As you’ll read on page 3 in the article, “Revitalizing the Northside Planning Council,” we’ve been going through some big changes over here at NPC. I’m now serving as both the Northside News Editor and the Interim Executive Director (though there’s far more work to do than we can afford). But I want to talk about crickets.

Not everyone knows that the Northside News is owned and published by the Northside Planning Council (NPC), a community-based nonprofit that basically coined the one-word term, “Northside.” Among other projects, NPC helped build this community’s identity through successes like the Warner Park Community Recreation Center, the establishment of the Friends of Troy Gardens (now Community GroundWorks), the founding of the Northside Farmers Market, and the campaign to bring Pierce’s Northside Market to the community when we lost our grocery store.

So much of the work we do at NPC involves our local businesses. The Northside News is the sole advertising outlet for many of our area businesses. We’re proud to help promote and support them — like our features on Serenity Salon, the Virginia Davis School of Dance, and Noah’s Ark this edition — and we hope that their advertising dollars are well spent. We are always available to help maximize your impact in the newspaper, so get in touch if you would like to join our community of advertisers.

NPC now also operates the FEED Kitchens, a kitchen incubator for start-up food businesses. To be honest, when I returned to NPC in 2013, I barely understood what that was. What I’ve come to learn is that it’s a pretty amazing place where dreams are coming true and exciting new innovations in the food industry are being explored.

That brings me back to crickets. As a life-long vegetarian (I’ve never even tasted meat), I’ll admit to being a bit squeamish about the idea of eating crickets, but, from the standpoint of a growing world population and ecological sustainability, crickets are an awesome source of protein. Insects are a common food source in Uganda (pickled grasshoppers are peddled on street corners in Kampala), where I worked in between stints at NPC. Well, we have a FEED user who’s taking frozen, vacuum-sealed, food-grade crickets, produced at an FDA certified site, and turning them into edible products. Don’t worry, it’s all up to code, but I’m tickled by the fact that it’s going on right here in our kitchen incubator. There can’t be many other nonprofits in town that can talk about producing cricket-based foods.

I love this organization. I love our newspaper, and I have grown to love FEED. Not only do we get to do fabulous, intriguing, engaging work, but Northsiders are among my very favorite people in the world (and I’ve seen much of the world, so that counts for something). Thank you.