About Cooking Up a Story
Cooking Up a Story (CUpS) is an online television show (and blog) about food and sustainable living.
CUpS offers a variety of original, short form video programming that examines our food system, up close and personal. We bring you unique documentary stories about farmers and ranchers, food artisans, and others whose lives center around sustainable food and agriculture. In addition, we offer interviews with experts on the science, politics and culture of food; how to information from leading farmers and backyard gardeners; cooking demonstrations; and time tested, family tested, recipes, along with a host of other video content and leading edge agricultural information. From the pasture to the kitchen, we hope you will join us on the journey to create a sustainable and prosperous food system.
Of course, you will find more than just videos throughout the site, you will also find fine work by outside contributors in both print and multimedia formats exploring the many aspects of sustainable food and agriculture.
Please enjoy below a sampling of Cooking Up a Story Segments:
More about CUpS:
The world is in a period of profound transformation that impacts all spheres of society. As we seek to transition from an era of abundant fossil fuels to an era requiring new forms of energy derived from renewable resources, we must also confront increasing environmental degradation and climate change, expanding population growth (an estimated 3 billion increase in the world’s population by 2050), increased water scarcity, growing political unrest, and wars, all of which— are directly interrelated with food and sustainability issues.
Cooking up a Story explores these larger questions and concerns, as we continue to focus on the people whose living examples provide inspiration, education, and possible models forward toward building a more sustainable future.
CUpS shows:
Food Stories—Documentary shorts — unscripted — featuring farmers, artisans, and others
Food News—Interviews with experts on the science, politics, and culture of food
Growing Food—How-to videos offering top notch farming and gardening information
Small Bites—shorter videos that highlight people and ideas around the themes of our show.
CUpS Talks—Talks by writers, scientists, and food experts
CUpS: Cooking Fresh—a cooking show demonstrating fresh, seasonal, and local ingredients by a diverse group of food enthusiasts, and professional chefs.
Additional content:
CUpS: Recipes—Family favorites from the people profiled on CUpS
CUpS Contributors—an eclectic and enlightened group of food experts and enthusiasts whose contributions greatly expand the value of information and content on our site.
9 Comments
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.