Community Health With the demise of Hyde Park’s 75-year-old Co-Op Market last January, Chicago has been left without a storefront food cooperative. By next March, that may change, thanks in part to Kathleen Duffy. When she arrived in Chicago from New York a few years ago, Duffy missed her small but comprehensive local health-foods store. “I started thinking about the idea of opening my own space like that,” she recalls, but she didn’t have the resources. Her Logan Square neighborhood, however, did. “I sent out an email to about twenty people I knew from the art and activist scene…I got 300 responses,” she says, and the Dill Pickle Food Co-op was born. Since its first meeting in January 2005, the co-op has grown to 270 members and secured a building near the California Blue Line stop on Fullerton. With the help of a benefit show at the Empty Bottle August 27—with performances by Alla and Tirra Lirra—the co-op hopes to raise enough money to open its doors within the next six months.
Big Heat 2023: The Food and Drink 50 This year, Newcity’s Big Heat feature focuses on those who stand behind the chef in the kitchen. We want to recognize the people who’ve succeeded big time, but we also want to recognize promising upstarts.
Not Just Corn and Soybeans: The Big Food Disconnect and How to Fix It As people in growing cities began to disconnect from the work of farming, what people knew about farming diminished rapidly. In Illinois today, ninety-six percent of all farms are family owned. That’s roughly 70,000 family-owned farms, of which nearly 9,000 have been in the same family for more than a century.
Sicilian Street Food from a Ghost Kitchen: Sfera “We started at farmers markets about three years ago with our arancini—stuffed risotto balls—which is our specialty,” says Daniela Vitale, who runs Sfera in Avondale with her partner, Steven Jarczyk.
