Albert Lew
Faces Behind the Food
As human beings, we all must eat to survive. While some of us enjoy good food others struggle to put meals on the table. My wife and I ate at two wonderful restaurants in the Boston area to celebrate our fall birthdays. In both instances, we met the chef at the end of the meal. But what did we know about the people who grow the ingredients these restaurants use? For instance, !Who grew that meaty celeriac?” The answer to the first question is Eva Sommaripa, an 80 year old pioneer who has been supplying New England and New York restaurants with amazing ingredients, beginning with fresh herbs for Julia Child in the 1980s. The next question was, How do they grow those microgreens?” My wife had recently begun a weekly delivery of nutrient dense microgreens, and I was curious about how they were grown. To answer this question, I sought out the woman who delivered our microgreens, Smita Das, who began growing these microgreens for her own use in her basement during the pandemic and quickly discovered a market for them with both consumers and restaurants. And while Eva and Smita donate to their local food pantries, from my younger daughter”s volunteer work at the Greater Boston Food Bank I knew that this organization has worked for years to buy and distribute tens of millions of dollars of food annually to those in need. Thus, the third question became, !What is the scope of GBFB”s efforts?” The images of Juan Encarnacion and Jose Vega provide a glimpse into the scope of what the Greater Boston Food Bank does every day. My intention with these images is to inspire your curiosity about the people and stories behind your own food.
Artist Bio
Although I wasted many rolls of film as a child, my excitement for photography as an adult began when I realized that I could !see” the Milky Way better with a camera than with my own eyes. Although the sublime, unexpected and mysterious diversity of nature, along with its occasional interactions with architecture continues to be a major theme of my photography, I have recently become interested in using photography as a narrative tool to bring humanity and awareness to the process of how our food is grown and distributed. In the spring, I will be working with the Greater Boston Food Bank and local farms to document the many narratives about how food is provided to those in need. I was born in Northern California and raised by an architect father and a scientist turned homemaker mother. My mother constantly took me to museums, national and state parks, where I developed a love of beauty of nature as well as artists’ interpretation of the natural world. I now live in the Boston suburbs and lead the telecommunications security business line for a high tech Fortune 1000 company. This winter I am based in Utah to pursue my dream of regularly snowboarding in deep powder. I am looking forwards to photographing the dark skies of the Wasatch range, the alpenglow sunsets, action shots on the snow, the architecture of the urban canyons of Salt Lake City. Photography, snowboarding and food are my outlets for personal and artistic expression.
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