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Reporting works up an appetite! Trying the DC food trucks today. What’s your favorite lunch-on-the-go? http://pic.twitter.com/iPKcI7dO -
“Current forecast is 70’s & sunny for Trucko De Mayo! Over 40 food trucks beer, music & more. #perfect #curbsidecookoff bit.ly/IBgP8h
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“We love DC’s food trucks and @dcfta, but @buritosontherun setting up outside @tortillacoast seems in poor taste.
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DC parking enforcement parked in the crosswalk to ticket legally parked food trucks. http://pic.twitter.com/Q7VdHiqC -
“RT @DorseyMc: DC Food Trucks Association (DCFTA) just announced ‘Curbside Cookoff: Trucko De Mayo’ with 40 trucks, two bars, live music, prizes & more!
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Mobile Vending/Food Trucks | Issues: Washington DC | Legislation
Final regulations should permit food trucks at a specific location, within a specific block and within the designated food-vending zone… -
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Meet DC Food Trucks – DC Food Truck Association
Meet DC Food Trucks. The DC Food Truck Association is a collaborative group of food truck owner-operators. We seek to elevate and susta… -
DC Food Trucks threatened by establishment
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“Happy #FarragutFriday, DC food truck fans! Here is today’s guide: foodtruckfiesta.com Have a great weekend!
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“MT @dcra: All 3,200 comments to proposed vending regulations have been posted on our website. Makes for great reading! 1.usa.gov/xPAKnd
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“Comments period for proposed vending regulations has closed. We’re uploading the flood of comments rec’d yesterday: 1.usa.gov/xPAKnd
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“i really like the food truck craze that has come over DC…so many more food options.
City council cooks up rules for D.C. food trucks: Storify
City council cooks up new rules for D.C. food trucks
Proposed regulations would level the playing field between food trucks and brick-and-mortar restaurants.
Brian Arnoff, 24, knew he wanted to serve good food to hungry people, and a food truck seemed like the best way to do it in Washington, D.C. The start-up costs were lower than those of a traditional brick-and-mortar establishment–between $50,000 and $100,000 for a food truck, as compared to at least a million for a restaurant–and he would get the chance to put his bachelor’s degree in hospitality management, earned at Boston University, to good use.
“I saw the whole food truck thing blossoming in New York and down here. It’s a lot more reasonable to get into than a restaurant, and I always really wanted to start my own business,” he says.
Brian’s truck, CapMac, has been in operation for almost two years, serving gourmet macaroni and cheese in downtown locales during busy lunchtime hours. The truck serves dishes such as the classic CapMac n’ Cheese, which features elbow macaroni topped with cheddar and pimento cheeses. Crumbled Cheez-it crackers are the pièce de rèsistance on top.
From kabobs to cupcakes
Arnoff’s truck is one of approximately 100 in the greater D.C. area, serving everything from chicken kabobs to cupcakes. Food trucks have become a booming industry in Washington in the last four years, ever since the Fojol Bros. of Merlindia, a “traveling culinary carnival,” began serving its signature curry on the day of President Barack Obama’s inauguration. Most trucks use social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to keep their customers abreast of their location on a given day.
The regulations in place for these meals-on-wheels establishments, however, are outdated—left over from the days when the only mobile food vehicles were ice cream trucks and hot dog stands.
In January, D.C. mayor Vincent Gray proposed new rules to update these 30-year-old regulations. Under the old rules, trucks could only stop when someone “hailed” them (like an ice cream truck,) and had to pack up and leave if no one was waiting in line for their fare. Food trucks have not necessarily been following these guidelines, parking in downtown parking spaces during lunchtime hours without being “hailed” and drawing scrutiny from parking enforcement officials. Arnoff says that tickets are usually around $25, but if a food truck receives one every time it parks to do business in a given week, this number can quickly add up.
