Civil Eats

At a Slow Food dinner seven years ago, native foods chef John Farais and California native landscaper Alrie Middlebrook began an ongoing conversation about the importance of integrating native plants into our daily lives and diets. Read More

Before the dawn of industrial agriculture, we had thousands of varieties of vegetables and fruits. Today, we see only a small fraction of that variety: red delicious apples, iceberg lettuce, beefsteak tomatoes. According to the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, 75 percent of European food product diversity has been lost since 1900 and during that same period, 93 percent of American food product diversity has been lost. In the last century, 30,000 vegetable varieties have become extinct and one more is lost every six hours. Read More

During a recent visit to the San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, a bag of tepary beans at the Rancho Gordo stand called out to me as I struggled to make a few choices from their incredible variety of offerings. I knew that they were an ancient bean associated with Native Americans and so I bought a pound. The variety I purchased are small and pale green in color. The photo shows them along with a kidney bean and black bean for scale. Read More