Dandelion cafe is a solar powered cafe playfully serving local dandelion coffee, zines and resilient ways of being.
At the Feverish World Symposium, October 20-22 on the University of Vermont campus. UVM wouldn't let us serve the dandelion coffee we prepared for this event so we are 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!
the jist:
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.
solar cooker links:
4 types of solar cookers
make a solar cooker out of a papasan!
some plans on how to make solar cookers from solarcooking.org
You can make some pretty strong solar cookers with an old satellite dish. This was the method we attempted
if you're super badass you can weave a solar cooker!!
our process:
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
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
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Biomimicry
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
about:
Dandelion Cafe is an idea from Francesca Enzler and Trav Fryer.
-acknowledgment: dandelion cafe was created on land that the Abenaki people have a deep relationship with and that relationship was wrongly and violently severed.
special thanks to Sophie Cassel who bestowed hella knowledge about herbs.
this site is hosted for free on surge and the domain is free from freenom.