food 33
Fuel, Food, and Fault: Rethinking the Emissions Debate
If we are serious about sustainability, we need to rethink where and how we apply pressure.
Garden With Children
I am happy that the boys enjoy the garden too. But who knows how it will be in five years?
The American Food System’s Very Bad Legacy
There’s little appetite for a response that begins with taking up our axes to clear the land for something better.
Hope for a Humane Agricultural Future: A Review of Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future
The ecomodernist approach of Regenesis relies on a mechanistic understanding of humanity. The presumption is that humans are merely fleshy machines that can adapt to flourish in any environment as…
In Praise of the Humble Slow Cooker
One easy solution is the crockpot. Why? You can throw in some basic ingredients in the morning before work or school, and then when you get home in the evening,…
Let us Feast!
Time and time again, in both mythic and recorded history, humans have celebrated the passing of a hardship by gathering together in merriment with good food and drink and song.
Food and “the job of getting it there”
In Charles Frazier’s 1997 novel Cold Mountain, a minister’s daughter decides after her father’s death to remain on their western North Carolina farm, rather than return to the genteel life…
Loneliness, Rural College Students, and More
It's been a busy first week on the remodeled porch, and we have an excellent lineup of new essays coming next week. For now, though, here are some of the…
The Holy Earth and Liberty Hyde Bailey’s Front Porch Cred
He wrote sixty-five books and had a hand in another hundred and thirty-five.
Why Everyone Should Plant Seeds This Week
“Of the art of acquisition [of food] then there is one kind which by nature is a part of the management of a household, in so far as the art…
Oneself as Another in the Controlled Burn: A Dispatch
Low flames and smoke and visions of the eschaton.
A Little Home Cooking
Richmond, VA I do not think it outrageous, every now and then, to despair for the future of cooking in this country. Not all the time, no, for there are…
Life in the Kolache Belt: Reflections from the Intersection of Food, Faith, Farming, and Fracking
In some ways, the little farming community of Hallettsville where I have spent a writing sabbatical still resides in a simpler time. Czechs and Germans came in the 1800s and…
Something’s Fishy–But Not Very–At Dinnertime
Ingham County, MI As darkness falls upon what a friend of mine charitably calls “Jack-Ass Acres,” and as the promise of rain comes with the moving clouds at the end…
Soylent: It’s What’s for Dinner (and Lunch and Breakfast)
Hidden Springs Lane. What if you never had to worry about food again? Possible answers: 1) Wow! Think of all the time I can save, all the hassle of shopping,…
On Killing (Chickens)
Hidden Springs Lane. Last weekend the deed was done. Having acquired 25 chicks in the spring (they were free) it soon became clear that this was, as they say, a…
On Being a Worthy Heir of the Agrarian Contrarians
But, as Shakespeare wrote, we sometimes “by indirections find directions out.”
Diet, meet Butter
What did Grandma really eat?
Sausage Time Machine
Does food have a context of time and place?, or, How to make your own sausage.
A Season of Gluttony
Is the meaning of a feast forfeited when the fast is no longer observed?
Which Came First, the Chicken or the McNugget?
In many ways, the Los Angeles County Fair is not so different from county fairs all over the country ... except for its agricultural exhibit.
Technique and Food: Why our Local Food System does not Feed Us
Here are the local puzzle pieces that we somehow need to fit together: great farms; committed, hard working farmers; a university of world class researchers; a highly participatory local political…
A Garden of Remembrance
I was just a boy with spindly limbs and boney knees, but I knew the importance of stories, so I sat with my grandparents on the porch, and drank sweet…
Membership
We are here, in part, because choices made in big places have worked against rural places and rural people.