. The last issue was always supposed to be called ‘Design for a New Earth’. We conceived of it in 2016. I grew up in Houston near NASA. I grew up with lots of astronauts and aunties and uncles who worked for NASA. And so originally I was like, yeah, we were talk about designing for space. And then the closer we got to it, I was like, oh, that sounds so terrible because now going to space is synonymous with this bro-y escape hatch available only to the ‘Elon Musks’ of the world to escape Earth because we're just going to burn it to the ground.

And so I was like, clearly that's not the conversation I want to have. The closer we got to it, the more I really started learning. And I was like, it's actually about designing for a relationship with soil. Design for a New Earth. We all need to be in relationship with the land that we're on and the soil that actually feeds us. And so that's kind of the full circle… where we're talking about the microbiome in the first issue and then in the last issue, we're talking about the microbiome of the planet. And I think that's a huge shift.

I learned over the course of the seven years that the world I want to inhabit and the world that I want to contribute and build is not one where corporations have the power to decide what I can eat and how much it should be and where I can get it. That is not the vision of the world that I want to live in. And I felt like the best way to reorient myself was to be an advocate for a vision of the world where we all have a relationship with the food that we eat and a relationship with the land that it comes from.

It's interesting because there is this push and pull in your work. It is both forward looking and looking to technology to solve some issues, but your work also draws on indigenous practices or traditional ways of dealing with food growth and sharing of food and feeding people. So I wonder how you think about things. Is there something coming that we should be excited about from a technology perspective? Or is your work more about remembering practices that have been forgotten?

I am not a Luddite. I'm not like ‘No technology’. I think we need all hands on deck for the upcoming polycrisis that we're currently in. I think maybe all of us know that no one else is going to save us. We are going to save ourselves.

And so that is the work of Field Meridians. It's about knitting together community, creating a sense of belonging where we live, knowing our neighbors. That is the work I want to invest in in the coming years because I think that's going to be the most resilient form of design— building living infrastructures, building ways that support us as a community, and building ways that support us as a place called New York City.

So I mean, can you talk a little bit about Field Meridians and how you got there and what is your mission?

Totally. So during the pandemic, I had a nine month old child and the George Floyd protests were happening, and I felt really lonely and very scared, really. I was like, I don't know what's going to happen.

Simultaneously, there was a proposal to build a condo next door to me. I live in a residential historic district called Crown Heights. It's all very low lying brownstone buildings. It is a historic district because the elders in our community fought this 20 year fight to landmark our district. And now we're one of the very few districts, landmark districts in New York City, that is predominantly brown people. And this developer came in in this very shady way to take this land that was part of a church. And we had neighbors that basically coalesced around this issue and started organizing other neighbors against this development. We ended up getting railroaded by the Landmarks Commission, and despite our efforts, the condo is now built. But the energy that I felt from organizing with my neighbors and knowing my neighbors was really sustaining.

And I realized in that moment that that was the work I actually wanted to do. I wanted to continue to build these infrastructures with my neighbors so that we could continue being ready for whatever might happen. I am not a organizer and I'm not really an administrator.

I like to make things. And so when I was thinking about what shape this thing I wanted to do was, I was like, I've never worked in a nonprofit organization. I don't know what artist organizations look like, but I have worked in media my whole life. And so I know I want to make things that are site specific to my neighborhood. I wanted to continue publishing other people's work.

And I also wanted to go back to my roots, which is music. I worked at a music magazine in my early twenties. I love music people. Music people are the best kind of nerd—high level nerdom about this ephemeral beautiful work of art. I miss music people. I wanted to have a pirate radio station. I want to hang out with DJs again in my forties.

So that's what we're doing. And as this work has unfolded, many people, including some people here, have attended the Nature School. The first project we did was we installed a solar kitchen in our local park. Has anybody ever cooked with a solar oven before? It looks like a giant satellite dish.

Yeah...

It's kind of crazy. It's a crazy provocative looking object. It literally looks like a satellite dish and you're concentrating the rays of the sun into this very hot point. You can grill chicken on there. It's really insane. So we installed it in our park and then we invited local restaurants, local artists, and local cooks to come and do workshops, like free workshops, in the neighborhood over the course of the week of the solstice. We used it as a provocation to ask our neighbors, what do you think the future of food should look like in our neighborhood? And people had so many different answers. It was so incredible.

