4/16 Interview with Caroll Lee from GET FRESH/Lilly Day
On Wednesday, April 16th, I went back to Get Fresh (where the truffle class took place) in order to interview the founder/owner of the store- Caroll Lee. About a year and a half ago, in 2006, Caroll founded Get Fresh (located in Park Slope Brooklyn), based on her idea of “ready to make meals for busy moms.” She started out by doing research on where our food comes from, and through doing so “Omnivor’s Dilema” by Micheal Pollan, landed in her hands. From reading this book and others, Caroll learned that most of out food come from corn (such as corn syrup), and that corn and beans are the largest crops sold today in the world. However, Caroll “thought that people needed to know what REAL food was,” and in her opinion that is “food that is traditional, whole, and minimally processed.” In order to show people what this type of food really was, Caroll decided to have her new store only support small, local, family farms -all using only organic practices. To her, using the land as much as possible is supporting the generations ahead, and using it in a local way is simply a “win, win situation.” Caroll is simply “supporting people who are supporting the land,” the same practice as Alsiha Lumea, Peter Hoffman, and many others who are beginning to learn about the connection between our world and sustainability. Caroll’s goal was to make Get Fresh as sustainable as possible, so to complete that she uses wrappers that have been made out of recycled plastic and can be recycled, some wrappers she uses are also compostable, the cutlery is made from potatoes, and all of the scraps are composted. Caroll says that in reality “people want to be local, and that Get Fresh just makes it easy.”
