I love Drew Gardens’ space and community. Every year I lead a workshop on cooking, though less now about low-cost, low-waste cooking. Now I focus on helping them create a food coop there.

The city has some programs I consider “push,” where they try to supply fresh, local produce to the community. Having grown up with parents who, because they struggled to make ends meet, started a family food buying club to save time and money while increasing quality, which folded into a coop, which helped even more, I see the potential for a “pull” effort.

Starting a coop

Starting a coop takes work, but it’s a labor of love, and the Drew Gardens crew loves the work they do. Check out my other post today, A video tour of Drew Gardens, with a long video walk-through of the place. You can see how much work they do. As I learned from my mentor Frances Hesselbein, work is love made visible.

The Drew Gardens team seems interested in starting a coop. One of them joined the 4th Street Coop, that I belong to downtown. I’m putting them in touch with the general manager of the one I grew up with in Philadelphia. Maybe soon the Bronx will have one.

People who want more supermarkets as ways to fill in food deserts, in my opinion, suffer a lack of experience, imagination, or both. Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and their peers pull money out of the community and fill it with garbage—both doof Coops keep the money in the community and create a lot less wastethat goes into and poisons our bodies and the packaging that ends up as litter and landfill. Coops keep money in the community and create a lot less waste.

Off-grid solar power

If you look for them, you’ll see the solar panels and battery they bought, in part inspired from my past workshops. They bought them partly to help Puerto Rico gain independence from the dominance hierarchy created by control over energy sources, partly to provide electrical power to Drew Gardens.

Longtime readers might remember in my first cooking workshop there, before I had disconnected my apartment from the electric grid, we filled the pressure cooker with ingredients, then took it across the street to power it in a deli, come back to the garden for about thirty minutes, go back to the deli, and bring back the cooked stew. This time they had the battery charged.

The past couple workshops, I brought my battery and panels up by subway. This time I relied on theirs. Speaking of things I didn’t bring, I brought some ingredients but not green leafy vegetables. I checked to make sure, and they were overflowing with many kinds of kale, collards, broccoli, chard, and probably others I forgot. They also had sage, oregano, mint, basil, and others I forgot. Also eggplants and some tomatoes and cherry tomatoes.

I liked that, though I didn’t know what ingredients would go in the stew, my famous no-packaging vegan solar-powered stew formula always works. Everyone who ate said they loved it. More than saying so, they all scraped their bowls clean and went back for seconds and thirds.

Don’t you love when you cook something and everyone scrapes their bowls clean and goes back for more? Very satisfying and rewarding for me. Plus I ate it and relished it as much.

I also came home with a butternut squash they gave me.

Pictures of the workshop

---

You might remember in September I attended my first natural building workshop. Here’s the chicken coop they built, with a tiny bit of contribution from me.

---

Videos of the workshop

I start with a few short snippets. The bottom one is longer, starting at the beginning. Sorry about the sound, but we were outdoors and we aren’t videographers.

---

---

---

---

Here’s another view of the chicken coop.

• ← This week’s selected media, October 26, 2025: The SCUM Manifesto, The Eye of the Storm, A Class Divided, Dirtbag Billionaire, The White Rose movement
• A video tour of Drew Gardens, fall 2025 →