The proposed regulations dispel both of these outdated rules, but they also contain some stipulations that the D.C. Food Truck Association, a consortium of mobile food vehicles, fears might harm their business. Trucks selling desserts, such as cupcakes and other baked goods, will only be able to idle in one spot for 10 minutes with no waiting customers, and they must close at 10 p.m. on weeknights and 1 p.m. on weekends, which is earlier than brick-and-mortar restaurants are required to close.
Using public space for profit
The city is also proposing “Vending Development Zones,” which would we designated areas in which food trucks can operate. The D.C. Food Truck Association, however, is worried that restaurateurs might invert this rule to create “Food Truck-Free Zones.”
Edward Grandis, a lawyer who has served as legal council to the Dupont Circle Merchants and Professionals Association for the last 20 years, thinks it’s unacceptable that food trucks currently don’t need to get site permits from the city to operate within a certain area.
“Anyone who uses public space in the city has to get a permit in the city,” he says. “They’re just being childish in saying that it’s going to be a burden and slow them down to get these permits.”
“DC MAP is very much in support of a vendor having the same obligations as an in-line business,” he continued.
Tim Noonan, who is in charge of the Sweetflow truck, owned by the locally owned and operated Sweetgreen chain of salad and frozen yogurt stores, has noted a shift in the mentality of police officers in the three years since the Sweetflow truck started operation.
“We’ve seen an increase in getting parking tickets,” especially around the downtown business district of L’Enfant Plaza, he says, noting that police officers are getting more bold about approaching trucks with long lines of customers and asking to see things like health inspection documents, which disrupts business.
Another major factor contributing to the dispute are the concerns of brick-and-mortar restaurants, which are afraid they may not be able to compete with the ease and quick service of a food truck. “There have been a lot more restaurants filing complaints on food trucks,” Noonan says.
“Restaurants cannot pick up and move to a better spot”
This growing concern is reflected in the 3,000-plus comments that the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs received on its February release of the proposed new vending regulations. Many business associations advocated for food trucks only being allowed to vend at a specific location, within a specific block. This, they argue, would prevent any one block from being mobbed with too many food trucks at any one time.
Betsy Allman, of the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington, one of the interest groups that submitted comments on the proposed regulations, thinks that the proposed constraints are fair, and completely necessary.
“It’s not specifically about the competition, it’s about the unfair competition,” she says. “Restaurants cannot pick up and move to a better spot if a food truck parks in front of their door.”
As of right now, food trucks also aren’t required to charge the 10 percent sales tax that is required of non-mobile restaurants. The D.C. City Council has also proposed to make this tax mandatory.
Noonan sees this as fair, noting that when the Sweetflow truck first got its start, he and his colleagues assumed that the rules were the same as for their Sweetgreen stores and treated the operations similarly—sales tax and all.
“The scale of food trucks is no longer just a hot dog vendor,” he says. “It’s upscale cuisine. It certainly is harder felt by smaller companies, but you should account for that and plan accordingly.”
Full transcript of live 2012 Oscar coverage
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Correction: And Uggie the dog*
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Aaaand that’s a wrap, folks!
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Keystone XL pipeline project gasping for breath, but not dead yet
Loud dissent and an environmental revival may not be enough to stop the Keystone XL pipeline.
1,252 total arrests were made during the Tar Sands Action protests in late August and early September. Photo by Kate Flynn
It was the third day in September and the last day of the Tar Sands Action protest. Dark clouds hung heavy in the sky, but nevertheless, a few hundred people had gathered in Lafayette Park that morning, across the street from the White House. They talked excitedly among themselves and held boldly lettered signs, and when a young woman with a bullhorn and a clipboard told them to line up, they loosely organized themselves into rows and made their way across the road.
On every day of the two-week long demonstration, protesters had lined up in the same place, at the same time, many of them hoping to be arrested by U.S. Park Police. Bill McKibben, environmental writer, journalist and activist, spoke words of daily encouragement to them through a megaphone before sending them out onto the sidewalk with their banners and signs.
