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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.
Garth Brown
January 1, 2025

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…
Jeffrey Bilbro
February 24, 2018

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.
Jason Peters
October 20, 2015

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.
Jason Peters
November 12, 2014

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…
November 11, 2014

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…
John Murdock
September 23, 2014

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…
Jason Peters
July 23, 2014

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,…
Mark T. Mitchell
May 23, 2014

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…
Mark T. Mitchell
August 26, 2013

On Being a Worthy Heir of the Agrarian Contrarians

But, as Shakespeare wrote, we sometimes “by indirections find directions out.”
Jason Peters
May 2, 2012

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?
Mark T. Mitchell
September 20, 2010

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.
September 14, 2010

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…
June 28, 2010

Membership

We are here, in part, because choices made in big places have worked against rural places and rural people.
May 24, 2010