Going on a stroll with a friend leads to a two-hour-long skillshare that reverses the usual generational roles: Fuddy-duddy me tries to explain RSS feeds, the point of Facebook (not sure there is one), and things like Digg to the 26-year-old. In turn, she shares knowledge gleaned from botany classes and, she confessed, years of reading seed catalogs at bedtime, about the edible things I’ve been walking past every day.

Although I’m no longer standing at the Farm Bureau-sponsored exhibit, The Great American Farm, at Disney’s Epcot Center, I can’t seem to shake the creepy feeling it gave me. One of the most visible parts of the exhibit are the Look Closer screens, which invite attendees to Look Closer at biotechnology:

Prominently placed next to the […]

Among the dizzying number of Things to Do while at Disney is to visit Epcot Center’s Innoventions plaza. To children, Innoventions looks like a wing at a science museum. To a slightly more cynical eye, it looks a bit like a huge exhibition hall filled with the best marketing efforts of companies like Waste Management, Liberty Mutual, IBM, and the Society of Plastics. One such exhibit, The Great American Farm, is proudly sponsored by the Farm Bureau, and designed to help Americans think more about the connection between agriculture and the food on the table — an admirable, Ethicurean-friendly goal, to be sure.

The family of Springfield Farm, whose ancestors first settled the land in the 1600s, wowed me with the contemporary food network they’ve helped build.

I am fortunate to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where year-round we can eat foods produced within 100 miles of our homes, feast on a diverse, abundant range of organic fruits and vegetables and ethically-raised animals, and are not too surprised to pass Alice Waters while doing our weekly farmers market shopping.

…Being a close community, they passed me on to their neighbors at Visser Family Farms, where I talked to Kathy Visser and was able to order two legs of lamb for our holiday feast, along with a box of organic Pink Lady apples from their neighbor’s farm.

Noshette and I went down south to Charleston, South Carolina, to attend a wedding of an old childhood friend of hers and we did a little bit of Ethicureanating while we were there. (once the word Ethicurean gets an entry in the dictionary, we’ll have to figure out how to conjugate it.)
A quick bit of […]

This week was Noshette’s birthday, and among the many things we did to celebrate was to have dinner at Les Jardins Sauvages, which in English means "the wild gardens", a woodland table restaurant in St.Roch de l’Achigan. (Since I no longer go by the name "Nosher", Noshette will now be known as "Megan".) The 30 […]

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When you come from a smaller city in a rural area and your main local-foods choices consist of a couple of upscale restaurants or your own home cooking (with produce from the farmers market, of course), sometimes you want to know what it’s like to have […]

Autumn is apple season in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere, an opportunity to taste apples at their peak and remember how good an apple can be. For many, the apple’s standing has been diminished by too many cardboard-like Red Delicious apples served as token pieces of fruit on airplanes or at other establishments. […]

This multigenerational family farm, in business since 1866 (here’s the old part of the home[]http://www.flickr.com/photos/foodperson/1506163547/in/set-72157602305466561/], raises pastured chickens [http://www.flickr.com/photos/foodperson/1507022506/in/set-72157602305466561/]and turkeys (heritage [http://www.flickr.com/photos/foodperson/1506162945/in/set-72157602305466561/] and white[http://www.flickr.com/photos/foodperson/1506164151/in/set-72157602305466561/]…. [http://www.flickr.com/photos/foodperson/1506163279/in/set-72157602305466561/] Pendleton’s Country Market…. Not only do they operate a decent-sized diversified farm, growing everything from commodity crops (corn, wheat) to asparagus to bedding plants to cut flower, but they also are ceaseless promoters of local agriculture, including their own farm, of course, and active in 4-H…. [http://www.flickr.com/photos/foodperson/1506166281/in/set-72157602305466561/] Karen was in the “villa,” butterfly net in hand, to catch monarchs passing through weeks beyond their usual migration and pointing out the freshly deposited butterfly eggs and swallowtails’ defense mechanism.[ http://www.flickr.com/photos/foodperson/1507025320/in/set-72157602305466561/] Visitors also could buy bedding plants, pumpkins [http://www.flickr.com/photos/foodperson/1506166013/in/set-72157602305466561/ ] and assorted other items…. To top off the day, I went to a neighbor’s birthday party, which was catered by Local Burger (owned by another neighbor; I live a cool neighborhood), and had an elk burger (among the selection of local burgers offered) with meat supplied by a farm tour rancher, Rocky Hills Elk Ranch (no website; email credmonds /at/ yahoo), and some of those Wakarusa Valley Farms salad greens.

Over the Labor Day weekend, I visited one of my favorite farmers at her Barton Organic Farm and talked to her about the ups and downs of organic farming while helping harvest seeds for next year.

Shopping at the farmers market gives consumers a chance to talk to farmers about their products, see how a farm changes across the seasons, and gain a better understanding of the challenge of farming. It’s a big improvement over a sterile grocery store where the origins of fruits, vegetables, eggs and meat are unclear, […]

Delighted by her love of cheese, Anthony and his wife Kelli, who makes the cheese from the raw cow and goat milk produced on their farm, invited the Cheese Baby to the Estrella Family Creamery cave christening, held Saturday night…. Samuel OK’d our request after warning us not to let the buck pee on us. We limited our visit to the mama goats and their kids, which must be bottle fed, guessing by how enthusiastically they greeted us. We returned to the party and found Anthony among friends in the garden…. Kelli said a few words of thanks before the family’s pastor offered a blessing, and then Chef Roy Breimann of the Salish Lodge conducted the christening, opening the champagne with a saber and a blessing of his own, which he credited to Napoleon: “in good times you deserve it, and in bad you need it.”… These ceremonies were succeeded by a remarkable feast, including roast veal, spit-roasted baby goat, grilled salmon, mussels, heirloom potatoes, farro salad with root vegetables, and of course a selection of Estrella cheeses, the cheese table having been moved from the garden to the light-string- and candle-lit supper tents by tractor…. We thus finished our meal with two Estrella creamery products that we can’t buy at the farmers’ market: whipped cream, which isn’t available because the cream usually goes into the cheese, and butter, which isn’t available because it’s illegal to sell unpasteurized butter in the state of Washington.

I have been so busy gardening and cooking and enjoying the last few weeks of summer that I never got around to writing "Vermont Diary - Part II", the thrilling sequel to "Vermont Diary - Part I." Contributing to my negligence was a short trip to Maine, highlights of which I will include in this […]

I just came back from 2 amazing days in Northern Vermont.

You see, I was hired to be a chauffeur to an evil capitalist management consultant who was going to a small Vermont town - with or without me - to convince a nice small-town Vermont construction company owner to diversify and morph into […]