For Tyler Mintz farming is in the genes (and jeans). His family has run farms for four generations starting with his great grandmother, Barbra, from Hungary. Mintz notes, “In the early 70s my father, Andrew, worked as an Agricultural Extension Agent in cocoa production in Colombia. When he returned to the States, he started to farm organically on his own gentleman’s farm, before organic was ‘cool.'”
On land once used as an apple storage facility, the Mintz family farm was home to the community’s “u-pick” raspberry patch among other vegetables, honey bees and some livestock like chickens, ducks and goats.
Growing up, Mintz was surrounded by small-scale agriculture and livestock. His childhood was full of picking berries, making and jarring tomato sauce, getting eggs from the hen house, feeding animals and watering crops. Of the many Mintz family rules, two stood out and heavily influenced Tyler’s attitude toward food: “Make sure to be home for dinner,” and “You have to try every food at least once.”
When he moved to an urban environment in 2001, Mintz realized not everyone grew up eating home-grown food for dinner. People in Brooklyn weren’t going to their backyard to fetch the eggs for breakfast. Baffled by the distant relationship between people and their food in NYC, Mintz recently founded Foodstalks, which just launched its website, to encourage farm to table eating and consuming habits. Its full of useful information and smart graphics. See and support it here.
