In preparation · Demystifying Food Origins · 40 pages + 548 architectural boards in draft

Demystifying Food Origins

Flashcards

A classroom and garden deck that pairs what a crop does for the body with where it came from and how to grow it — the teaching tool behind the food education work, built on an architectural drawing collection.

Six color groups open the deck, each listing the fruits and vegetables that carry those pigments and what they support in the body. Ten crops then get a matched pair of cards: what it does nutritionally, and how to actually grow it.

Food Guardian cards carry a character, a place, and the history that connects them.

The deck’s fourth component applies the organization’s premise in miniature: the tools of architectural documentation — sections, dimension lines, numbered keys, title blocks — turned on subjects architecture has never bothered to document. The Architectural Detail Collection holds 137 crops on four boards each: form and anatomy, transformation over time, three coordinated views, and the layered tissue system. Every board carries the crop’s scientific name and its published research citation, the way a drawing set carries its engineer. The boards are still on the drafting table — they join the public record when they meet their own standard.

What is in it

Color groups — Green, White, Red, Blue & Purple, Yellow, Orange
Crop pairs — broccoli, sweet potato, eggplant, okra, tomato, cayenne pepper, lemon, blueberry, avocado, watermelon
Food Guardian cards — character, cultural anchor, and crop history
The Architectural Detail Collection — 137 crops drawn to building-documentation standards, four boards each: morphology, transformation, coordinated anatomy, system and envelope

Source Built from Developed from the “Your Health In Color” resource and the food-mapping workshops in the East New York participatory design study, and from the Demystifying Food Origins character compendium. The architectural boards are drawn from published botanical research — scientific name and citation (Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) in every title block; collection audit 2026-08-27: 548 boards across 137 subjects.

The draft as it stands — not a finished cover.

Can I get it

Not finished yet. This one is still moving — chapters can be added, cut, or rewritten before it is done, so treat the page count above as where the draft stands today, not as a promise.

When it is ready, buying it will not be buying merchandise. Sixty percent of what you put in goes straight into the programs this book came out of — the workshop, the garden bed, the mural, the next piece of research. No profit is distributed, and you can hold us to that.

And if you are already in the Founding Archive, it is yours without buying anything. Knowledge is not a reward for financial capacity.

Put me on the list

Accompanies

Demystifying Food Origins

Demystifying Food Origins uses character design, agricultural history, and regional storytelling to reconnect fruits, vegetables, grains, roots, and tree crops to the people and places that sustained them. It treats food as cultural evidence while distinguishing botanical origin, cultural anchor, crop movement, and artistic interpretation.

Pillars

Food as Empire

Participate

Help make this one true

This deck is built to be used — in classrooms, gardens, kitchens, workshops. If you have tried a card with real people, what happened is exactly the research we need: what worked, what fell flat, what you changed. And the architectural boards are drawn from published botany — if one does not match the plant in your hands, that correction is exactly the checking the deck needs. What holds is incorporated, with credit if you name yourself.

What are you adding?

Where you tried it A dish A correction A source Something else

A classroom, a garden, a workshop, a kitchen table where a piece of this was used with real people. What worked, what fell flat, what you changed — that is field data.

Name the dish and the table it belongs to — the season, the occasion, who cooks it and who taught them. The dish is where a crop becomes a culture.

Point to what is wrong and say what is right, as you know it. Lived knowledge counts as evidence here — you do not need a citation to be taken seriously.

A book, a paper, an archive, an elder, a grower. People are sources. Tell us where to look and what it will show us.

If it does not fit any box here, it may be the thing we have not thought to ask for. Say it plainly.

Your contribution

Name the record credits its contributors

Email to verify authorship — never published

Reviewed before anything is published, per the data privacy policy. Your name and email are asked for because authorship matters here: a record that cannot be verified cannot be trusted, and a contribution that holds is credited to you by name in future editions. Your email is never published.