Eating and blogging my way through Bill’s Imported Foods

This morning on the Today Show several stay at home mothers were featured in a piece about the lucrative new world of digital marketing.  In the segment, the Today Show told the story of how these homemakers turned their passion for raising children and love of family into six figure online businesses by starting to writing systematically about their experiences caring for their families on blogs.  Through creatively engaging a niche market, homemakers, these entrepreneurial women built online businesses catering to the needs and wants of mothers around the country.  Starting small, these bloggers built a large audience and eventually began to be approached by marketers to feature products on their blogs.  This story is so appealing to and interesting to me because it involves the intersection of three topics I love: economic empowerment of women, creative entrepreneurship, and technology.  In fact, it was so appealing and interesting to me that I decided to write my own food blog which you are now reading the first installment of called “Daedalus in Minneapolis.”  In this blog I will be exploring a myriad of topics including but not limited to: the immigrant American experience, food, sustainable agriculture, health, gentrification, technology, local neighborhood business, and family.  I will tell the story through the lens of a year of working at Bill’s Imported Foods in the Lyn-Lake/Uptown area of Minneapolis, Minnesota as a Ph.D. refugee biochemist from Atlanta, Georgia.  My Turkish-American last name “Erbil” that is the capital of the occupied country of Kurdistan in Northern Iraq will fold into the stories in ways that will be revealed as the blog unfolds over time.  Realizing that so much of our experiences in America are determined by our names, it will be fun to feature my simple experiences with the food in the store while at the same time writing about current issues.  As they say, “Think global, act local.”  Stay tuned for exciting recipes and adventures in a little bit of Greece in the heartland!