Civil Eats

As a little girl, I loved sitting on the kitchen counter while my mom cooked. While I kicked my feet against the cabinets, she taught me how to peel an onion efficiently and how to crack an egg and use my index fingers to get all the white out before tossing the shells into the compost bin. And I still vividly recall the excitement I felt over the beautiful, golden, sesame seed-studded  loaves of braided challah we baked in my second grade class at the Woodstock Children’s Center–they were like some kind of miracle. Childhood is such an important, impressionable time of life when the vast majority of our lifelong habits are formed, or at least pointed in the direction in which they’ll head. That’s why my husband and I want to introduce our son, Will, to growing and cooking food alongside us. Read More

Hats off to this mother of three who got fed up and took charge. Thirteen years ago, Sofía Gatica’s newborn died of kidney failure after being exposed to pesticides in the womb. After the despair came anger, then a fierce determination to protect the children in her community and beyond.

Today, she’s one of six grassroots leaders from around the world receiving the Goldman Environmental Prize, in recognition of her courageous—and successful—efforts. Read More

The DIY craze has shacked up with the local food movement to produce some inspiring examples of entrepreneurialism: Mason jar magic made by suburban fruit salvagers powered by pedals; workshops on wild-crafting, axe-making, rooftop bees and city-living chickens; lecture series that focus on the how-to rather than just why, when and where; and more.

But we can’t just take pictures of these ingenious innovators for the glossies and call our work finished. We have so much creativity (and cabbage) fermenting at the intersection of craft, food, and agriculture–now we need to connect the dots. Read More

It is a basic tenet that a community’s food supply should be healthy and accessible for everyone. But the truth is that local communities have very little control over what they eat. Corporate producers dominate the American food system by providing cheap and plentiful food. While this may seem to be a good thing, the food and the processes used don’t necessarily guarantee the nutrition or health they purport to provide. Read More

For the urban office worker, buying your lunch every day can be a drag. It leaves your palate uninspired, your wallet empty, and your butt growing slowly across your desk chair. It can leave you with a permanent distaste for turkey sandwiches and a fear of deli lines.

Christine Johnson and Joanna Helferich—a public health director and a corporate lawyer respectively—came up with a solution for their lunch blahs.  For the past five years the two college friends have been getting together on Sunday evening and cooking their lunches for the entire week. Read More

Community is at the center of the good food revolution, and the Lower Ninth Ward section of New Orleans is home to one of the more extreme examples. Five years after Hurricane Katrina broke the levees–flooding the neighborhood and forcing its residents to decamp elsewhere–the area, largely frozen in time, has become home to a thriving community of urban farmers aiming to improve the quality of life of its residents. Read More

Four Worlds Bakery is a small business stemming the tide of a bad economy with sustainable practices–and good bread. This winter when I moved from New York City to Philadelphia, I found out quickly about this hot spot for baked goodness. A new Philly friend raved about Michael Dolich, the owner and head baker, as I bit into one of his delicious almond croissants at a local coffee joint. Her enthusiasm matched with the buttery magic in my mouth inspired me to investigate this West Philadelphia community staple. Read More

When Brooklyn homeowner and Hunter College urban studies professor Tom Angotti thought about how he could make a difference in his community, he decided to start with his overgrown corner plot. Little did he know he’d be at the helm of a volunteer movement that’s working to make a difference in the way we think about food, community, and what it takes to democratically run a major project comprised of individuals holding various opinions on urban agriculture. Read More

Manny Howard’s new book, My Empire of Dirt, is haunted by the living ghost of Wendell Berry.  First there’s the epigraph by Berry in which he instructs us on how to “use land well,” and it includes knowing and loving the land, and using the right tools. (To paraphrase a master, poorly.)

