The Food Rendezvous: Your Weekend "Foodshed"

The Food Rendezvous

Imagine a happy combination of community meeting, farmers market, country fair and food festival and you have something like this weekend's first-in-a-series The Food Rendezvous. Or just call it a "foodshed," which is how founders Laurie Dill and Dominique Leveuf also describe their events, the second of which is scheduled for next month at an as-yet-undetermined location. Or don't call it anything and just show up this Saturday with a shopping basket and an appetite.

So what exactly is a foodshed? "It's all the components that come together," says Dill, "to make the food system: the farmers, the breadbakers, the producers." Dill and Leveuf will also be including non-profits and, eventually, underground dinners. "We want to build it as a resource center as well," said Dill this afternoon. "It's so exciting to see what's going on here [in Los Angeles.] The vendors are unbelievable."

Dill and Leveuf describe themselves as "two friends who are both passionate about food, sustainability and local production and have decided to take things into their own hands." Thus the Rendezvous, which assembles local producers and adds fun things like chef demos, readings from local cookbook authors, food workshops, a bike raffle, a jam-making contest and DIY sessions on making garden beds, composting, worm growing, canning and preserving. Add local musicians and movie screenings and you have yourself a festival. Who's coming? Cookbook author Martha Rose Shulman, gelato maker Leo Bulgarini, Let's Be Frank, Cacao Mexicatessan, Josie's English Kitchen Jams, Cognoscenti Coffee, Mi Hijos Salsa, and Mark Stambler's Back Yard Bread, among many others.

The Food Rendezvous is this Saturday, August 28th, from 4 - 10 p.m. at SPARC at 685 Venice Boulevard in Venice. Tickets are $10 in advance, and $15 at the door. (Kids under 12 are free.) TFR will be a monthly event and the location and participants will change each time. Check the website for more information.