Born out of a homesickness for the yogurt of his native Iceland, Siggi Hilmarsson started to make his own batches at home, founding Siggi’s in 2005. After many, many batches, he was able to create a nonfat skyr with three times the amount of protein compared to standard yogurts.

It has the cleanest taste (and thickest texture!) of any dairy product I’ve ever tasted, and quickly developed a cult following among foodies and healthy eaters. Now distributed nationally by Whole Foods, I sat down with Siggi to discuss his perspectives on American tastebuds and approach to eating.

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What was the inspiration for you behind founding your own yogurt company?
I missed skyr the yogurt of Iceland, which is much thicker than regular yogurt from being strained– you strain about 75% of the whey weight out so you have a much more concentrated mass of milk solids. Skyr is traditionally made from skim milk, because it’s a byproduct of butter. So back in Iceland in the old days, you would start by skimming off the cream to make butter, then take the skim and make the skyr, after straining the whey from the skyr you would use the whey to drink or pickle various sheep’s parts usually or other food items to store over the winter.

Although I missed skyr the reason why I founded Siggi’s as a particular brand of skyr in the US has more to do with food here than with yogurt per se—I’m pretty averse to eating a lot of sweet stuff and I wanted to make the product not very sweet. I wanted to make a yogurt that was not excessively sweet and didn’t have this explosive sweet flavor.

I don’t like eating a lot of sugar. And when I came to the States, I was shocked by not just candy, but whole wheat bread (with high fructose corn syrup) and everything in between has sugar.  In particular even natural yogurt had 25 to 30 grams of sugar a cup. And then you see some that use aspartame, or artificial sweeteners, which I absolutely abhor. I don’t think they are good for you, they taste terrible, and they are part of this engineered food that I’m not really into.

How did you educate yourself in the process of making skyr?
I started just reading about it. My mom went to a couple local libraries back home in Iceland and got me some really old articles. I read some books, I read online, learned about yogurt in general. And then I started experimenting. All in all, from the time I made my first batch to when I started selling it, it was probably a year and a half. I went through many batches that failed first.

As a company, what are your guiding principles?
We don’t want any of our foods to be overly or excessively sweet, so we use a low amount of any sort of sugar substance. And the sugar we do put in there, we decided to use agave, which is a low glycemic carbohydrate, it takes the body longer to break down so basically you don’t get as much of a rush as you would if you just pump yourself up with sugar.

The other principles are general subtlety—we don’t use flavorings or try to avoid them, we use real fruit, don’t use any colorings, no artificial ingredients, try to keep ingredient style clear and short.

Even things that are unnecessary we just don’t include—for example people will often add beet juice for color, which is still natural and it’s pretty tasteless in small amounts, but we’ve skipped that. We don’t try to exaggerate the colors of things. Also with our sourcing we try to be transparent and traceable. We have certain criteria for the farms that they give their cows access to pasture, grass feed them, don’t use any hormones, we are against tail docking which is a rather unpleasant practice in some industrial dairies. We endorse sustainability–for the lack of a better word -and humane animal treatment, no factory farming. .                     .

In 2005, Ian Kizu-Blair, Sam Lavigne, and Sean Mahan created SFZero: a “collaborative production game” or alternate reality game (ARG), that sets out to take game players from being passive consumers behind a screen to interacting with the real world and with each other. SFZero is currently played in at least 30 cities around the world, from Minneapolis to Baghdad.

They’ve collaborated with Jane McGonigal on Flashback!, an educational kids TV show for PBS, been written up in the San Francisco Chronicle, spoken and hosted events at Institute for the Future, and created Ghosts of a Chance, a game for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where gameplay involves creating art objects and mailing them to the museum for an exhibition/event. .                     .

Addressing our economy back in April, President Bush refused to utter the term “recession,” opting instead for dopey euphemisms like “tough time,” “slowdown,” and “rough patch.” But as the domino effect of Lehman’s bankruptcy topples bank after bank, week after week, the discussion amongst grown-ups shifts to the plausibility of “depression.” Facing such a bleak outlook, we thought it would benefit our readers to share a personal account of the Great Depression, not necessarily to judge the economic parallels, but for the anecdotal guidance only our elders can provide. Dave Crawford, a 92 year old retired law professor and veteran of WWII was 13 years old when the stock market crashed in the fall of 1929. Earlier this month, he spoke with People Are Amazing:

Johnny Williams: As a 92 year old who lived through the 1930’s, do you think that we’re approaching another depression?

Dave Crawford: Definitely. And I think we may be even worse off than we were then. I think the big difference now is that nobody even dares use the word “depression.” They say “maybe we’re in recession,” but I think the fundamentals are even worse than they were then. I hope I’m wrong. In 1929 it was like falling off the edge of a cliff, people starting jumping out of their offices in Wall Street…it was that bad of a crash. It wasn’t until FDR came along in the early 1930’s that we began to rebound. He did a remarkable job; he was a real savior for our nation. We have no such leadership in evidence at this point. FDR came right in and said, “listen, this gap between the rich and the poor is ridiculous” and he inaugurated plans like the National Recovery Administration that were anathema to the wealthy. But we don’t have anybody like that now to take hold and close the ever-widening gap between the rich and the middle class and the poor.

