Today, December 1st, we had a guest speaker in my RFT class. Her name was Annie Novak and she is founder and director of Growing Chefs field-to-fork food education program and the Manager of the Edible Academy at the New York Botanical Garden. She is also the co-founder and farmer of Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn in partnership with Goode Green and Broadway Stages. She is the author of The Rooftop Growing Guide: How to Transform Your Roof into a Garden or Farm, published by Ten Speed Press. As she spoke to my class about her experience with plants, she had done it in such a passionate way and it really inspired me. Annie explained to the class why she chose to do this job for the rest of her life and the reason is because she wanted to study something she never knew about. She explained how she wanted a change and needed motivation for the rest of her life and that is how she is where she is now. Learning about plants was interesting for her and she became so involved and starting loving her job more and more each day.

Annie tells the class all about plants and rooftop gardens and how they are put together. She also explains in steps how fruits and vegetables are picked off plants and what happens after that. Annie prefers fruits and vegetables to be organic and she explained how it happens. She showed us on maps where rooftop gardens are located and how all of them are different. She spends a lot of time around plants and she really loves the concept of bees and soil because she tells us that the two help with plants. She taught me  so much about plants in such a short amount of time.

After Annie talked to my class, it really inspired me to take advantage of plants and trees and everything that gross on them. It is important to eat fruits and vegetables because provide us with so much nutrients, and they taste amazing as well! I enjoyed this guest speaker and I feel she is helping the environment and the world in such an amazing way.

Last night I had the opportunity to attend the Oxfam dinner with our learning community. Before this dinner, I had no idea what I was attending. When I walked into the banquet hall, I was handed a green card and was separated from my friends when I was directed to sit on the right side of the room. I was placed at the High-Income table with 4 other girls. My card said I was a 40 year old doctor living in India with my husband who is a businessman and two children who attend private school.

This banquet not only informed me with statistics about classes and different income groups, but also how people are living and what people are going through. A person truly does not know how good they have it until they have experienced poverty. POverty is extremely common but a lot of people, like myself, are not fully aware of it. I am from a fairly large town in New Jersey and poverty is not common at all.

Every year on Thanksgiving, my family delivers Thanksgiving dinners to elderly people in poverty. It allows me to be exposed to poverty and teaches me to be thankful that my family can provide me a meal on the dinner table every night.

The two girls presenting at the banquet had a lot to say about poverty in our area and really informed the students what it is like for people in need by giving us real situations and real people’s names and circumstances. This dinner was extremely informative and it makes me look at life differently than I did previously.

After attending the presentation by guest speaker, Annie Novak, I was inspired be her. Discussing the agricultural world, I was intrigued at how much I learned from her in a short period of time. She was very knowledgeable and passionate about rooftop farming, going into depth about each topic she spoke about. While I was never particularly interested in planting and growing crops, I was also interested in health and nutrition which she discussed. I’ve always felt the organic way of living was unrealistic because of the expense and the difficulty in growing fresh crops without them going bad. She opened my eyes to think about the food world differently.

In growing cities like New York, Annie Novak focused on utilizing the space available and started growing farms on rooftops. To me, this is a very innovative and genius idea because, as she discussed in the presentation, these cities do not have the space for farms anymore with overpopulation being such an issue. This reminded me of the RFT neighborhood projects where we looked at growing neighborhoods and the rising issues of overpopulation and gentrification. These rooftops farms are still allowing for the neighborhood to cater to its population while creating a better food source for locals. The rooftop gardens also provide better insulation for the building , the accessibility to use more nutrient-rich soil because you start on a new slate as well as being able to keep animals that live on the ground away from destroying the crops.

Annie Novak as inspired me to do something I love and be very passionate in whatever I chose to do. Also over the past few years, I have traveled to new places and began a love for traveling and she further inspired me to visit new places and see new things because it can totally change my life, like it did for her when she visited West Africa and the chocolate plants. Annie also spoke very educated and emphasized her feelings towards never being ignorant. I hope to learn more and grow like she had and expand my knowledge beyond my school life. While this lecture was focused on plants, rooftops gardens and the Botanical Garden, I took away much more of a intellectual and inspirational message from Annie Novak.

Going to the banquet yesterday it really opened my eyes to see how other people live. When I walked in I was given a card that showed me were I was to sit. I saw that people were being put into different areas of the room. Some people were sitting at nice tables with chairs and some were places on the floor.  I was with the low income population so I had to sit on the floor. My card told me that I was a 40 year old women who worked on a farm in Haiti. There was an area with middle class  families and hight class families. Everyone had a different background story for why they were in their specific class.

