So, it’s not just food and farm books in which someone does something (or does without something) for a year. An upcoming memoir about a father and son who watch three movies together each week as a condition of the son’s dropping out of school is also wrapped in the one year ribbon. I learned […]

Perhaps we are now at the end of the year of the year. Too many writers recently have taken on one-year projects of deprivation or exploration and learned about themselves and the direction and purpose of their lives. Often the products were interesting, but the trope itself has become a bore.
Are food and farm […]

Low Stress Food

I wrote yesterday that pre-slaughter stress in livestock impacts meat quality. Today, I received my Stockman Grassfarmer (why yes, I am a farm geek) and learned of a new book proposing that when we eat meat from stressed animals, we experience “second-hand stress.”
As antidote, the author of

Referencing an old post at Idle Words, the Law for Food blogger discusses pasteurization and the American school lunch.
While I also take issue with pasteurization, the part that most interests me is his point that what we provide in the lunchroom is as much a part of how we educate our kids as what we […]

Choosing traditional foods is part of the recent trend toward eating what the Ethicurean calls SOLE food — Sustainable, Organic, Local, and Ethical.
Traditional foods include heritage breeds of livestock that are better suited to being raised the old-fashioned way (in open air, on pasture, eating foods appropriate to the species) than the ones bred […]

Every tribal newspaper I’ve ever read (and I used to read them frequently when I was practicing law in tribal courts) has included one or more articles on diabetes. Native people are disproportionately impacted by the disease, and an article in the most recent issue of the University of Washington’s alumni magazine, Columns, suggests […]

I found River Valley Ranch’s cheese disappointing. Pacific Northwest Cheese Project seems to disagree — I think.
The Project’s recent post focuses on the farm’s successes: attracting media and finding retailers. Not a lot on the cheese, at least how it tastes.
I really wanted to like it. I enjoy raw milk cheese, goat […]

Fall is the beginning of the rainy season in Seattle but everything looks sunny to me.
Maybe it’s because so much of what I read is optimistic.
I read a couple of blogs by writers living in joyful abundance when many people would focus on the deprivation. Gluten-Free Girl Shauna James Ahern lives with celiac […]

The Unsettling of America
I am motivated to create this journal as a means of capturing ideas and making connections between them. Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture is an apt starting place because it thoughtfully addresses many things I care about and coherently relates them. I begin with the hope that I can […]