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dandelion cafe is a solar powered cafe playfully serving local dandelion coffee, zines and resilient ways of being


the jist

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coffee shops are unsustainable and exploitive. Better to source dandelions locally and share dandelion coffee with your friends for free!

we made a zine about how to prepare dandelion coffee. You can download it here. Here are instructions on how to construct it. It only requires one, one-sided (hint: use re-used paper that already had something printed on one side ☺) sheet of paper to print the whole booklet.

run your own dandelion cafe! Use the zine to find dandelion, harvest it, process and roast it. Make a solar cooker out of found materials and roast and boil the water that way without use of electricity or gas. Then serve the coffee to your local community along with printed copies of the zine.


our process

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we harvested dandelion root at our friends Sophie and Nathan's farm. Bless these friends. We got there via bike, bus and solar-powered truck.


reading/listening list

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these authors/thinkers have sowed their own seeds and wishes through writing and speaking and living. Those seeds found a home in our thoughts and dandelion cafe bloomed. Now dandelion cafe is a wish we send into the world, hoping the seeds will take root in nourishing soil and blossom into another dreamy reality of how the world could be.

• Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimerer
• One Straw Revolution - Massanobu Fukuoka
• Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler
• End of the World Podcast - Adrienne Maree Brown and Autumn Brown

resource for coffee x slavery, environ impact, fair trade=not fair

“Food and medicine are not two different things: they are the front and back of one body. Chemically grown vegetables may be eaten for food, but they cannot be used as medicine.” ― Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution

biomimicry

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There are ways in which Dandelion Cafe demonstrates biomimicry with the dandelion (taraxacum) plant.

• The ephemerality of both the dandelion plant and cafe works in the favor of the organism. As each dies, the lightweight seeds are carried by the wind for propagation. For the cafe, the wind is the far-flung humans who breeze through and the seeds are the joy and knowledge of local, sustainable herbal beverage crafting.
• Both cafe and plant provide a free resource for those who come upon it
• Both are as simple as possible to maximize ease of propagation
• Using the sun for energy
• The seed (zine) contains everything you need, just add water and sun (and actual dandelions)

giant corporate cafes exhibit biomimicry with the ways dandelion has been falsely demonized as:

• parasitic
• ugly
• ubiquitous

acknowledgments

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dandelion cafe was initially forged on unceded Abenaki land.

dandelion cafe was come out of the heads of Francesca Enzler and Trav Fryer.

special thanks to Sophie Cassel who bestowed hella knowledge about herbs.


history

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dandelion cafe debuted at the Feverish World Symposium, on the University of Vermont campus. UVM wouldn't let us serve the dandelion coffee we prepared for this event so we were forced to simply display the solar cooker and hand out the zines. You win this time capitalism! But this is not the last you'll hear of Dandelion Cafe!



contact

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you can email us at goodday@dandelion.day




why do anarchists only drink herbal tea?
Because proper-tea is theft

☺