“What you’re doing today is really hard, and requires a lot of courage. For normal, law-abiding people—it’s not natural and not easy to do something that the police tell you not to do,” he told them on Sept. 3. McKibben is a balding and serious man, and the collective concern of the hundreds of protesters seemed to have settled itself into the wrinkles on his forehead.
Listen to a clip of Bill McKibben speaking to assembled protesters during the Tar Sands Action protest.
[audio:http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37282180/bill%20mckibben.mp3%5DThe protesters, of all ages and from all parts of the country and Canada, had come to Washington to object to construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. By the end of the two-week long protest, the non-profit group Tar Sands Action, which had organized the sit-ins, was calling it the largest environmental civil disobedience act in decades.
Canadian corporation TransCanada, which builds and maintains energy pipelines, proposed the $13 billion project in 2009. The 1,661-mile long Keystone XL would expand on existing pipeline infrastructure and funnel tar sands crude oil, comprised of bitumen, a thick, sticky substance, and diluents from Alberta, Canada to terminals in Texas. At the time of the Tar Sands protests, the State Department was scheduled to hold a final hearing on October 7th to decide whether or not TransCanada’s proposal was in the national interest. The decision ultimately rested with President Obama, who was supposed to come to a resolution before the end of the year.
The protests ultimately resulted in 1,252 arrests. The media didn’t extensively cover them at the time—instead, their effects were more indirect and insidious. In November, President Obama and the State Department announced that they would delay the final decision on the pipeline until after the 2012 election, while exploring a new route for the pipeline in the U.S.
Since August, the issue has become an intensely polarized one. Those who oppose the pipeline say that it will cause a large-scale environmental disaster if it ruptures; that corporations should be investing resources in clean energy, not dirty sources of petroleum like tar sands; and that the jobs the pipeline will create aren’t sustainable.
Elizabeth Shope, a spokesperson for the National Resources Defense Council, thinks that the protests in August and September, and a more recent one at the beginning of November, have most certainly had an impact on President Obama’s delay of the final verdict.
While Shope views the delay as a promising development, she doesn’t think that the project has been killed outright.
Bill McKibben, sporting a wristband from his arrest at a sit-in, addresses assembled protesters.
“I think that there’s not a definite conclusion of what decision they will come to, but this fight is not over. We definitely had a major victory with the administration deciding to do a review,” she says.
Shope also sees the U.S. government’s hospitality towards the pipeline and TransCanada as a result of the poor economy, and the promise of what the corporation is referring to as “shovel-ready” jobs. She, like many others who oppose the pipeline, doesn’t think that more and more unconventional methods of producing petroleum are the answer to boosting the floundering economy.
“We need to turn towards a clean energy future. We can have jobs and the environment,” she said.
The process of extracting tar sands from the ground is a dirty one, and highly water-intensive. James Hansen, a prominent NASA scientist who has done extensive research on climate change, has been quoted as saying that this pipeline would be “game over” for the planet—that the carbon produced from converting tar sands crude oil into usable fuel would negatively impact global climate change, especially if the pipeline were there to facilitate global demand for such a thing. He was one of the 1,252 arrested in the Tar Sands Action protests.
“The tar sands pipeline would be the first big step into unconventional fossil fuels, which would make it hard to stop greater and greater expansion of tar sands use,” he said in an emailed statement. He thinks that it is still possible, just barely, to stabilize the climate in this century, but that it will require a move away from coal, tar sands and tar shale, and towards clean energy.
The reality, however, as John Monaghan of the Heartland Institute sees it, is that most newer and cleaner energy technologies are not ready to compete in the marketplace, and consumers need fossil fuels now. The Heartland Institute states its mission as “promoting free-market solutions to social and economic problems.”
Monaghan, like many proponents of the pipeline, argues that decreasing the U.S.’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil can only be a good thing.
