“Convenient Consciousness” with plant-based fast food

Sacramento’s newest addition to its vegan utopia is the 100% plant-based burger, fries and shake restaurant Burger Patch. Located on K and 23rd Street and open from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekdays until 1 a.m. on weekends, Burger Patch is the new Sacramento hotspot. During busy hours, lines stream around the corner and two blocks down.

The menu at Burger Patch offers three different kinds of burgers: the single patch, double patch and barbeque “bacon” patch, all of them using the famous Beyond Meat patty. They rework the Beyond Meat into a 2.5 ounce patty for the single and double patch, while the barbeque patch is molded into a 4 ounce patty. The Burger Patch crew hand press their large patties in-house, which offers Beyond Meat fans a larger portion option than what is traditionally offered at other vegan restaurants.

The menu also offers a chick’n sandwich: The Ranch. It uses Gardein vegan “chicken” and Sweet Earth hickory-smoked “bacon.” Both the burgers and sandwiches use Daiya vegan cheese and are topped with homemade barbeque, ranch and Patch sauce (similar to a Thousand Island dressing, but with a chili-garlic kick to it).

Also offered on the menu are a few “milk” shake options: vanilla bean and chocolate — I highly recommend adding their grilled and salted chocolate chip cookie into the mix too. With their minimalistic yet diverse menu, Burger Patches makes for the perfect, guilt-free lunch and dessert stop.

The owners of Burger Patch Danea and Phillip Horn spoke about their experiences being vegan and how it transcended into owning a restaurant.

“Phillip and I have followed a majority plant-based diet for more than a decade with being 100% plant-based for the past seven years, Danea said. “I love experimenting in the kitchen to recreate recipes that are free from meat, dairy and eggs but taste exactly how I remembered them growing up. One of the meals, especially for Phillip, was a burger, fries and shake. Over time as we toyed with what a restaurant could look like, food scientists were discovering ways to create burgers based on pea protein, coconut oil and beet juice that look and taste just how we remembered.”

Burger Patch started as a pop-up location at Sacramento’s Golden One Center and quickly became one of the most popular food stops in the stadium. Safe to say, they’re meeting the same success at their brick-and-mortar location as they did at their pop-up.

“In 2017, these two ideas intersected, and Burger Patch was the first restaurant to serve the Beyond Burger in Sacramento,” Danea said. “When the line stretched to four hours, we knew that this was something people were craving. We always enjoy showing our friends and community that you can follow a plant-based diet and still indulge with a comforting meal. Burger Patch is modern ingredients with a nostalgic taste.”

The Burger Patch mission statement illustrates their dedication to the theme of their restaurant.

“When you come into the restaurant, you will see the phrase ‘convenient consciousness,’” Danea said. “We know that people are busy, and often finding a quick plant-based meal can be challenging. We want to make it easy for people to eat in alignment with their values in a conscious way that is kind to our bodies, animals and the planet. Oh, and we made it really delicious.”

With the success so far with their Sacramento location, the Horns have fielded several inquiries about potential additional locations and are open to exploring those possibilities in the not-too-distant future.

Burger Patch also plans on adding new menu items during special events, such as the “Pulled Patch.” This burger will make its debut at the BottleRock Music Festival in Napa before it joins the menu at the Sacramento location.

With plant-based foods on the rise, Burger Patch is making great waves in providing a conscious choice for the masses with their gourmet burgers, modern ingredients and nostalgic taste.

Written By: Clay Allen Rogers — arts@theaggie.org

Children books that have had a lasting effect on students

After taking ENL 180 “Children’s Literature” with Professor Frances Dolan, I began thinking critically about how the books we read as children influence the rest of our lives. A child’s introduction to literature is important, especially during such a formative time for the brain. Youth is when we begin establishing thoughts and opinions about the world around us, something books can aid.  

An article in Time Magazine cites titles such as “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Goodnight Moon” as being some of the best and most influential children’s books. But what is it about these books that makes them so important? Why do people have so much nostalgia toward them?

The literature we are exposed to as children leaves a lasting effect on who we are and who we grow up to be. I personally was an avid reader as a child. Because I was so shy, I found solace in burying my nose in a book and turning the characters into my friends.

I learned the power of creativity in Katherine Paterson’s “Bridge to Terabithia” while also learning that sometimes novels can make you cry — a lot. I improved my vocabulary and tapped into my dark side in Lemony Snicket’s wonderfully weird “A Series of Unfortunate Events.”

