Beta to beyond
It's been almost a year, and we've been thinking... this monthly (free) newsletter explains some upcoming changes and re-iterates our goals and aims for Sourced
Happy June to our free newsletter subscribers! All this summery weather has got us thinking about our upcoming 1-year anniversary 🥳 and how best to celebrate.
This issue of our free newsletter is going to give you some insight to what we have planned, what we’ve been up to and where we want to take Sourced in its second year.
From its launch in July 2020, we’ve always said this is the ‘beta’ version of Sourced. So thank you for bearing with us and helping us see how best to make Sourced into the public resource we want it to be!
On our end we’ve been deciding how best to grow Sourced but our main goals and beliefs remain the same:
Food and drink are biological and cultural rights.
Publish work that asks questions, empowering readers to investigate the ideas further in their own ways and environment.
Publish in multiple mediums, languages and styles so that the information is accessible. This is also about valuing personal history, or visual language as academically important as ‘academic’ writing; creating and building a new canon.
Be engaging with the work - create space conversations (insta live tutorials, social media chats etc).
Find ways to decolonise our thinking on food and drink systems
Our editorial guidelines remain much the same as when we started, but our newsletters will be changing. We want to be able to hit enough financial stability to employ a small team so we can have the capacity to produce content in many different forms and adequately compensate the people who do that work; it is very unlikely we will ever publish more than we do now, but rather our fees to contributors will rise as our finances do.
We’ll still be popping in with this free newsletter each month to keep you up to date with what is new on the website and in the Sourced world, and our paid-newsletter (the one that funds all the lovely commissions on our website) will still be coming out every second week but is getting a bit of an upgrade.
The current structure of our paid newsletter consists of an essay, recipe and reading list. They’re meant to show the behind the scenes work of Sourced. They tell you what inspires us, how we work through questions and what we’re excited about. We love them, we hope you do too, but we thought it might be nice to shake it up a little and give some space for other people we admire to share their insights with you.
To get an idea of what these would look like check out the newsletter takeover from Sachiko & Shu.
Why are we doing this? We are big believers that our voices should never be the only ones in the room. Through takeovers we’ll be able to showcase other people who do work we see as aligned with our beliefs. It also gives us a chance to take a break from essay writing to develop the Sourced editorial strategy. And, we use these takeovers and interviews as research points, therefore we thought you might too.
To that end, we will also be changing the way our seasons look. While we were in love with the idea of 4 seasons a year, we’re running into the problem of feeling like a 3-month focus is just enough time to get stuck into an idea, but not enough to really consider it through. With Water especially we’ve seen how 3 months is a very ambitious time period for a complex ingredient. So we will be extending the Water season into July and discuss the possibility of reducing our focus from 4 ingredients a year to 3.
What does this mean for you?
Nothing really, unless you want to upgrade your subscription to get our paid newsletters too. You’ll be helping us pay freelancers and as a bonus you’ll get to see what makes us tic and know the people we admire a little bit better.
But what if I absolutely cannot handle another email in my inbox?
No woooooorrriees. We get inbox fatigue. You can still support us through a patreon subscription, where you can read the newsletters on the patreon without receiving them in your inbox twice a month.
Coming up at Sourced
We are bringing on board the wonderful Rini Singhi to help us with admin, streamlining our research and getting us into a better functioning place. A proper introduction coming soon, in the meantime follow her at @rinisinghi
Our next subscriber newsletter will be an interview with Anna Jones, specifically looking at her book One Pot, Pan, Planet!
Water, thus far…
Chloe’s investigation into chefs in London cooking as diaspora and thinking about all the questions that brings
It Travelled With Me, Within Me
Photographer and essayist Yvonne Maxwell captures the story of her mother and cooking, everyday rituals and what travels with us
Talking fungi!
Chloe & Anna interview Catherine Chong
Looking at farming since the pandemic, and the importance of bogs within the eco-system and especially regarding water.
A look at Burton’s water and the global impact on beer, by Hollie Stephens
Ideas around water scarcity, and what travelling ‘overseas’ means
Including reading lists, which will be further updated… sorry! This two woman team struggles with admin sometimes!
Image in this newsletter: a photo from a beach in South Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand from Anna’s trip home in 2017. “I love this liminal space between sea and land, especially in the waxing and waning of the tides. So much life (and food!) is in this area; there is also a sense of danger in case you get caught with the strong tides coming in fast and get cut off from the land, on certain points. During this time I have really noticed how far away I am from home, and feel homesick and question why I left; this image makes me think of distance and an endlessness to time.” Anna describes why she loves this image.