Then, early on in Howard’s recounting of a season spent trying to turn his south Brooklyn backyard into a homestead, the voice of Wendell Berry comes to him, offering further wisdom. Only problem is, Howard confesses in the epilogue that “On the Farm, Wendell Berry girded me.  Not that I had ever read a word he’d written until I was back at my desk, trying to make sense of the year.” Huh? Read More

As cities across the country struggle with suburban sprawl, disappearing farmland, and a dwindling population of regional farmers, one community in Chicago’s northern suburbs is doing things a little differently.

Prairie Crossing is one of those rare examples of energy efficient construction, neighborhood-oriented development, good land stewardship, and farming advocacy that is leading the way for a new kind of development. Under the visionary guidance of George and Vicky Ranney, the 677 acre property in Grayslake, Illinois was transformed from depleted corn and soybean fields back to a diverse and thriving ecosystem of native wetland and prairie habitat, 100 acres of certified organic farmland, and low density single-family housing. Add to that a coordinated regional effort to stem the tide of suburban overdevelopment and loss of farmland, and you have a nationally recognized development model that not only demonstrates environmental conservation but actually increases farmland and farmers. Read More

A reader recently asked me if I could expand the post I did last year on “choosing the right milk” to include eggs, another food for which there a lot of confusing buying options. Although there are more details below, the short answer is that you should look for eggs that are “pasture-raised” from a farm near you. Pasture-raised is pretty much what it sounds like — they are eggs laid by hens that are raised with open access to pasture where they can scratch, peck, bask in the sun, eat and run around to their hearts content.

Unfortunately, “organic”, “cage-free”, and “free-range” classifications/certifications do not guarantee that the birds are fed a natural diet or that they live the life of a normal chicken, complete with keeping their beaks (egg-laying hens raised in factory farms routinely have their beaks cut off–a truly horrible practice that is done to prevent them from hurting each other in their extremely close living quarters), having enough room not just to turn around but also to run around in, as well as unlimited access to the real outdoors and all the sunlight, yummy grass, and nutritious bugs they desire. Read More

In neighborhoods around the globe people gather on their front porches to commune, but our busy street, while friendly, is not like that. Yet a landscape change Blue and I made for environmental reasons brought us unexpectedly closer to our own community.

A few summers ago we took out our front lawn, and by removing the weed and gopher-ridden turf and disabling the sprinkler system, we started saving 18,000 gallons of water a year. We put in a drip system whose sprinkler heads consumed a couple of gallons per watering, versus the hundreds per watering of conventional sprinklers.

We replaced the lawn with vegetable beds that soaked up the sun bathing the front of our house. Read More

The Lemon Lady needs a new nickname, methinks.

Anna Chan, 37, has outgrown the title, which doesn’t begin to describe the difference this anti-hunger activist has made in less than a year in her one-woman campaign to get fresh produce into the mouths of people in need in her community. Read More

There’s a little red schoolhouse up the road from my house. It is picture perfect, quintessential in every way of any number of historic schoolhouse stereotypes in design, and our neighborhood has immense pride for it. The one room space holds a piano, an antique wood stove, some old child-sized desks bolted to the floor, a few glass cases with local natural artifacts (think owl talons, mountain lion teeth, hawk feathers, snake skins, etc.), and lots of black and white photos of past students, teachers, and residents. The Alba Road Schoolhouse was in session after being built in 1895. It now serves us as a library, meetinghouse, lecture hall, and general gathering place for our small mountain community. And best of all, for a monthly potluck where we come together, old and young, organic and conventional, to break bread and get to know the people we live near. Read More

On a recent Sunday evening, nearly a hundred and fifty people decided to drive out to Brentwood, Ca to have dinner and enjoy the harvest hospitality at the Brookside Farm.  Farmer Welling Tom was busy running about – harvesting fruit for the small vegetable stand set up on the edge of the orchard where his mom Anne would sell some pears before being called over to help serve the grilled fish and meats that accompanied their local bounty. Read More

