TEDxSydney – Crowd Farming 0

Last weekend I attended the TEDxSydney conference. It was held at the breathtakingly beautiful Sydney Opera House. If you’ve never heard of TED you can read lots more about it HERE. As PHENOMENAL as the conference was, I’m actually not writing about the speakers and performers today, I’m writing about what we ate.

Under normal circumstances I, personally, would be interested to know what was served for lunch at a well-known conference, but I understand that the majority of people probably wouldn’t. So of course there is something more exciting to discuss with you than just the contents of the day’s menus.

As TED is all about ideas worth spreading and new and exciting ways of doing things, it was the perfect opportunity for food curator Jill Dupleix and her team to feed the people using ‘crowd farming.’ “What the hell is that!?” I hear your ask. Well I don’t hear you but I imagine that’s what you’re thinking! ‘Crowd farming’ is basically where all of the attendees, as well as other locals who were interested in participating, were asked to grow and bring the food that would be eaten on the day.

The real challenge was not actually sourcing enough produce, every man and his dog got behind this awesome concept, rather, the poor chefs from Matt Moran’s ARIA catering were only made completely aware of what they would be getting a couple of days before! They basically had no idea what or how much of any one thing would be available, yet the expectation that the 2000 plus attendees would be eating delicious tucker was absolutely there!

I think this video that was shown to us on the day explains everything really well. I have watched it a billion times and get chills every time I do. The sense of community and togetherness makes me all warm and fuzzy!

Have you heard of Crowd farming? What do you think about it?

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