From Roald Dahl’s classic novel, I related heavily to characters like Matilda: characters who were quiet and precocious and, above all else, book lovers. As an English major, I think it’s safe to say that what I read had a major impact on my life.

This goes for many other students as well. Second-year English major Ariana Green said that “Harry Potter” was one of her favorite series growing up.

“The theme or lesson that I remember learning from ‘Harry Potter’ is the importance of family,” Green said. “One doesn’t have to be related by blood to have a family, which is a lesson that really resonated with me growing up.”

Fourth-year English and theater and dance double major Katherine Halls said that her favorite books included the “Amelia Bedelia” franchise and the “Junie B. Jones” books.

“I think Junie B. Jones resonates the most with me, since the books’ point of view is set through her thoughts in her diary,” Halls said. “She leaves absolutely nothing out, and her perspective on life as a kindergartener is so funny and similar to mine. I whipped through them as a kid.”

Halls carried the messages she received from these books throughout her life.

“I think some important lessons I’ve learned from books like these are it’s okay to be yourself,” Halls said. “You get to choose what you like and what you want to do in life so you should be brave.”

Second-year English major Caitlyn Liu was an avid reader growing up and found the “Nancy Drew” series to be the most relatable.

“The most prominent lesson I learned from reading ‘Nancy Drew’ was to always be prepared,” Liu said. “Nancy always knew what to do, she was resourceful, she had everything she needed with her at all times. I was that third-grader who had dozens of band-aids and packets of Neosporin in my backpack.”

Along with providing her with important emergency readiness skills, Liu continues to see the value in what the novels taught her.

“Reflecting as an adult, reading ‘Nancy Drew’ definitely taught me how to be persistent and observative.” Liu said. “Nancy was always so attentive to everything around her — the atmosphere, the situation, the people she met. She taught me to not trust everyone I meet instantaneously.”

From the wordless pages of “Where the Wild Things Are” to the complex fantasy world of “Harry Potter,” children’s books captivate their past and current readers for generations. Whether we can recognize the impacts explicitly or not, the content we absorbed as children made an impact on us today.

Written by: Alyssa Ilsley — arts@theaggie.org

A Musical Love Affair

Jazz, characterized by free improvisation and syncopation with instruments like piano, trumpet, saxophone and drums, has its far-reaching tendrils in much of the music we experience today. Jazz has particularly deep roots in the world of hip-hop. Since the 1990s, hip-hop artists have been paying homage to their jazz roots in bold and mold-breaking ways, blurring the lines between conventional hip-hop and jazz. This musical relationship fostered some of the most compelling and pioneering musical projects of the past three decades.

Both jazz and hip-hop are relatively new art forms that developed and thrived within the margins of society. Luke Mombrea, who studies music composition at the University of California, Los Angeles, commented on their connection.

“I would definitely say one thing that’s very similar is that they are both African American art forms that allow creativity in the sense that they were not in the mainstream and could break a lot of conventions,” Mombrea said.

Some of the early rudimentary features of hip-hop were hinted at in the 1920s when jazz musicians began to scat over their different instrumentals giving more body and life to their music. This method allowed them to reflect the improvisational character of jazz in their singing. The structural bones of hip-hop further developed within the Bronx in the 1970s when Jamaican disc jockey Clive Campbell, also known as DJ Kool Herc, began to ad lib over his records.

Hip-hop and jazz both embrace the power of improvisation, an underlying parallel between them. For jazz, improvisation occurs as different instruments spin off the chord progression to express themselves individually, while hip-hop applies improvisation by delivering off-the-cuff verses known as freestyles.

Jacam Manricks, a jazz musician, composer, arranger, and music professor at UC Davis, commented on this aspect.

“It gives the artist a compositional role in a way because improvisation is composition sped up in real time,” Manricks said. “So it’s exciting, it’s spontaneous, it’s never really done the same. It gives the performer or performers in the band power.”

One of the first hip-hop artists to fully embrace jazz as an integral part of their sound was A Tribe Called Quest, a hip-hop group from the St. Albans neighborhood in Queens, New York, consisting of Q-Tip, MC Phife Dawg, DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad and MC Jarobi White. In their 1991 critically-acclaimed album “The Low End Theory,” they sampled numerous jazz tracks like Jimmy Mcgriff’s “Green Dolphin Street” and Freddie Hubbard’s “Suite Sioux.” These samples added an unorthodox dimension to their sound, implementing hard-hitting drum lines, deep driving upright bass riffs and brassy cutting horns. The group also actively referenced jazz in their lyrics, aptly asserting “We’ve got the jazz” and “What’s Duke Ellington without that swing?”