At the end when we got to eat it wasn’t what I was expecting it to be. Those of the high income class got to have wine, salad and chicken. The middle income class got to eat pasta with a little bit of butter, a piece of bread and water. And the Low income class, which was me, only had rice and beans, not even a drink of water. This was really eye opening to see that this is actually how people today live. Not everyone can get full course meals or even a drink of water. It showed me to stop taking what I have for granted and to really look at what I have in life because not everyones life is that great, some people don’t even get enough food to feed themselves let alone their families.

Throughout the semester, I’ve been traveling to the different boroughs of New York City and trying many different foods on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn. My first trip I went to a street fair near Grand Central Station and tried various ethnic foods such as German sausage, Greek Grape leaf wraps, a chicken kebab, and French crepe. It was very interesting to try many different foods from all over the world in such a small setting,

On my second trip into the city I went to Central Park and decided to go to a very well know street food cart just outside of the park
the vendor is called Waffles & Dingus and is a social media sensation.

When I was in California I ate a lot of Acai bowls. When coming to the New York I didn’t expect to find any because I figured it was more a West Coast thing. However, through a friend I ended up finding one. On my trip into the city I went to Juice Generation, a healthy to-go juice bar and smoothie bowl joint and had a peanut butter Acai Bowl. Acai is a superfood and smoothie bowls are extremely healthy and a very fulfilling meal.

This past weekend I was lucky enough to celebrate Thanksgiving multiple times with family and friends. On Thursday I enjoyed a wonderful meal with about 20 of my closest family and friends. We had everything from mashed potatoes, turkey, steamed broccoli, sweet potato fries with melted marshmallows on top, onion gravy, cranberry sauce and so much more. Every Thanksgiving we like to incorporate our Russian traditions into the Thanksgiving dinner including a variety of dishes that include fish, salads and other recipes. Even though we are Russian, my family really appreciates the holiday because they give thanks to our country for allowing them and us to be here. They are thankful to America for letting them in 30 years ago, letting them start a life for themselves and their children. Its safe to say that after my meal on Thursday everyone in that house had to be rolled outside to their cars because of how full we were. But the food didn’t stop there. On Friday, my friends and I decided to have a “Friendsgiving.” At 12 pm, all the girls gathered at my friends house to start cooking. We began with the turkey, putting all of the stuffing inside of it, which consisted of dried fruits and rice. After, we wrapped the whole turkey in bacon and placed it in the oven for it to start cooking. Then, we began preparing the side dishes such as baked mac and cheese and pizza bread. Our pizza bread consisted of tomato sauce, cheese, onions, garlic, and a few other spices. Following the bread, we made steamed vegetables: string beans, broccoli, peas, and some others. At about 4 pm, everyone else joined us at my friends house to indulge in this delicious meal. 

This is what our meal looked like, two portions of everything and the turkey that was wrapped in bacon. It wasn’t exactly a very traditional Thanksgiving dinner but that was the point. We incorporated our own ideas and favorite dishes into this Friendsgiving dinner. Last but not least, my family and I indulged in our last turkey of the year this past Sunday. My mom has an adult day care business in which the elderly absolutely adore my mother. Therefore, one of the grandmothers decided to make my mom a turkey to show gratitude for everything she has done for the center and everyone within it. 

This is the turkey that the grandmother prepared for my mom. My brother, my mom, my dad and I enjoyed this wonderfully delicious meal Sunday night to put an end to Thanksgiving.

Going to weddings I usually see and eat the same foods all the time. My cousins wedding was a little different .The past Saturday my cousin got married at the Marina del Rey in Queens. The place was beautiful and I was expecting an extravagant wedding party. When they told me they were having  huge cocktail party and to be ready to eat I thought they were kidding, Turns out they weren’t. Walking into the room I smelt all the different foods that were made and being put out onto the tables. Iv never seen that much of a variety of food.

When I waked in and saw all the food I was ready to eat. The first station was filled with pastas(hot and cold), mozzarella and tomatoes, salads, vegetables,rice, stuffed peppers and mushrooms, antipasto, breads and crackers. The second station was all fish. They had a sushi bar, fried calamari, rice with shrimp,fish salad, grilled vegetables with shrimp, and baby scallops. Looking at all this food before the wedding even started I was thinking of how I was going to eat my actual meal. The food wasn’t over. My cousins wife loved her bbq/home cooked meals. Along side the room there were mash potatoes(with toppings of bacon, cheese and gravy) There was a little stove cooking baby steaks, hot dogs and hamburgers. Mac and cheese and fried chicken was her favorite so they also had that. At the end of the cocktail hour dessert was put out that consisted of little pastries and fruit. They wanted to have everything that they liked and I think they definitely  accomplished that.