I have to preface these post with a shout out: the images are from Kyle Roth, a local photographer who does beautiful work and who is a big champion of Cleveland, be sure to read his blog at North Coast Lifestyle and Epstein Design Partners.
Michael Ruhlman is an author and culinary grad. As he stood on the stage and talked, I found myself nodding. He spoke about food and cooking. I can tell you from personally experience that most people do not know what most veggies are, or how they are raised. We are becoming farther detached from our food. He gave us a great talk about food and how cooking are what makes us human.. He quoted from Richard Wrangham’s book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Taking us from our food preparation has made us more separate and more unhealthy. He spoke about how we feed our livestock foods that they were never meant to eat. Furthermore, social problems and illness are on the rise as more of our food is processed and provided to us. Cooking makes us think about what we are eating. It takes effort, which brings families together. When you cook, you look for better ingredients and you learn more about what you are eating and how to make your life better.
Michael Ruhlman is so passionate that he helped to start North Union Farmer’s Market, which has grown to one of the top farmers markets in the region, with multiple locations around the city. He showed us slides of some local producers. Local farms that are doing good things by raising humanely produced pigs that are well treated and humanely slaughtered. Local food is making a comeback because we are starting to learn that cooking makes us better, and not cooking takes stuff away from our lives. We can change things now, simply by taking the time and effort to cook for ourselves and our family. One of the things he mentioned was voting with our dollars. When we buy raw ingredients and cook, we spend our money in support of those who are promoting this industry. On the other hand, those who do spent money on crap are voting for more crap. So what do you want to vote for? And take the time to pick up a pan, rather than McDonald’s for dinner.
image courtesy of Susie Sharp
If you have ever thought about opening your own business then you know what Danielle DeBoe went through before she opened her fantastic shop in Gordon Square that is known as 
Danielle’s shop, 
The most moving and inspiring talk of the entire TEDxCLE event was Patrick Perotti, Esq. While normally the word lawyer makes people cringe, Mr Perotti and his firm, Dworken & Bernstein company actually are giving lawyers a good name. They founded a group called Lawyers Give Back.
Chris Yanc was one of the speakers at the TEDxCLE event. Before entering the event for the day, there sat upstairs an interactive light table. you could draw or write with your fingers, make waves in a pool of water, and a host of other cool things. It looked familiar to me, as I had seen something similar at Ingenuity Fest. There is was being used to control a selection of videos that were played in order of votes, and you could vote on the videos by touching this giant touch screen. The reason it seemed so eerily similar was that it was the same table. What made it such a great project is that it was built and made by Chris Yanc for pennies on the dollar, compared to similar products on the market. Even better, he told us how he did it. Being a techno geek deep at heart, I loved hearing him speak. He was witty and fun. Of course he did not go into too much depth about his table, but he did share the basics. Why? He spoke of open source. Open source means that developers and creators share their work with the world, not for the almighty dollar, but in order to collaborate and create and make things better. You can find out more about him at cyancdesigns, where he even has a host of tutorials to inspire and educate. THAT is a page I am bookmarking!
The organizers for our event were 
