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Victory Garden update: Finally, everyone’s eating something
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
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Victory Garden update: Getting in a few good digs
Memorial Day weekend, though mostly seen as the first taste of summer vacation, also gives us time to reflect on the meaning of patriotism. For those of us who garden, it offers a little of both, especially now that more and more people are viewing their Victory Gardens as a way to save our
We’re seeding a trend here…
Maybe a collective spring fever is making its way around the Internet, but I've seen and read more about gardens lately than I have in a long time. If you somehow missed the hubbub this past week, Michael Pollan published
Announcing the Bay Area’s newest meat CSA: the Clark Summit Farm Meat Club!
In September 2006 I complained to then-San Francisco Chronicle reporter Carol Ness that there were plenty of veggie Community Supported Agriculture programs in the Bay Area, but none that would give you a selection of chicken, beef, pork, and eggs every month. She quoted
Meeting my meat at Garden of Eden/Lionette’s Market in Boston
Johanna Kolodny is dedicated to working to change the food system at multiple levels. She has worked with the NYC Greenmarket and Slow Food, and taught undergraduate courses about the food system. A graduate of Williams College, she received her MA in Food Studies from New York University. On a frigid
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Coming out of hibernation
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 streets,
Bake on the wild side: Part 2, the bread
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
Canadian government wants feedback on food safety
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
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Digest – Blogs: Test your 2007 food-politics knowledge, Nestle on low-fat, ethics of hair mats
Attention regular Digest readers!!!: Get thee over to The Cleaner Plate Club, where Ali has concocted a most amusing "2007: The Food Quiz" for you, with multiple-choice questions like "How many pounds of
2008 resolutions from the Ethicureans
Happy new year! We had discussed making some predictions for 2008, as we did last year. But all the ones we could come up with were such buzzkills (raw milk crackdown! even more E. coli outbreaks in beef! a sucky Farm Bill
Bake on the wild side: Part 1, the sourdough starter
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 making can be nearly
Growing into a farmer
Please welcome our newest guest contributor, Rebecca Lay, a farmer in Western Massachusetts. Rebecca works part-time at an independent record label, calls for contra-dances, and also writes for her blog, Tomato Hands. I know the exact moment when
Putting up with friends
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,
Cooking off the grid, part 2: A different kind of cookout
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
Food Bloggers on the Farm in San Francisco
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,
