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The spirit is willing, and the fresh is weekly: Review of “A Year on the Garden Path”
For the past few weeks, I've been watching the snow drift down with deceptive lightness, only to accumulate in deep piles (18" and counting here in northeastern Ohio) that have well and truly buried any remotely green thing on the ground. While it's lovely to sit inside and watch winter's show, I also find myself reaching for the seed catalogs. Winter
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When times get larder: “Food Security for the Faint of Heart” reviewed
The potential for disaster surrounds us every day. The aftershocks of the earthquake in Haiti may seem too big for many Americans to grasp,
Grow-hio: Midwestern farmers rely on Eliot Coleman’s advice for cold-weather farming
As winter approaches, even the most knowledgeable of local-foods-loving shoppers have wondered what fresh produce they will find over the winter months, and the opening of a year-round market here in Wooster has only increased the frequency of that musing.
Sharon, the bounty!: A review of Astyk’s “Independence Days”
Ever since the idea of going locavore, or eating local on 100-mile diets, tiptoed into the mainstream a couple of years ago, more people have chosen to support their local farmers markets and to eat fresh food in season. The old chorus continues, however: "What can a locavore eat in the winter?" Well,
In “Fat of the Land,” forager Lang Cook tells how rooted food is to place
High school date nights found my boyfriend and I parked at the edge of Puget Sound, where daytime low tides enticed dozens of clam diggers to the tide flats. We called our sessions by the unintentionally indecent name "clam digging." High school was the last time I'd made out clamming until a recent
This space is preserved: Checking out “Canning and Preserving Your Own Harvest”
Come summer, I dream of the carefree days of my childhood, when endless sunshine meant days spent outdoors or trips to the lake or just a general sense of freedom from drudgery. I dream of those, of course, because I now work through the summer and spend a good deal of my free time working in the garden
Just say YIMBY: Weed expert Nancy Gift talks about lawns for dinner
By Holly Hickman vs. Recently, a man I know sprayed his front and back lawns with a brand of weed killer he'd bought from the
“Food, Inc.” the book: Picking up where the documentary left off
By Joshua J. Biggley Summer blockbusters are often contrived, schlocky representations of the books on which they are
Newsweek wants you to read about agriculture, now
A Berry good list: Newsweek's list of 50 books that even busy people should read now, because they "open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways," includes Wendell Berry's "Unsettling of America"
I can, you can, we all can!: Essential books for preserving seasonal bounty
Well, that sure happened fast. One day I was bundling up in a coat to head outside, and the next thing you know, the weather turned downright summery here in northeastern Ohio. The early crops I planted at the beginning of April are starting to overwhelm me with their bounty — loads of lettuce, reams
Nobu’s no-no: The rise and fall of the bluefin tuna
With the Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin stocks plummeting to shockingly low levels, chef and restaurateur Nobu Matsuhisa (24 prestigious restaurants around the world) is under pressure from a battalion of critics to remove the fish from his menu until populations are sustainable. So far, Nobu's restaurants
Chilling out: A review of “Fresh: A Perishable History”
Locavores like me live for the local farmers market, not just for the conversations with the farmers, but also for the wide variety of fresh,
Depression-era food essay collection shows similar problems with how “America Eats”
"It’s always twilight...when it comes to American food": In 1939, the Federal Writers’ Project editor Katherine Kellock "hatched a new idea: a book, to be entitled “America Eats,” about “American cookery and the part it has played in the national life.” Writers hit the road to document foodways,
Bill Marler re-Pollanizes Washington State U
E. coli can bear sweet fruit: When Washington State University decided to cancel a program requiring all freshmen to read the same book — this year's pick was Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore’s Dilemma” — claiming budget constraints, many saw agribusiness pressure instead. One distinguished WSU
Meeting Louis Bromfield - and Wendell Berry! - at Malabar Farm
Here in northeastern Ohio, not only are we surrounded by acres of rich agricultural land, on which depend a mixture of big and small farms, but in every county there are hidden pockets of little-known historical significance. And in almost-neighboring Richland County, one historical attraction has appeal