“We can have more credibility in certain foreign policy negotiations if we aren’t as beholden to these states for resources,” Monaghan said.
Monaghan also thinks the pipeline protesters and other environmentalists have set up a false dichotomy—jobs versus the environment—and that delaying the decision was a loss for the U.S. economy. TransCanada has claimed that the project will create upwards of 13,000 jobs. According to a study by the Cornell Labor Institute, however, the real number of permanent jobs created by the pipeline would be more like 50.
“I think the number itself isn’t all that important,” Monaghan said. “In a sluggish recovery, we should be doing everything we can to unleash private capital to create projects that add value to the American economy. Without question, Keystone XL does that.” Monaghan and others also see Obama’s decision, or lack thereof, as an attempt to pander to an environmental voter base that he might need to depend on in the upcoming election.
The proposed pipeline would snake through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma before terminating in the Gulf Coast. While those in favor of the pipeline have argued that it will lower gas prices in the U.S., this is yet another disputed claim.
One thing that seems to get lost, at times, in policy debates is the issue of how the Keystone XL will affect the lives and livelihoods of those who live and own land around the proposed pipeline route. Marty Cobenais, of the Indigenous Environmental Network, based out of Bemidji, Minn., made a trip to Washington in late November with a number of other Native American representatives. Their purpose was to discuss the impact that the pipeline would have on tribal life with the State Department and members of Congress.
Cobenais has been in conversation with tribes and tribal leaders from all over the U.S. and Canada. He has seen the ways in which pre-existing oil infrastructure has affected the way of life of the First Nation in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, and downstream, at Fort Chippewa. Rare cancers in humans and abnormalities in fish and other animals are just a few of the phenomena in those areas that he sees as resulting from the initial, messy process of extracting the tar sands.
“It’s ruining their entire way of life, their culture,” he said.
Listen to a clip of Marty Cobenais describing how tar sands extraction has affected the way of life of the First Nation in Alberta, Canada.
[audio:http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37282180/Marty%20Cobenais.mp3%5DTribes in the U.S., particularly in South Dakota, are also concerned that the pipeline will contaminate their water supply. A singular water pipeline supplies clean and drinkable water to 52,000 people in South Dakota because uranium mining has contaminated the groundwater. The oil pipeline would cross it twice.
Cobenais also sees a disconnect between the politicized forces in Washington fighting for and against the pipeline, and the actual realities of life for people in places like Nebraska and South Dakota.
“They can bring people in, but they still don’t get to see how those people live, and how it’s actually going to affect them personally. They don’t see their ranches, they don’t see their water, they don’t see their cattle out in the middle of the pasture where this pipeline’s going to go through,” he said. He sees the role that he plays as essential to making those in Washington see why it’s so important to block the pipeline.
Despite the efforts of people like Cobenais, lobbyists have continued to fight hard to get the pipeline built. According to an article published in online news source The Hill on Dec. 11, at least 42 lobbying firms, associations and companies have voiced their support of the pipeline since it was first proposed in 2009.
The National Association of Manufacturers is one such company. They’ve been urging the State Department to move ahead with its approval. Spokesman Jeff Ostermayer says his company’s main concern is job creation.
“This will benefit manufacturers and this will help Americans get back to work. This will help manufacturers be able to hire,” he said. Ostermayer and his pro-pipeline colleagues seem to be working under a desire for short-term gratification— environmental concerns are too intangible, too far-fetched, and too removed from their own interests.
On Dec. 17, the Senate passed a bill that requires an expedited 60-day approval process for the pipeline in return for a payroll tax cut. President Obama has said he will sign it, but he still has the power to kill the project. Montana recently granted permission to TransCanada to construct that segment of the pipeline on state soil. Things are moving forward, and not necessarily in the way that the Tar Sands protesters had hoped.
“These things can work,” Bill McKibben told the throngs of protesters in early September, before the issue had exploded as a major source of political and industry tension in Washington. “One of the things we’ve managed to do is reinvent what this kind of protest looks like in this country.” Whether or not this pipeline is built, those images of protest might be its lasting legacy.