When I first moved to Auburn, Alabama from Los Angeles almost a year ago, I immediately set out to find healthy, humane, local, and sustainably grown food sources. My quest was not easy. In a state where the obesity and heart disease rates are the second highest in the nation, I wasn’t sure what kind of healthy food might available, much less easily accessible. As it turns out, there is a growing local and sustainable food movement that, if nurtured, may turn into a revitalizing force for the environment, rural communities, and citizen health in Alabama.
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Today’s world is budding with innovation…brand new systems created by a generation of people that find technology as familiar to their fingers as I find a wooden mixing spoon. We are seeing an emergence of people taking this newness and coupling it with craft, with older, perhaps simpler ways of life. Preserving traditional methods of quality by injecting a bit of adaptive contemporary sheen is introducing what may be a key to saving our planet. A perfect example of this in my own town goes by the clear-cut name of Santa Cruz Local Foods, an online Ebay of sorts where food and technology meet. Essentially, on a weekly schedule, farmers and producers register their items into the database while consumers login to shop. There is a single drop off and pick up location, money is handled through the facilitators of the website, and everyone goes home happy. Read More

In recent years, farmers’ markets have flourished as consumers look outside the corporate, industrial food system to feed their families. We have an organic garden on the White House lawn, and in backyards everywhere, small gardens are nearly ready to bear Mother Nature’s summer fruit. The warm weather is finally here, and around the country farmers’ markets are in full swing. Strawberries, corn, pole beans and apricots have arrived in most places, and soon, tomatoes and figs will also find their place on the dinner table. This summer, two different organizations are celebrating the American farmers’ market tradition and raising awareness through summer-long contests. Read More

The second installment of Kitchen Table Talks was held last Tuesday in San Francisco. The evening featured Jessica Prentice, a professional chef, local foods activist and author and a clip of Edible City, a forthcoming documentary which follows the lives of Bay Area residents who are creating a local food system in their neighborhoods and communities.

Slated for distribution in early 2010, Edible City is a project of East Bay Pictures, a film company committed to making motion pictures that inspire reflection, compassion and imagination. The film, which uses character vignettes, showed Joy Moore, a longtime activist and teacher, discussing gardening and nutrition with the students at Berkeley Technology Academy. To help bring this inspiring film about growing local food systems to a larger audience, East Bay Pictures is seeking funds to finish the film. Read More

What if I told you that America’s food system is broken? What would you say?

Would you defend it by pointing out the abundance of choices offered in today’s average supermarket, estimated to be over 45,000 items? Would you cite that per capita spending on food has dropped significantly over the last 50 years, freeing up incomes to improve quality of life? Would you talk about how American innovation is not only feeding our citizens, but is also feeding the world? Or would you quietly ask what a food system is? Read More

It’s possible, it the biggest and most anonymous city in America for dinner with a group of strangers to feel completely familiar and relaxed. The Ted and Amy Supper Club was my second foray into the underground supper club scene — amateur chefs hosting under the radar dinner parties in someone’s apartment, where they charge a relatively low flat fee for several courses and free flowing wine. (Check out my first experience at One Big Table here.) These supper clubs seem to me to be the social dining experience of both the now and the future. I think everyone realizes the cultural winds are shifting — formal, fancy, trendy, showy and gimmicky gastronomy is out. Home cooking, value, connection to your food and the people around you are decidedly, wholeheartedly in. Read More

The number of landless and itinerant young farmers, working alone or with a few other people, is a pretty large demographic in my world. What is sometimes missing is not only land ownership but the sense of community that can come from an agrarian culture. None of these farmers wants to farm alone, removed from the company of like minded people.

