The shortest distance between two points is incontestably a straight line. But the route Matt Kirchner followed prior to launching Local Bound, a local food distribution business, meandered through South Jersey, North Carolina, Los Angeles, New York City and Point Breeze, and from baseball diamonds to family farms. Kirchner’s passion for playing baseball dominated his
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The name Edible Alphabet might conjure images of sugary breakfast cereal or playful pasta shapes. That’s not what has drawn more than 1,000 adult learners to this innovative series of free, fun English language classes at the Culinary Literacy Center in the Free Library of Philadelphia since 2016. Lindsay Southworth, senior program manager, traces the
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Bakari Clark describes herself as a student and a gardener. As the 2025 recipient of the prestigious Douglas Dockery Thomas Fellowship in Garden History and Design, Clark can now claim to be a student of gardens. The 25-year-old Virginia native came to Philadelphia to study at Temple University, where she became interested in many aspects
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Ordering takeout from your favorite neighborhood spot is a treat. What’s not a treat? The disposable packaging that’s used for pretty much every to-go order. Whether you’re digging into a burger and fries or summer rolls and pad see ew, what you’re left with is a heap of unrecyclable trash that’s problematic for both the
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When Peter Merzbacher first started delivering loaves of bread around the city on his bicycle, he had no five-year plan to grow his small baking project into a wholesale business. But today, Merzbacher’s processes 12,000 pounds of dough into bread every week out of its Germantown warehouse. And still, the mission remains the same: nourish
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Estere Alveno-Marius remembers the first time she tasted comparette (also known as konparèt), the sweetly spiced gingerbread-like treat that originated in Jérémie, the capital of Haiti’s Grand’Anse region. A friend visiting Alveno-Marius in her hometown of Saint-Louis-du-Sud brought the pastry as a gift. One taste and Alveno-Marius understood how the fragrant coconut sweet bun got
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On a typical Monday at Fishtown Pickle Project, cucumbers are everywhere: being rinsed, flying through the spear cutter—affectionately named Britney Spears—and getting stuffed into jars with garlic and seasonings. The aroma of vinegar wafts down the hallways of their manufacturing center in the Globe Dye Works building in Frankford, where the staff processes roughly 3,000
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In 1965, Alphonse Pignataro, recently graduated from Trenton State College (now The College of New Jersey), boarded a plane bound for Barbados. For the Elizabeth, New Jersey, native, this marked a moment of multiple firsts: his first jet flight, his first time leaving the United States and the first year of a two-year Peace Corps
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Olga Sorzano has a simple mission of making delicious, farm-to-bottle kombucha. In the ten years since she founded Baba’s Brew, the brand has bloomed, with a new boosted kombucha flavor hitting shelves, and even more new product ventures on the way. Baba’s Brew is named after Sorzano’s grandmother, whose portrait hangs on the wall behind
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My last three columns have focused on ways that Philadelphia could launch or expand food scrap drop-off programs. And drop-off programs are the place to start. They build awareness, provide an option for motivated citizens who can’t afford private collection services, and they have relatively low operation costs. But when I saw that Washington, D.C.,
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In my previous two columns, I discussed a number of ways that the City could launch composting drop-off programs, either on its own or in partnership with private composting companies. A third way forward would be an expansion of Philadelphia Parks & Recreation’s Farm Philly Community Compost Network. Based on a program in Washington, D.C.,
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