A few years ago I read 1491 by Charles Mann. I picked up the paperback in an airport on the way to an agriculture conference. The book stunned me. I had no clue about the truth of civilization on the American continents, which is that before the Europeans arrived here there were millions of people [...]
Each year a particular circle of friends produces a wild, foraged, and farmed dinner purely for our own indulgence. It’s a gracious competition where everyone eats the rewards. This year the menu included my own country veal pate, pickled wild ramps, creamed nettle soup, an exquisite homemade hard cider that was more like Prosecco, nettle [...]
It is the Friday before Memorial Day Weekend, the second farmers market of the season, one of the loveliest days in May, the beginning of a three-day pajama party at the farm, and I am frazzled. All week long my consulting clients have been like a room full of crying babies. Each demands my immediate [...]
Some foodie friends came over for fried chicken and collards. They left behind a jar of dill pickles. I ate the last pickle yesterday and as I was rinsing out the jar, I noticed the list of ingredients included Polysorbate 80 and Yellow #5. Yikes! I can’t believe that made it through the front door [...]
I just listened to this podcast from Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity about diet-related disease, the environmental cost of industrial food, and the lifestyle habits of Americans, who lead the Western world in watching TV and eating crap. It’s a brilliantly concise (14 minute) interview with New York Times columnist Mark Bittman, [...]
Yesterday I was foraging in the barn for a piece of wood to plug up the hole the bees used to enter the now defunct hive. Buried under some chestnut beams in the lumber archives I saw a green tarp that didn’t belong there and went to reach for it, stopping just short of putting [...]