11/11/2023 0 Comments Acorn and oak tree apartments![]() ![]() Thanks to a combination of hard work and support from fellow islanders – plus the occasional crowdfunding experiment – Marcie has used the acorns of Kea to create a cookie business, Oakmeal, which is working out rather well. It’s autumn 2016, and Marcie is in Paris, at the biennial SIAL, the biggest wholesale food fair in the world. The harvests could begin.įast-forward five years. In a population of about 2,000 talkative people, that was more than enough. And by the way, what do you think of these acorn cookies? A hundred or so people attended. The meeting was to say: Let’s make Kea’s oak trees part of the island’s economy. She’d learned how to remove the bitterness one would experience if eating them straight off the ground, how to mill them into flour, how to use that flour in cooking. For years she’d been researching the acorn’s potential as a source of food. What else would you do with them, exactly? Well, Marcie had a few suggestions. That said, there were still plenty of the trees, so each autumn, thousands of acorns would carpet the ground on farms and in back gardens, where they would just lie until they were cleared or simply merged with the ground. The oak forests that contributed so much to Kea’s serene, verdant atmosphere were thinning out. This had a lot to do with the islanders finding more value in the land on which the trees stood, which could be claimed for holiday homes, and their wood, which could be repurposed as a cheap source of fuel. For a long time, Kea’s oak trees had been in decline. Back in 2011, Marcie Mayer invited her fellow residents of Kea, an island in a shipwreck-strewn part of the Mediterranean near Athens, to a meeting about acorns. ![]()
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