It's easy to tell people that eating local is a good thing. Economically, nutritionally and environmentally, buying locally grown food is a no-brainer. But how do you actually get busy Pittsburghers, ingrained in the habit of dashing into a grocery store and buying packaged foods, to really consider a shift toward eating locally?
A pair of
Sprout Fund "Seed Award" recipients named Quelcy Kogel and Erin Pischke decided to tackle that question. The solution they came up with was both original and delicious.
Sunday, you may have noticed, was March 14 -- a date that for years has been designated "Pi Day" by math teachers and other number lovers nationwide. Kogel and Pischke took the idea of "Pi Day" one step further, creating the QTPi(e) Project. Working from a list provided by the county, they selected dozens of addresses around Pittsburgh that included some portion of pi (3.1415, for those willing to round off a bit) and delivered a surprise gift to as many as possible.
The gift included a pie baked from locally sourced ingredients and a recipe box -- the sort your grandmother might have had in her kitchen -- filled with recipe cards packed with information. One recipe card detailed the local origin of the ingredients in the pie. Another gave details on the QTPi(e) Project, while a third told the history of pi. Yet another offered "the long ingredient list of really unnatural substances" you'd find in a commercially produced pie available nationwide, says Kogel.
"Originally, we wanted to map out where those ingredients came from," says Kogel. "But there are so many different factory farms that things come from, we couldn't even source it all. So we just showed the distribution centers."
The hope is that pie recipients -- not to mention their friends and family who hear about this unexpected gifting of baked goods -- will learn valuable information from the recipe cards and be inspired to eat locally as often as possible.
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Writer: Melissa Rayworth
Source: Quelcy Kogel/Erin Pischke, QTPi(e) Project
Image courtesy of the QTPi(e) Project