Jazz-rap was both a new musical invention and a nod to the group’s African American heritage. “The Low End Theory” set off a cascade effect that rippled through the genre causing many artists to substitute basic repetitive beats for a live jazz sound that added a refined character to their flow. Some notable artists who added their own flavor to the diverse, vibrant rhythms of jazz were Digable Planets and De la Soul.

Mombrea elaborated on the significant benefits that jazz instrumentals can contribute to hip-hop.

“The way jazz instrumentals are used in hip-hop are unique in the sense that you have this more rhythmically off-kilter beat and more syncopated-type instrumental,” Mombrea said. “There’s more area for you to flow onto, so its less rigid. Things that sample jazz are more rhythmically complex so there’s more things you can find. You can get so much variation with jazz, more than any other type of music.”

Jazz got yet another boost into the hip-hop world in the 2000s when rhythm and blues artist D’Angelo came out with his album “Voodoo.” The album featured Questlove, the gifted co-founder of The Roots, on drums.

Mombrea commented on the impact of Questlove’s drums on the hip-hop and music community.

“A really prominent aspect that’s influencing a lot of this jazz and modern hip-hop production is actually a lot of the drumming that was done by Questlove on D’Angelo’s ‘Voodoo,’” Mombrea said. “D’Angelo asked Questlove to play drums as though he was drunk. This meant a super heavy swing, using drums that are slightly behind the beat.”

For hip-hop artists, this originally jazz swing drum technique created new and unconventional grooves that elevated their flow’s rhythmic ingenuity. Mombrea continued to elaborate on the unique freedom this style developed on albums like Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 “To Pimp a Butterfly.”

“One of the things that’s very much prevalent, especially in ‘To Pimp a Butterfly,’ is that these swing-pockets allow artists to create very intricate rhythmic lines over the top,” Mombrea said.

“To Pimp a Butterfly” is a recent landmark in the fusion of jazz-rap. The album itself features prominent up-and-coming modern jazz artists like pianist Robert Glasper, multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin and saxophonist Kamasi Washington.

Manricks commented on the unique capabilities that jazz artists like these bring to the collaborative process.

“Jazz musicians are very fluent in their particular type of language so when they collaborate with artists like Kendrick Lamar they have a whole lexicon of harmony, melody and rhythm that they can draw upon because the art form [of jazz] is evolving all the time and has taken so many parts,” Manricks said.

“To Pimp a Butterfly” is uniquely groundbreaking because rather than only sampling past jazz albums to piece together beats, the musicians improvised jazz riffs on the spot and let the creative process unfold from there.

Mombrea continued to comment on the intricacies of the album.

“One of the things that I think was unique in Kendrick’s album was that when hip-hop usually uses jazz, it uses a loop so you don’t get the same kind of progression in jazz,” Mombrea said. “But in the Kendrick album, he had this really unique combination of having loops, but also having stuff that really had jazz progressions and live musicians in there. In one respect it was jazz-hip hop, but then it also had its own original jazz.”

Mombrea also noted that hip-hop returns the favor of influence.

“Jazz is getting into hip-hop, but hip-hop is getting into jazz too,” Mombrea said.

When hip-hop artists like Kendrick Lamar, Common and Mos Def work closely with modern jazz artists like Glasper and Washington, they create a melting pot of talent and technique that naturally diffuses itself amongst the group.

Manrick provided some insight into how this diffusion of technique and musical evolution are thoroughly ingrained within jazz’s DNA.

“Jazz has always been a collage and about modernity,” Manrick said. “It’s nothing that is completely original, it all comes from something. One remarkable thing about jazz is that in the short time it’s been around about 100 years, its come the same amount of distance in terms of musical complexity, soaking up other cultures and incorporating other forms of music in 100 years as classical music had done over centuries.”

The adaptive and progressive nature of jazz supplements its relationship with hip-hop. In arms, the two grow in tandem as they draw from each other to move music forward, captivating and delighting listeners all along the way.

Written by: Andrew Williams — arts@theaggie.org