And then I started this corporate job and I disappeared for two years. And then in the midst of my corporate job, as it was crushing my soul, I was like, oh, all I want to do is go back and do Field Meridians. And so when I was released from my bondage, that's when the Nature School started. I had taken my little people to this awesome nature center upstate called T Town Nature Preserve. It's on a lake and there's a really easy hike around the lake and there's animals like falcons and owls and snakes and other things. So you can go see animals and you can also walk the lake. And we were walking and I was like, ‘Yo, it would be so cool if Crown Heights had a nature center because we should also know about the possums and the raccoons and the squirrels.’

I don't even know what species of squirrel lives here. Does anybody know? I bet Dan knows. I don't know. But I just feel like there's all these animals that we live with in the city and we don't know anything about them. I don't know anything about, I kind of know more about the lifecycle of a rat because of the rat problem we have now. We've all been educated, but we just really don't know anything about these animals that we are in consistent relationship with. I didn't know anything about the street trees that live on our block. I just was like, I don't know anything about the nature in the city, and I would love to have a nature center in Crown Heights that talks about these things.

I was really fixated on this idea when I left my job. And my friend was like, well, ‘It's really expensive to have a space in New York. Why don't you just do the programming you want to do, but have it distributed?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, totally.’ So that's where the Nature School started. And we've done two cycles. We did a spring cycle of three months and then a fall cycle of three months, and we did about 30 events in each cycle. And they're all artist-facilitated adult activities like workshops. Some of them are making, some of them are just kind of observing, but they're all an invitation to notice the nature that surrounds us in the city through creative practice.

So then I guess the tough question about all of this is New York City is a space of economic disparity, great economic disparity that's mapped out in the geography of the city. There are food deserts and then there are very expensive neighborhoods where there are very fancy farmer's markets, which is very funny. I grew up in Pennsylvania where the farmers lived down the street, so you would just go to the farmer's market and buy produce from the farmer. But here it's some sort of badge of sort of class in a way? So how do we reconcile? And then in a related sense, is there a call to action to designers? And then I guess a second question is how should designers be aware? What should they be doing or thinking about that can address some of this stuff?

I mean, food apartheid is real in our city, and we call it food apartheid because it's by design. It is by design that certain neighborhoods and certain communities are denied access to affordable, nutritious, fresh foods. As designers, going to go back to what my student talks about, we should be designing with the trouble. We should be designing to point out these disparities.

I think that my biggest blind spot is really about policy, and it's something that I don't know if I'll ever know that much about. But what I do know is that design holds space for collaborative expertise. And the kind of superpower of designers is being able to synthesize so many different strands of information in order to create work that then points out, highlights, and offers solutions at different scales.

The work that we are doing for Field Meridians is we want to plant a food forest, and for many people that might not be a design question. For me, it is a design question because the work that I'm thinking about is, well, how do we design a long-term container that will allow people to have a kind of communal visioning process that feels equitable, that is reparative, and that will change and shift with the needs of the community? And so that's kind of the design question that I'm asking right now.

And I think that one of the most powerful shifts in design that I've seen in the short time that I've been writing about design is this comfort amongst designers to be open to the process. And that itself being the design as opposed to having this kind of fixed final product. The final delivery, which is the hard launch, is such a capitalist construct. It is like, who are you launching for? And young designers are like, no, design is the process. The thing that I want to design is systems or the experience or whatever it might be, which some gatekeepers might be like, oh, that's not design. But I love that the walls are getting a little fuzzier and people are just more comfortable with the unfolding of things.

And that's kind of where I am in my life as well. Like, oh, I don't know what's going to happen. We may never get land, but let's try to do it together and see what comes next. Who knows.

So I have two more… and I'm mindful of making sure we have enough time for q and a, but I have two final questions and one goes really detailed and one goes really big. So the first one is how did you plan, or how did you understand how to present the work from an aesthetic perspective for the graphic designers here? How did you determine an aesthetic for the magazine? And then I noticed that it sort of shifted in the last issue and you used a different paper stock and you have an insert. So is there something behind that or did you work with a different designer? And then the bigger question I'll ask after.

Okay. The answer is I didn't determine the aesthetic choice, honestly. If they were up to me, it would have been so boring and so whack. I again really feel like my superpower is building the structure and being like, you can fill it. And I am also really relentless. If I think something should happen, I will ask somebody until they answer me. I'll do it in a nice way, but I'll be like, ‘Hey, you haven't responded. Hope everything's okay. What do you think about my proposal?’

