Goat Cheese and a Baguette: A Conversation with Bethany Rydmark

Goat Cheese and a Baguette: A Conversation with Bethany Rydmark
Food and Faith Podcast with Anna Woofenden and Sam Chamelin 

Bethany Rydmark is an eighth generation Oregonian, a landscape architect, a food-loving community organizer, and a forever-traveler at heart. As a home-educated daughter of a farmer and a teacher in the rural Pacific Northwest, she’s been transformed through engaging cultures beyond her bounds around the world and across her city. 

She has been featured in print, video, and web by Rolling Stone, The Oregonian, Cooking Up a Story, The Huffington Post, and The Associated Press as founding co-host of Portland’s PDX Food Swap. The grass roots community organization promotes food sharing across cultures by connecting people across cities, socioeconomic lines, and streets through the moneyless exchange of homemade food. Her work in grassroots food activism continues to attract attention in the lead up to the 10^th Anniversary of the PDX Food Swap in 2020, and the 5^th Anniversary of the Bake America Great Again Bake Sale for Refugees in 2019. 

A blogger for fifteen years, Bethany founded twoOregonians.com, earning finalist for TBU’s Best Newcomer travel blog in 2012, and her written work appears in such places as the collective Mama Said: Wit and Wisdom for New Mothers (Wild Child Travels, 2016), Meet, Plan, Go! How to Make Career-Related Connections on the Road, Sustainable Food for Thought, and The Art Cities of Emilia Romagna (citta d’arte Emilia Romagna, 2014), and her independently produced feature on the Middle East’s first microbrewery was highlighted by The Atlantic Longreads’ then-active Travelreads.

She has spoken at Wise Words and Wine with Women of Hope, and continues to engage with her international and local community through online and in person connections at global and neighborhood scales, raising funds for the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization and celebrating liberty and justice for all. 

Bethany is a 2006 graduate of the University of Oregon’s school of Architecture and Allied Arts, American Society of Landscape Architects member, and licensed, practicing landscape architect and small business owner living and working in Portland, Oregon.

Bethany is married to her childhood friend, Ted, and is raising two daughters in footsteps of strength and independence to follow their curiosities and compassion into the world.

www.twoOregonians.com

www.PDXfoodswap.com

www.bethanyrydmark.com 

email: bethany.rydmark@gmail.com

Food Swap Network Resources - https://foodswapnetwork.com/resources/

Rolling Stone Feature - https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/videos/portland-oregon-bartering-in-citys-cash-free-economy-w504157