The Tables
Feeding a Sustainable Future
Alice Waters, whose legendary Chez Panisse restaurant is still, after 35 years, regularly voted the finest in America, is a major figure in the global organic food movement. She has devoted ten years to creating the Edible Schoolyard Project in California which makes the growing, preparation, and serving of lunch a school subject with life-changing consequences. In Vienna, the leading European city for production of organic food, she joins forces with Barbara van Melle to create a series of inspired and memorable tables that will serve as rare, powerful and delicious meeting points to assure and extend the City of Vienna’s commitment to a sustainable future on farms, in schools and in restaurants. Culture meets agriculture.
School Food for the Future
Kagran Vocational School for Horticulture and Floristry
Children need variety and this also goes for food. Unfortunately, the actual situation in schools and kindergartens is quite different. Convenience food and industrially prepackaged menus cause young taste-buds to wither. The Kagran Vocational School for Horticulture and Floristry presents the school food of the future. An international meeting is to showcase pioneering school projects.
Alice Waters -"The Edible Schoolyard" Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School, Berkeley
Joshua Viertel, Director, Yale University Sustainable Food Project
Dr. Roberta Sonnino, Lecturer in Environmental Policy, Cardiff University
Jeanette Orrey, School Meals Policy Advisor to the Soil Association
Austria, too, boasts numerous initiatives to improve the quality of food offered by schools and kindergartens and increasing kids’ knowledge about the importance and origins of food. Since the beginning of the current school-year, the lunches of approx. 18,000 Viennese students at 90 whole-day schools contain a 30-percent share of organic foodstuffs. This makes Vienna a European leader in this field. Many of the initiatives undertaken in Austria, including school gardens, organic meals in kindergartens or healthy buffet lunches in schools, were launched by individuals. The meeting "School Food for the Future" presents Austrian projects and wants to establish a platform for discussion and the exchange of experience. Project operators are to be networked and experience, through international projects, that their endeavors to provide youngsters with a novel approach to food, eating and nutrition makes them part of a big, worldwide idea and counter-movement.
Conversations between Farmers and Restaurateurs
Schloss Niederweiden, Lower Austria
While Austria takes a leading role in the share of organic foods sold in supermarkets, the situation is different in the catering sector, as hardly any restaurant in Vienna uses only organic ingredients. The share of organic, regional producers in the restaurant and catering sector is minimal. This is where New Crowned Hope comes in with a workshop and communal dining in the historic kitchen of Schloss Niederweiden. In this kitchen dating from 1725 with its wood-fired, open cooking pits, U.S. and Austrian chefs headed by Alice Waters will use superb Austrian organic ingredients to prepare dishes that are surprisingly pure, genuine and authentic. The workshop will bring together farmers, producers, chefs, and restaurant owners, including Austria’s biggest organic farm with 600 hectares of cultivated land, the City of Vienna, and Arche Noah, an association based in Schiltern (Lower Austria) dedicated to saving traditional cultivated plants. One objective lies in networking outstanding producers of organic foods specializing in the production of rare varieties with Viennese restaurants, so that regional, organic diversity, instead of industrial monotony, will dominate the menus of the future.