MAP-21 would improve roads, employ millions
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted unanimously to pass MAP 21 Wednesday.
On Wednesday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee passed a bill that attempts to help America’s highway system meet the demands of 21st century travelers. Passage of the bill was driven by two pressing needs—the urgency to create jobs, and the necessity of improving the transportation system.
“Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century,” or MAP 21, passed unanimously, receiving unusual bipartisan support. Senator Baucus, R-Mont., stressed the vitality of highways in transporting goods and people and contributing to the smooth operation of the entire country in a Senate committee hearing Wednesday.
“Roads can make or break a nation,” Baucus said, quoting former New York senator Patrick Moynihan. Baucus serves as the ranking member of the committee. He drew on the example of Interstate 15, the fourth-longest interstate highway in the nation, which winds through six states before entering Alberta, Canada.
“Montana can’t fund roads like I-15 by themselves, and other states along I-15 clearly can’t either,” he said, calling Montana a “highway state” due to its landlocked position and lack of large international airports. He argued that all states would benefit from the federal government’s investment in this infrastructure.
He called the bill “a good compromise,” stating that the additional construction jobs that the bill would provide would be invaluable to the American economy.
One area of partisan contention in the bill were Transportation Enhancements, or TEs, which provide federal money for bike- and footpaths, as well as highway beautification. Senator Inhofe, R-Okla., stated that he did not believe that that these activities reduce congestion, or “improve the condition of our crumbling infrastructure.” However, in the current iteration of the bill, states wouldn’t necessarily have to spend this money on TE activities, but could use the funds for purposes such as preventing stormwater damage and preserving historic sites.
Members of both political parties have been attempting to improve this infrastructure for a number of years. In 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (H. R. 1) was signed into law, providing a total of $48 billion for transportation improvements. Out of that $48 billion, about $27.5 billion was set aside for the highway program.
The committee’s unanimous passage of the bill was unusual in Congress’s current sharply divided political climate. Senator Whitehouse, D-RI, called the bill a “commonsense measure” that would benefit each senator’s constituents.
Special interest groups, such as the National Asphalt Pavement Association, are poised to gain from the passage of this bill, mostly because it gives them a degree of certainty that their services will be needed for at least 2 more years.
“We can hire employees and buy equipment,” said Jay Hansen, of the NAPA. “Without the bill, there’s a lack of clarity in the future.” The current funding ends Nov. 18, making the passage of new legislation somewhat urgent.
Hansen also added that the bipartisan nature of the bill was “nice to see,” since the committee voted unanimously to pass the bill. “There’s not a lot of legislation being considered in Congress in this way,” he said.
Record number of Americans depend on food stamps as farm bill faces cuts
The USDA is spending a large part of their budget feeding hungry Americans, but they might not be able to provide the same level of support in 2012.
With roughly 45 million Americans on food stamps—the highest number ever, according to former USDA secretary Dan Glickman—the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been spending a large part of their budget on feeding people through a variety of programs.
Glickman stressed the “short-term emergencies” that many Americans face in feeding their families and themselves, and noted that the current driving issue in food and agriculture is feeding hungry Americans during a time of recession.
“Food security and feeding people is just as important as energy security or health security. It’s a major national security issue,” he said.
Glickman’s statements were made at a summit focusing on food security and sustainable agriculture, hosted by the Newseum, come at a time when the updated 2012 version of the Farm Bill is facing a potential $23 billion in cuts. Approximately $2 billion would come from nutrition programs, such as food stamps and school lunch. What remains to be seen is where the final cuts will come from, which won’t be set in stone until Nov. 1.
“Right now the different proposals are flying in fast and furious. What’s relevant today may not be what it looks like when it finishes up,” Rusty Rumley, a staff attorney at the National Agriculture Law Center, said.