The reality is that the work of farming requires a lot of time, and extra time is not always available to pursue the sort of friendships and bonding with other area young farmers that make the experience more fulfilling. Farming might not be as sexy as the New York Times sometimes makes it out to be, but can definitely be as fun as it looks. However, it can also get lonely and monotonous. Read More

My obscure Community Studies undergraduate degree provided a multitude of lessons, but the main things I gained were these two ideas: 1. The personal is political. 2. To affect change you must begin right where you are. With these dictums in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about communities that are coming together to become self-sustaining. With food safety threats, economic destruction, globalization, outsourcing of jobs, and the homogenization of our food sources, it is no wonder that people are starting to get more and more organized. It seems like just this week, I have heard about a variety of examples, not just nationally but really close to home here in my small-ish town of Santa Cruz. Read More

Matt McCue is a new farmer. He is also a returned Iraq war veteran and former Peace Corps Volunteer. Matt got involved in farming in California after meeting Michael O’Gorman, founder and Executive Director of the Farmer-Veteran Coalition. Now, he is starting Shooting Star CSA Farm in Solano County, having secured a lease on some beautiful and productive property. “What is your life going to be defined by?” he asks. “In the military, if you get into an altercation, your life is defined by tragedy. My life is defined by growing and harvesting things, and there’s a lot to be said for that.” Read More

One of the complex questions I have been living is the question of education. This is a question that has grown within me from my own education in the public school system and now ripens as I have the stewardship of nurturing my own four daughters. For their sakes, I have waded through the war-zone of educational philosophies with the cross-fire so thick that I could not clearly see who was wrong or who was right. At last I came upon a place of peace, where Dewey, Montessori, Steiner, Mason, Rousseau and Froebel all seem to call a truce. I have found a place where public schoolers, home-schoolers, and private-schoolers can amicably co-exist. This higher-ground is in the garden. Read More

Northfield has a rich agricultural history. The town’s motto, “Cows, Colleges, and Contentment” evokes agriculture’s influence on Northfield’s fields, factories, and culture. Founded in 1855, the Minnesotan town was central to the wheat industry. A sawmill for processing lumber and a gristmill for processing flour were both powered by the Cannon River flowing through town. As the wheat frontier moved westward during the 1950s, diversified farms and dairy operations become the town’s principal source of income. Read More

Growing up in Kansas, I was surrounded by wheat and corn fields. Driving from my hometown of Wichita to visit my grandmother in Kansas City, I waved and shouted hello to the cows along the freeway. I never gave much thought to where my food came from because when I looked around, all I saw were farms. No one talked about food miles or supporting local farmers. I had a romanticized notion of big red barns, farmers getting up at five a.m. to plow the fields with their dog by their side and sitting down to dinner each night with food from their garden. I had no idea that most of the farms in my home state grew rows and rows of genetically modified wheat, corn and soy. It saddens me when I think about all the times I drove past, waving to the cows because I now realize that those were confined feeding animal operations (CAFOs). Ironically, it took my move to the San Francisco Bay Area to develop an interest and passion for sustainable agriculture. When I was asked to write about the local food scene in Kansas, I wondered if anything had changed. In a state were Monsanto reigns, does anyone care about local food? Read More

When I think of Petaluma, California I think of a tiny little town 30 minutes or so north of San Francisco home to antique and outlet stores, many a poet and artist, dairy cows and rolling fields nestled next to quaintly rusted industrial-scapes. I have never really given much thought to the families and seniors in line at the free food pantries. The fact is though that Petaluma has changed a lot in the last five to ten years. In 2007 there was a 30% increase in the number of seniors visiting food pantries and a similar 30% increase in the number of children enrolled in the free or reduced price meal program at school. That’s one in three kids and a reminder that all is not as it may seem.

A job-hunting informational interview led me to Petaluma Bounty and Grayson James, the Executive Director of the non-profit dedicated to transforming the way the hungry get fed in Petaluma. Read More

The idea of community looms large in the current environmental debate. It offers a locus of action that complements both the national and international protocols and the individual behavioral changes that have, until recently, dominated the environmental agenda. Read More

I am trying to convince all of suburban California to buy animals whole.

Buying whole animals might sound macho. It might bring to mind flikr photos of smug carnivores committing heroic feats of nose-to-tail cookery, and mewling over every last, high-stakes moment of it. (And to folks that tackle 500 pounds of beef with such gusto, I raise my PBR beer can in congratulations.) But unless you require such theatrics, the process does not need to be so excessive. Read More