Johnny: What are your earliest memories of the Depression era?

Dave: What comes to mind more than anything else was the new junior high school in the suburban Philadelphia area where my family lived. They started building in 1928 and they had all the steelwork up in 1929, but at the time of the crash the construction just stopped. I still remember driving by the skeleton framework of the school that I was supposed to be going to that fall. Gradually they got back on track but that skeleton framework is still very vivid in my mind. Also I remember one of the dances at my high school where the charge was “a penny a pound” for your date’s weight. So if she weighed a hundred pounds, it was only a buck for admission.

Johnny: Did they actually make the girls get on scales?

Dave: Yes, they did! So it was best to be with a girl who was very thin!

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INTERVIEW

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It’s a time-honored elementary school cliche: when the semester is slow, vacation fast approaching or there is a substitute teacher, the class watches a video to kill time. But Tony Dusko, a Pennsylvania-based 5th-grade teacher by day and animator by night, has bigger aspirations for what his students watch. Beginning with a short cartoon of a grilled-cheese sandwich telling his class to get ready for lunch, Dusko discovered that his 5th-graders had a voracious appetite for animated lessons.

Drawing on a degree in fine art and studies with Academy-Award nominated animator Paul Fierlinger, Dusko has created a series of films to engage his students in a variety of subjects; from learning about owls to being a good friend. His shorts make for lively and fun viewing, and represent a simple and effective way to break through the electronic clutter of his young students’ lives: His characters are quirky shapes and colors, his sound-effects are expressive, and his sense of humor is appealing to all ages (watch Some Facts About Owls, above and check out more of Tony’s work at notebookbabies.com). Recently, I had a chance to ask Tony a few questions about how and why he does what he does. –John

How did you get started with your educational animations?

One day I decided to make an animated character to tell the kids to be quiet when they are in line to go to lunch. I was sick of telling them myself every day.

What was your students’ response like?

They couldn’t believe their eyes or that I could do something like that. Then they begged me to make more.

How do you think a dynamic medium like animation helps kids learn?

I am not sure why it works but I am certain that it is an effective way to communicate information when done well. Perhaps it is the combination of movement and sound using simple colors and shapes. Or maybe it is just a medium that kids are used to from TV.
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INTERVIEW

Last year, a glowing little store called the mastihashop opened on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side. Mastiha is the hand-harvested resin from the trunk of mastic trees grown on Chios, Greece. It has been used for therapeutic purposes since Hippocrates’ time, and was studied by the University of Nottingham as a treatment for peptic ulcers.

The store is a veritable festival of Mastiha: flavored candies and sweet treats, spice shakers for cooking, teas, homeopathic powder for digestive problems, gum, and skincare products (developed in conjunction with the slick Greek beautycare brand Korres). Here are some of the forms you can taste at the store:

The mastihashop is run by sisters Kalliopi and Artemis Kohas. Kalliopi recently took some time to chat with me about introducing the magical sap to the US. –Kat

How did you get into the mastiha business?

My sister and I have been surrounded by mastiha our whole lives and when the “mastihashops” were created in Greece we knew that we wanted to participate in mastiha’s renaissance and be the ones to bring it to the US. We approached the company and to our good fortune they chose to work with us.

What have you learned in the past year since launching mastihashop?

I have learned that no matter how excellent your product is, without the proper exposure and channels of distribution your product won’t get the attention and sales it deserves. The biggest challenge is being proactive and creative everyday in order to educate the public to a product that they have never even heard of. .                     .

INTERVIEW

I’ve been a long-time fan of Paul Ahern’s “Cardboardistry” art — the pieces feel familiar yet striking and simple yet meticulous. I recently had a chance to catch up with the man with the mad knife skills, newly invigorated after his first show in Austin, Texas. –Kat

What is this thing you call Cardboardistry?

I discovered this method of working in summer 2003 in Brooklyn when I was the production designer for a music video for The Natural History. Our rule was that all sets and props had to be made from cardboard. I needed a pop art “painting” for the wall of this cardboard living room set, so I devised a method of creating a black and white image by removing the surface paper and revealing the corrugation beneath to act as the blacks in the image, and leaving behind the white. It turned out so well that I hung it up in my apartment after we were done, and a few different people asked to buy it.

Before I knew it, I had commissions for a series of huge wall pieces. People seem to be attracted to the mystery of how I create these pieces, but really it’s nothing more than steadfast determination, in the face of a rather mundane and repetitive process – scraping corrugated paper with an X-Acto knife. .                     .

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Daniel Sklaar, the brains (and culinary talent) behind Fine & Raw Chocolate. Available in several fine-foods stores in the New York area (including the Bedford Cheese Shop), Fine & Raw combines raw and natural confectionery with unconventional taste and texture.

According to Daniel—a former financial analyst turned French Culinary Institute graduate and self-professed chocolate fiend—the goal behind Fine & Raw was to rescue chocolate from its highly processed, mass-produced form, and reintroduce it to people as a simple and celebrated food. To that end, Daniel keeps his chocolate free of preservatives, sugar or dairy, instead blending it with blue agave nectar, coconut oil and sea salt. He also uses low-heat techniques to ensure that the chocolate retains the biodiversity of its nutrients. The end result is a chocolate similar to fresh produce: perishable, complex and delicious.

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