So I basically emailed Eric. I’d seen his work when he was still a student, and I was really moved by his work. It was my first time seeing a design project that I felt an emotional connection with. And so when it was time for me to design the magazine, I was like, I'm just going to reach out to this kid who I have never met before, but we had some mutual friends in common and he was literally moving out of New York to Montreal to start this big new job. And I was like, eh. And he basically was like, yeah, I'll totally do it, but only if my friend can do it with me. And I was like, sure, whatever. And so Matt Tsang came along. Matt was also working at this big new job with Eric, and the two of them set the direction for the print magazine.

There's no way that I would've been able to envision the aesthetic without them. They fully set that up and I'm so grateful to them for their vision because I don't think we would've had the impact that we have without their art direction and design. The last issue is different as far as paper stock is concerned only because it's our final issue and we wanted to have it as an offering. We worked with a different printer. It's a very nice paper stock. We kind of pulled out all the stops. The poetry insert was a kind of nice add on. There's even a scent intervention if you want to smell the magazine, it is our kind of swan song. So I think that that's the reason why it's different, but it's still the same scale. It's still the same people who worked on it. One of the things that I feel really grateful for is that the people that we started the magazine with are the people who we ended the magazine with.

So my co-editor who I met at a butter meetup, and I kind of randomly asked him to, I was like…

Wait can you say more about what a butter meetup is? I think I’d like to go to one of those...

Exactly, exactly! Yeah, so Johnny is a food scientist and had just come out of a stint doing the Fermentation lab at Noma, and he's also a writer. He's brilliant. It's nice. And he had organized this butter meetup in London and a friend of ours from Copenhagen was flying in with butter to go to this butter meetup. And she was like, yeah, just meet me at this natural wine bar in London after the butter meetup. And I was like, what? Clearly, I'm going to go to the butter meetup and I'm going to eat all the fancy bread that all these fancy butter people are bringing with them.

Oh my gosh.

And I just started talking to Johnny and we had all these weird connections, and I was like, this guy's so nice, and it's so weird that you organized this meetup. And I was like, I'm doing this magazine about the microbiome and I can talk about design all day, but I don't know restaurant world people. And he knew all these restaurant world people because of Noma. And so he was this perfect partner. And then after we finished the first issue, I was like, okay, Eric, Matt, Johnny, that was cool. So no pressure. You don't have to work on this anymore. You could tell me. You can pass a baton to somebody else if you want, or I can find someone else. And everybody was kind of like, Hey, that was cool. We should just keep doing it. And I was like, okay, cool. And we ended up doing six issues together.

We have moved continents, had children, breakups, people... it was crazy. We went through a pandemic together. Jena Myung designed the last three issues, and Eric and Matt really focused on art direction, but that was really the only change to our team. And even on the website, the same guy who was like, don't worry about the Tumblr theme, I'll just make you a website. I still work with him now on MOLD, and so yeah, I'm lucky.

He designed the Field Meridians website too. I am kind of a keeper of people. If I like you, probably I'll just probably be like, Hey, what are you doing? Should we do something else together?

So yeah, in that vein then the big question is what's next? You were talking about doing an exhibition and obviously you’re going to continue with Nature School…

Totally. So we are starting this Sunday at Rodeo Bar in Crown Heights. We're going to be starting a weekly winter gathering where we're going to start planning next steps for planting this food forest. We don't have any answers, we only have questions. So if you're interested in participating, please join us. So that's the next kind of phase of Field Meridians is this food forest vision. We don't have land. I mean, I just mentioned that I have blind spot for policy, and then I'm also leading the policy group. So if you have vision for policy, please help me.

Cool. Cool. Well, thank you so much.

Thanks! Want to open it up?

Hi LinYee. I've known you forever. Anyway, thank you first of all for your candor. I really enjoyed everything you had to say. And I was struck because you brought up some very big issues, almost joyfully like the soil crisis or we're not having enough calories in our lifetime, which to me usually is presented in a doom and gloom way, or here's a very solutions oriented way to achieve policy or a solution. And I feel like you're coming at it through exploration. And I'm curious what is LinYee's view on the future? Are we a pessimist or an optimist? Where are we settling?

