Cross the Line this Weekend: To Farm City Fairs and FIAF’s Annual Multi-Medium Fest

Is THIS the future of urban food? Either way, you can check out this and other ideas at FIAF's Farm City Fest this weekend. Photo courtesy FIAF.

Each fall the French Institute Alliance Francaise (or FIAF) runs a festival called Crossing the Line, one of those amazing multidisciplinary type things where artists and musicians and poets and professors all work together in ways they often don’t get to without a big chunk of grant money and a very forward-thinking project manager.

This year’s fest, happily, is strongly focussed on food, and from today till October 2nd there are plenty of Edible-ly events to consider around the city, from movies — American Meat, The Gleaners and I — to tours of some of the city’s working farms and a massive Manhattan forum on the future of growing food in the city on the 25th. (Get the whole schedule right here.) But one of the most impressive events is this Sunday, and it’s in Brooklyn.

It’s called the Farm City Fair, and it will include everything from locally made ice creams and popsicles, to produce for sale from local community gardens and farms, to a cooking contest where one ingredient must be grown in Brooklyn, to a 12-piece “avant garde” marching band, to artists that use agriculture as inspiration and medium, to demos on growing food with cast-off Poland Spring bottles and $5 plastic tubs from Home Depot, to food from chefs at Egg, Marlowe & Sons and Ted & Honey, to a taste of an interestingly un-molecular recipe from WD-50 chef Wylie Dufresne using local food. It’s called “slow poached egg, smashed potatoes, green tomato consomme, pickled carrots, basil.” We’d gladly cross the line for that, hmm?

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