You may have heard them on iTunes: a group of food reporters, commentators, constantly talking about all things food.
The Heritage Radio Network reports out of recycled
shipping containers in Bushwick. To be more specific, their offices are
in shipping containers in the middle of a pizza restaurant in hipster
Brooklyn.
They crank out 40 shows a week, hitting all topics
related to food. To date, they’ve compiled a log of 7,000 episodes. This
covers the gamut from sustainable agriculture to food tech to eating
disorders to the culinary history of Vietnam.
Patrick Martins, founder of Slow Food USA and
Heritage Foods USA, started the program in 2009. Since then, he’s drawn
in the superstars of slow food like Alice Waters and Michael Pollan to
his eco-friendly office, hosting conversations on and off-the-air with
such food activists.
Martins (far right) hosts a conversation with Alice Waters.
To get younger voices in the mix, Martins and his crew
started a scholarship program, getting students from nearby schools to
contribute their own food stories.
While they’ve got a strong following of listeners,
they’re having growing pains. So, they’ve launched a Kickstarter
campaign, which reads:
“As a scrappy non-profit, we did our best to repair
the cracks with the equivalent of internet duct-tape along the way. But
now we’re at a critical point.”
“The website is our storefront,” Martins says in the
new Kickstarter video. But the website is outdated — in need of new
coding and organization.
Heritage Radio Network’s offices are housed in these recycled shipping containers.
“We want to be the planet for food,”
Martins iterates. To do that, they need a revamping. So, the largely
volunteer-based crew is seeking $35,000 on Kickstarter to support their
thriving non-profit.
Most, if not all, the shows are made by unpaid
individuals — an issue in many independent media outlets. Despite the
recent renaissance of radio and podcasts, the business models have
stayed largely the same.
Martins isn’t a novice entrepreneur, though. While
this might be his first media venture, he started Heritage Foods USA, an
online marketplace for family farmers to sell their poultry, beef,
pigs, and other artisanal meats directly to chefs and customers.
Working with the Slow Food movement, he had developed a network of
farmers around the country, who were looking for markets for their
product. Martins played that missing link, connecting them to premier
restaurants, farm-to-table chefs, and American households.
That online shop now has a retail storefront in New
York City: The Heritage Meat Shop, reportedly the “first all Heritage
breed meat shop” in America — not far from Martins’ recording studio in
Brooklyn.