Yeah, Laney, you've known me for a really long time, and Laney's one of my most favorite humans because we went to Dollywood together. We had a design client that was based in Tennessee, and we went to Dollywood together and I was actually listening to a Dolly Parton duet today, and I was thinking about you, and now I'm seeing you here, which is amazing. I am a 100% optimist, but I also am like, we're in late stage capitalism. Nobody's going to help us out.

I feel bad for my students sometimes because I'm like, so how do we remember that abolitionism is a practice? Like you are all paying lots of money and getting this master's in industrial design and the world is on fire. So I'm not an optimist with my eyes closed. I'm an optimist because I believe in us and I have to— I am a mom.

I also just feel like time and time again, I have been shown the kindness and generosity and beauty of people. And I think that we are all. I just have to be optimistic that we can all be open to learn new tricks. So yeah, I feel like, yeah, that's it.

Nice. Like a hardworking optimist.

Yeah. I mean, I just feel like we should all just be doing this work right now. This is my bossy side. I feel like anything we can do as designers to knit together, community, however you define it, is going to be the work of the next foreseeable future. I think there's no other hedge against uncertainty except for knowing your neighbors. That's it.

That's all it is. I don't care if you're like Elon Musk and you want to go to Mars or bury yourself into a hole in New Zealand or whatever. But that's not, it's just not the answer. I also don't want to be in New Zealand with whatever Elon Musk gross. I want to be with my weird DJ friends doing pirate radio and broadcasting from our weird witchy food forest, I think that's just...if it's the end of the world I would much prefer to go out that way.

Nice.

Yeah.

So not in a hole with Elon Musk. I think most of us would agree with that.

I have a very boring, but a question I'm very curious about, as designers, we always have to think about how we sustain ourselves and how we sustain the projects that we want to be when they're idealistic, especially. How do you do that now financially?

I have clients sometimes, and I only say this because this was literally the worst financial year for me ever. I was like, whew! Got to go back to that corporate shackle. It was a very hard year for me. And then out of nowhere I got two client projects and now I'm like, oh, I made all the money I was supposed to make this year and the last six weeks were great. This has always been a tension in my work where after we published the first issue of MOLD, I was convinced that all these food corporations would be knocking on my door and being like, let me give you money to advertise. And zero people called. And I was like, oh man, what are we going to do? And I just kind of came to a decision after the first issue that I am not an ad sales person and I don't want to learn this new business of doing ad sales.

I'd rather just be an editor and just recognize that it's not going to make money. The magazine will be. And because I've made many magazines in my life and worked for many magazines, I was like, the magazine is the most expensive business card you can ever make. And that's kind of what it's been. And so I've been lucky up until this year to have client work and that's paid for MOLD, which isn't a necessarily healthy business model. I do not encourage people to do that. Basically, it's still my side hustle, right? I am just like, let me make money and then just dump it into my art project. And so I don't have an answer for that. I just also know that it is freedom for me.

It means that we published Mold when it was ready. The first issue, I was so stressed out, we had kickstarted it and I was like, oh, everybody is expecting me to deliver it on this date and it's not even ready. And I was like, I had so much shame around it and I felt so bad. And my husband was like, dude, literally zero people are expecting that. You're literally the only one who's worried about it. I was like, really? And so that's actually been one of the best lessons of MOLD has been the trust in Community time.

Even the Seeds issue, Issue five, we started it in October of 2019, and then the world stopped and I was like, guys, we're not going to deliver it on time. And people were like, what are you talking about? We're in a global pandemic. And I was like, oh, yeah, okay. I was just in such a daze. I was like, I had this baby. And I was like, I just wanted to work. But the timing was perfect because when it actually came out, it was exactly what we needed to be reminded that seeds, we've always carried seeds through times of crises that they've always been a connection to a time before and a hope for the time after. It's always this arc, this beautiful trust that something is going to be abundant. So it was a good timing. Yes.

On the issue of doing things for money and you were expecting all the advertisers to, what would you have done if Kraft or FritoLay called up and said, I want to run an AD?

At the time I would've been like, yeah. I would've probably charged them not enough money for sure. I would've been like, yeah, $500. Is that cool? But it's like sliding doors. I don't know what would've happened. There's years that PepsiCo has a design team...

