Our Victory Gardens have reached harvest season, and we’re celebrating the coming Labor Day weekend with a virtual potluck.

An article in this week’s New York Times explains why “greening” (caused by a bacterium, Candidatus liberibacter asiaticus, and resulting in green, lopsided, bitter fruits) in the Florida citrus industry is a bad thing.

Summer’s heat has finally reached us all, even our northernmost Ethicurean colleagues, and if you wonder why you haven’t heard much from many of us -– well, you can imagine us with dirt on our hands and knees, working away in our Victory Gardens as our crops take off.

Who’s afraid of zucchini? Here are several ideas for using that bumper crop…

Lately we’ve seen a bumper crop of articles extolling the virtues of gardening. Sure, it’s a great way to reduce your food costs at a time when those prices are experiencing rapid growth spurts. But it’s more than that: gardens can be environmentally friendly and even (in our dreams, perhaps) politically savvy. It’s enough to make a gardener feel just a teeny-tiny, eensy-weensy bit smug.

According to an article in Sunday’s New York Times, the increased levels of carbon dioxide that characterize global climate change have given weeds — better defined as those plants “out of place” — a supernatural advantage. So what’s a gardener to do when faced with a bed of weeds? The answer is simple: eat them.

Somewhere along the line, the knowledge base surrounding food dwindled as more home cooks turned to processed and even pre-prepared food. What influenced this loss of basic understanding? How did we become so estranged from the natural environment and the food web that supports us? Ann Vileisis spent a great deal of time researching those questions, and in “Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get It Back” she offers a complicated weave of historical events that persuaded us to adopt “an unspoken covenant between shoppers and an increasingly powerful food industry.”

If the Memorial Day weekend kicks off summer, then we’re well on the way to sweet summer eats in our Victory Gardens…

Remember last year’s Penny-Wise Challenge? The rising cost of food this year causes me to look back to what I learned then — and to cook from my pantry more and more.

We on the Ethicurean team may not always keep all these purposes in mind when we garden. In fact, probably most of us approach the garden with a mixture of the dread facing work that must be done and the hope of enjoying the peace of a little plot of earth that will produce good food with a seasoning of joy. But as we continue to prepare the garden beds and start sowing seeds, we’re doing something more. In the words of Pattie over at FoodShed Planet (where this year’s Victory Garden Drive got started), we’re declaring victory over our food supply — at a time when that food supply is looking more and more shaky.

As March draws to a close, I start counting the weeks until the farmers market returns. (Ten, thanks.)
After a long winter rounded out by a handful of late snowstorms, I’m really looking forward to the first local salad of mixed greens, the first fresh asparagus, and the chance to restock my garlic stash. […]

The flaws of industrial agriculture and the current backlash against it came into sharp focus a couple of weeks ago, following the death of former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, well-known for his exhortations to farmers to "Get big or get out" and to plant from "fence row to fence row." Between the success […]

We’ve just dug out from a mild winter storm here in northern Ohio (only a few inches of snow, but topped with a thick glaze of ice), and I’m finally able to see the ground emerge from that blanket of cold, frozen precipitation. The weather lately has fueled a number of dreams of sunny, tropical […]

I love pasta. There’s just no getting around that simple fact.
Others may avoid carbohydrates like the plague, but I find that a meal isn’t quite complete without something a little starchy to hold everything together. An old-fashioned trencherwoman, that’s me. And pasta ranks at the top of the list because it’s so easy to […]

The high-starch vegetables play an important role in our winter diets, giving us the extra nutrition and energy we northerners need to stay warm and well-fed when the snow flies. But you’d better believe that we’re counting down the days until the start of this year’s farmers market -– and the first fresh leafy greens and other spring vegetables!