About Cooking Up a Story
Cooking Up a Story offers professionally produced original, short videos about organic food, sustainable agriculture, food politics, ranchers, farmers, backyard gardening, cooking, recipes, and so much more.
We strive to provide an enlightened perspective on everything relating to our food system—from how to can fresh sardines to the debate over creating a sustainable future. Our unique videos and written posts are educational, and at times, inspirational.
We tell it like it is — and you’ll see in our video stories, the subjects speak for themselves without an on-air personality to frame their story to a given objective. We interview thought leaders and accomplished individuals from a diversity of backgrounds and life experiences who care deeply about food and the planet, and through their ideas and their work, perhaps too, a little bit of them will rub off on us.
One of our new projects is a YouTube channel and video series called Food.Farmer.Earth, which provides a series of weekly short videos around individual themes that follow the connections of our food web. The first two videos of the week (segments) center on cooking and the craft of cooking, along with documentary stories about those involved in the producing, growing, raising, processing, distributing, and procurement of food. We call our third weekly segment “Food Wisdoms,” because we hope by sharing our interviews with food artisans, farmers, and leaders in the sustainable food movement, we’ll walk away with additional knowledge to ponder and share with others.
Cooking Up a Story may be a salmon swimming upstream in a culture too-often devoted to frivolous entertainment and escapism. Our audience too swims against the flow, choosing carefully their sources for information; critically evaluating new information; above all—are of inquiring minds.
And so, we ask you to join us, on our continuing journey of new discovery and celebration— bringing the people behind our food, to life!
Rebecca & Fred
13 Comments
i like your cheese making video from goat milk. i’m from Nepal. i’m also interested in goat firming so please would give me some tips
thank you
Hello,
I just wanted to connect about an upcoming story that one of your writers wanted to do about our gardening program. Thanks,
Sarah Canterberry
livingcitypdx.com
interested in your work, inspiring and entertaining.
I found your page on YouTube, and this is great! I have begun a journey in growing my own food and caring for the earth via research and a permaculture design certification course of which I am currently enrolled. I am a strong advocate for good, wholesome, clean food. Keep it up, and you have my support!
Glad to know about this site.
For research purposes it would be great if you provided more info, such as interviewer’s name, on-line publication dates, etc. of your videos. Or am I missing something?
Hi Blue Sky:
Thanks for your thoughtful suggestions. In the future, we may decide to add the interviewer’s name in the video, or within the post itself. As it now exists, the style of “Food News” segments are geared toward accentuating the person being interviewed, and less emphasis (by contrast), on the interviewer.
As for the original post date, that is something we choose (by default) not to show unless it is relevant to the context of the information being provided. Much, of what we produce for Cooking Up a Story is evergreen in nature. We have found that by providing publication dates, it discourages viewer interest based on the natural inclination of audiences toward consuming the freshest content. Of course, if a particular CUPS video is more time sensitive, we readily provide the publication date to maintain the proper context.
Fred Gerendasy
Great site. Will be reading more. Thanks.
Love your work. Ag Revolution just posted your story about the Jondles and Abundant Life Farm. We would love to use more of your videos on our blog.
Our target audience is Farmers and Ranchers, their vendors, the Packers, Wholesalers, Grocers, Food Processors – and anone who cares about food traceability.
Elizabeth
Hi Natasha:
I agree wholeheartedly with you. If you want to suggest any particular stories that involve people of color, or know of writers that may be interested in contributing to CUpS—please let me know.
In the meantime, you may be interested in this story about a youth program for low income families: Food Works
Thanks!
Fred
This is great! But, I’d love to see some other faces of the farming and sustainable food movement on here. That’s what my organization and documentary project is all about – raising the voices of farms and food initiatives led by people of color – check it out The Color of Food.
Hi Rebecca and Fred, great job with your site and philosophy. I found your site through Food News Journal today. They grab all the top food headlines and ‘the art of food photography’ was one!
Full disclosure – I teach wok cooking in S.Florida and market a cast iron wok Kit with instructional DVDs and audio cookalongs. My mission reflects much of the same goals as yours. Getting people to cook with fresh ingredients from local farmer’s markets but more importantly cooking and eating together with family and friends. I know those are my fondest childhood memories.
I’ve subscribed to your feed and Twitter and telling folks to do same. Keep up the good work.
Hi Rebecca and Fred,
Great site and great resource!
Because of the quality and relevance of you videos I will be using them on my site, http://escoffier.com.
Were going to be focusing on how and why restaurants and food service operations should adapt the principals of sustainability and ecology through the Green Restaurant movement. I think you videos give a texture and a feel to the topic that others lack.
Great work and best of luck with your site.