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.

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

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.

I’m involved in starting a brand-new CSA that I am really excited about: helping Liz and Dan from Clark Summit in Tomales, CA, get theirs off the ground. Clark Summit should be the poster farm of the sustainable-agriculture movement. They do things right — 100% grassfed beef, including Scottish highland, piglets and chickens running free all over the farm.

A beef butchering workshop at Lionette’s Market in Boston is a recipe for sustainability and responsible sourcing, with a healthy helping of community.

Finally, after 3 months of blizzards, winter seems to be showing signs of weakness in Montreal. I’m sure this doesn’t mean that winter is over, even though spring officially began over two weeks ago, but still, today the sun was shining and the snow was melting, and people were out on the […]

In part 1 of "Bake on the wild side," I wrote about how to create a sourdough starter and some of the science behind it. In this post I’ll tell how I used the starter to make loaves of bread.
There are many different ways to turn sourdough starter into bread: some easy, some complicated. […]

On December 17, 2007, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that the government will be implementing a new "Food and Consumer Safety Action Plan".
Apparently, the federal health and agriculture departments want feedback from Canadians on how the government should carry out its proposed food and consumer safety action plan. They have set up a website […]

Posts by bloggers at both personal and nonprofit sites that you won’t want to miss.

Happy New Year to you all.

I love to bake bread. It can be a messy process, requires a lot of patience, and rarely results in bread as good as what Bay Area bread wizards like Acme and Vital Vittles sell at many nearby markets. But that’s OK with me — the process is as important as the product. Bread […]

The day I became a farmer was not, as one might imagine, the cool April day I started work as an intern at Guidestone Farm in Colorado. Nor did I not think of myself as a farmer the day I learned how to milk a cow. Getting up before dawn to pick peas did not make me a farmer; neither did bucking fresh bales of hay until the stack reached above my head. Farming is hard work, but hard work alone does not make one a farmer.

RSS readers might not display the flashy Pictobrowser slide show below, so click through if you want to see us do the can-can.

Yesterday was Labor Day, and Marc, Rachel, and I stocked up like locavorean squirrels for the winter. Well, that’s what I thought the plan was. But 8 hours, 50 pounds of tomatoes, 15 […]

After I built the solar oven, it was time to test it. Being an engineer, I wanted to start out with some measurements.
My first two tests were as simple as it gets: heating water over the course of a sunny afternoon. To monitor the performance of the oven, I inserted a thermocouple (a […]

The surroundings of Alemany Farm in San Francisco do not bring forth feelings of pastoral tranquillity. On one side is 12 lanes of high-speed traffic (Interstate 280 and Alemany Blvd), which showers the area with waves of noise. On another side, a large housing complex — a vast space of buildings, cars and […]