He stated that cutting funding to food stamps and SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is not a politically attractive option to lawmakers.
While some cuts to nutrition programs may be inevitable, groups such as the Environmental Working Group are attempting to increase Americans’ access to SNAP programs, and children’s access to nutritious food at school.
Listen to Dylan Kesti, of the Environmental Working Group, talk about EWG’s priorities for work with the farm bill:
[audio: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37282180/EWG.mp3%5D“The food stamp program is the Environmental Working Group’s top priority in the Farm Bill, especially now during times of hunger,” said Ken Cook, president and co-founder of the organization, citing the fact that half of the 45 million people on food stamps are children, and that a household of three that earns $24,000 or more doesn’t qualify for the most minimal food stamp benefits.
Cook also expressed concerns that major decisions about the 2012 Farm Bill will be made by “ag[riculture bosses in the subsidy lobby,” and that they may push for a new entitlement guaranteeing income for the largest commercial producers.
“That, to me, is the antithesis to the way farm bills have been done in recent history, where it has been open and we’ve realized there’s more at stake here than production agriculture,” he said.
Along with food-stamp programs, the USDA also recently revised the long-standing “food pyramid” to attempt to change the way Americans purchase and consume food. The newer version, My Plate, shows a plate half-filled with grains and protein and half with fruits and vegetables, with a glass of milk on the side.
“One-third of our children at risk of being obese are, in fact, obese,” said Tom Vilsack, the current USDA secretary. “The focus that we have at USDA is, first and foremost, educating people about what a healthy, balanced meal should look like.”
Listen to Vilsack’s full statement here:
[audio: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37282180/tom%20vilsack.mp3%5DOccupy D.C. settles in to Freedom Plaza
Listen to an audio version of the story below:
[audio http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37282180/occupy%20dc.mp3]
Protesters displayed banners on Oct. 9, a few days after they had moved into Freedom Plaza.
Occupy D.C. protesters set up camp a week and a half ago on Freedom Plaza, not far from the White House. The local movement has been in full swing since October 6, one of over 900 so-called “Occupy” protests that have been taking place globally over the past month to protest economic disparity and corporate greed.
The tent city on Freedom Plaza resembles a small, self-sufficient village, complete with a first-aid center, a kitchen where volunteers serve food, and a row of portable toilets.
Freda Miller, previously of Costa Rica and Portland, Ore., said she felt it was important to take a stand against a government that she feels has let her and many other Americans down.
“I came here because it seems to me that the way our government functions has just gone completely crazy,” she said. “It seems like the government is only serving the corporations, and that it’s not doing anything to help the ordinary citizen. I felt like it was time that the government heard our voices.”
Washington Park Police have agreed to let the protesters camp out on the plaza for four more months, meaning the activists’ lease will be up sometime around early February. Eric Sheptock, an advocate for the homeless who lives in Washington and comes down to visit the protest every day, is hopeful that the drawn-out action will have an impact.
“Hopefully we can stay here until we get the systemic change that we want,” he said.
The original Occupy Wall Street protest that launched the worldwide movement has been criticized for making vague demands and lacking focus, but for some at Freedom Plaza, the Occupy D.C. protest is a way of channelling their boredom and frustration with unemployment into something positive.
“I can’t find any work, anywhere,” says Jonathan Nowlin, a recent college graduate who has been living out of his car for the past two months. Nowlin double-majored in French and political science with a minor in chemistry, hoping that it would land him a job in government contracting. He hasn’t had much luck so far.
“Even McDonald’s won’t take me, because they say I’m overqualified,” he said.
Three-day walk aims to stomp out breast cancer
The Washington, D.C., Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure annual fundraising walk took place this past weekend in and around the D.C. area. Music and cheering followed the colorfully costumed crowd on Sunday as they paraded through the streets of D.C., with their final goal being the Washington Monument.
Walkers are required to raise $2,300 to participate.