So for years I was like, you owe me money PepsiCo. I am the only food design magazine there! You should be advertising with me. And they of course never did. But I don't know. In retrospect, it was a true gift of freedom to be able to do it advertising free. I basically just kind of decided when the first issue was kickstarted. We raised $37,000. Doesn't seem like a lot of money now, but at the time it felt huge. And I was like, we'll just sell through the issues that we print and then just make the next one. And that's kind of been the model. I just trust that I've sold enough copies to pay for the next one.

Yeah. You do have merch though.

We just now do. For the first time in 10 years, we started to make merch. I was like, do we need to make more things in the world? We tried to do it very responsibly, but I also was like, maybe we'll make some money. This hasn't happened yet, so we'll see.

We’ll all go and buy the merch! And today you posted your gift guide, which I really appreciated.

Ok, anyone else?

I have a question. Yeah. In terms of the food forest, can you talk a little bit more about how that concept came to you and what motivated you to want to do it, and what are the biggest factors in terms of being able to successfully implement that?

Great question. So the food forest, I don't even remember where the idea came from. It is through the Nature School really. Then, this summer I was in Seattle with my kids. Even before I went, I knew I wanted to plant a food forest with Field Meridians. That's going to be our North star. And then we were staying in this neighborhood.

It just so happened that I was staying in the neighborhood with one of the largest food forests in America. It's public land and it's completely volunteer run with the exception of two staff members. That just started. It's the first time in 10 years that they've had staff members. And it was the most magical experience. And it really felt like the universe was like, yeah, that's what you should be doing.

I was in Seattle for six weeks. We went to the food forest six times over the course of six weeks. I was so obsessed, and it was amazing to see the forest change just in that six week window. My kids were obsessed with it. I made all my friends go. I made my parents go.

So a food forest is basically a planted forest with edible plants, and it's designed along permaculture rules, and it's anchored by groves of edible trees. And it has different layers, including the kind of mid layer. This is not the ecological term. There's ground cover, there's bushes. And I thought it was in my mind when I first heard about a food forest, I was like, yeah, of course a public place where people could forage and eat things from the forest. But when I was actually experiencing it, I just was like, this is actually a classroom. It's teaching us about what can grow on this land at what season. It's teaching my kids how to know if a berry is ripe.

It was just so, so beautiful to just witness it unfold. And the fact that it was fully volunteer run was also so inspiring to me. I worked a volunteer day. I wanted to just kind of get the vibe. This woman was basically like, I come here every week to volunteer. This is my therapy. This is how I make friends. This is where my community is. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. So I just want that for us too. I feel like we deserve it. And I highly encourage wherever you live to start working with your neighbors to also do this. We don't have to be the first door only. I want everyone to be like, let's all plant a food forest in our neighborhood. Maybe we could plant a food forest in Gowanus and it could help remediate the air that's here. I don't know. I am obsessed with the idea of an edible city, and I think it's just one step towards that.

How much space do you need for a food forest?

According to ChatGPT, it's like an eighth of an acre, which is about two Brooklyn lots.

I just had a quick question about just listening to you talk about the food forest and the community element of it made me wonder whether you've worked with any community gardens in the city?

Yeah, we have a newsletter for Field Meridians, and it came out of this question of like, oh, if we only do one project a year, what do we talk to people about in the meantime? And I was like, gardening, that's what we talk about. And so over the course of the last year, we have interviewed community gardeners in our neighborhood around what they're doing in the season. And it's a similar kind of invitation as the nature school. It's really about noticing what's happening in that moment. And we talk about it in micro seasons. So every two weeks the seasons change. And so we just ask community gardeners, what are you doing in your garden right now? And it's also a document of climate change because even in this year, it's been insane. We've had drought, we had torrential rain last year. It's been wild. So we were going to stop after a year, but I think we're going to keep going.

So maybe we'll have a two year record of gardening in the time of climate change. But yeah, community gardeners are amazing and are such a lifeblood for so many neighborhoods. And the stories around how they get their land is also really, really interesting. So yeah, I think community gardeners are absolutely one of the most critical living infrastructures of the city. But I think also, maybe community gardens could turn into food forests, so maybe there's that as a pathway. So I don't know. I don't have any answers for food force. So if y'all have ideas, please email me. Please come. We're going to meet every Sunday at a bar. My favorite bar right now. So it will be, I think, fun. And what are you doing on Sunday at one in the winter? Probably nothing. You should come.

Anyone else? Thanks everyone for coming!

Thank you so much!