Photo: “Wild Girl” Becky Lerner
Both the white and blue flowers in the photo above are camas. The white one will kill you, but the blue one is food. The native people of the Portland area considered blue camas root a staple. It took three days of cooking in underground fire pits to make it edible. The bulb is said to taste like a sugary, sweet potato.

From May 24 through May 30, local “Wild Girl” Becky Lerner will be eating an entirely wild diet as she forages from sidewalks, parks, wilderness areas and yards in Portland. There will be no dumpster diving or mooching off gardens – Lerner will be surviving on wild edibles only.

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Dragonfly, A Metabolic Farm For Urban Agriculture
New York City 2009
By Vincent Callebaut Architectures

Excerpts from Vincent Callebaut Architectures:

Architecture has to serve a new agriculture and to design for the new social desire for ecologic mutation and food autonomy! The Dragonfly project suggests building a prototype of an urban farm offering a mixed programme of housing, offices and laboratories using ecological engineering, and farming spaces, which are vertically laid out in several floors and partly cultivated by its own inhabitants. This vertical farm utilizes sustainable applications of organic agriculture based on the intensive production varied according to the rhythm of the seasons. This nourishing agriculture is in favour of the reuse of biodegradable waste and the keeping energy and renewable resources for planning of an ecosystemic densification.

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