Voices featured: Judy Bruce, of Colombia, Md.
Bruce and her seven teammates raised almost $20,000.
Marshall Moneymaker, of Montgomery County, Md.
Moneymaker lost three sisters to breast cancer. You can find his website here.
D.C. Greek festival a celebration of culture and community
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A Greek festival that calls itself the “oldest and largest” event of its kind took place this past Friday through Sunday at the Sts. Constantine and Helen Orthodox Church in northwest Washington, offering authentic Greek fare and a lively atmosphere to hundreds of attendees.
Andrew Nevins, an attendee sporting a blue t-shirt that read “It’s all Greek to me” spelled out in Greek letters that he had purchased earlier that day, was enthusiastic about the cultural opportunities afforded by the event. “We’d like to know, what do the people feel? What do they identify with, besides just food?” he said, referring to Greek Americans. “But the food is great, and we’re all enjoying the food.”
The Sts. Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church hosted the 51st annual Greek Festival this past weekend.
Greek cuisine also played a major role in Lisa Griffin’s decision to attend. Griffin, a non-Greek D.C. native, heard about the festival through the paper. She said that a previous encounter with dancing and food at a Greek church were enough to lure her out for the day.
“I had to come today because I just have to have it again, because it’s so good,” she said of the traditional Greek fare.
The three-day event features Greek jewelry and crafts, live music and dance performances, and, of course, time-honored dishes such as baklava, pastichio and moussaka.
“It’s a chance for not just Greeks, primarily non-Greeks, those who’ve travelled to Greece, who come and enjoy this wonderful, delicious food,” said George Recachinas, a longtime church member who assisted the Sts. Constantine and Helen Ladies’ Society in preparing the food in two small church kitchens.
The church itself is a tight-knit community. Jimmy Dialektakos was married at the church in 1984, a fact he relayed while roasting pork skewers that would later be served to festival goers. He also helps with maintenance work around the church.
“I do my share, like everybody else here,” he said.
Jimmy Dialektakos, a 27-year member of the church, roasts pork skewers at the festival.
Dupont market brings farm-fresh products to D.C.
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The Dupont Circle Farmers’ Market takes place every Sunday morning from the months of January to December. During peak summer months, nearly 40 farmers bring fresh produce, flowers, baked goods, meat and even seafood from Maryland and Virginia to the heart of D.C.
According to Stefano Frigero, of the Copper Pot Food Company, business was a little slow on Sunday, Sept. 11, but he’s used to working under any circumstances. He brings fresh pasta sauce, pasta and jam to Dupont Circle nearly every Sunday of the year.
“We are all year ‘round,” he said. “Our products don’t suffer in summer or wintertime, so we do from January to December.” He said that there are also more people buying his products during the wintertime.
Justin Grieser, of Firefly Farms, based in Maryland, said that he is always surprised at how many people come attend the market, despite any and all weather conditions. “Even when it’s cold out, people come out to support local farmers,” he said.
For vendors, preparation for the market is a weeklong endeavor. Some, such as Frigero, buy ingredients for their products at the market the previous week. “We can the jam and the sauce the same day. We prepare the pasta on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to get ready for every weekend,” he said.
For patrons, the market offers some of the best fresh products around, as well as an opportunity to support the livelihood of local farmers.
“We come almost every weekend,” says Tom Glass, of Washington. “It’s just a great way to support our local farmers and eat really fresh food, which tastes so much better than the stuff that’s in the grocery store for a week or longer, to be trucked here from somewhere else.”
Not every vendor is able to keep selling their product when the harvest ends, but some find innovative ways to extend their business into the winter months.
“We dry our flowers this time of year, in the fall. We make ornamental wreaths, and incorporate lavender and rosemary and thyme and make a culinary wreath. That extends our season after the frost takes our fresh flowers, for November and December holiday sales,” said George Miller, of Four Seasons Nursery in Charlestown, West Virginia.
Katherine E. Flynn 