A blog about food, history, data visualization, and more
At the 2017 International Food Blogging Conference in Sacramento, one of the sponsors was Avocados from Chile, the avocado promotion agency from that nation. The logic behind their promotional efforts in California is sound: United States avocado growers can’t meet growing U.S. demand The California avocado harvest is typically between April and September Chile is […]
This is the first of two posts about millet, a class of grains that doesn’t get much attention. The second post has information about millet production and use around the world (with charts and maps!) I can get quite nerdy about ingredients, so when one of my newsletters told me about an upcoming event called […]
You might have spotted Belgian endive in your local supermarket and thought “yet another salad green, nothing special.” But you’d be wrong. Belgian endive is an amazing vegetable that requires significant agricultural ingenuity to grow.
This is part 2 of a series on my tour of Marin Sun Farms. Part 1 is Open-doorness is our certification. The Chickenfeed Chronicles “If something is small or unimportant, especially money, it is chickenfeed,” says the idiom collection at Using English. But at Marin Sun Farms – and many other chicken and egg operations, […]
(Updated, 11/27/16: fixed broken links) This is the first part of a two-part series. The second part is Chickens on the Pasture. In early July I took a tour of the ‘headquarters’ of Marin Sun Farms, a company that is best known for grass-fed beef, superb eggs, and pastured chicken and is a regular fixture […]
The Edible Schoolyard, an educational garden and kitchen at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California, has been my path, so to speak, twice recently. The first time was a cover story in the East Bay Express. The second was an actual visit to the garden, my first visit ever. I wrote a […]
Continuing post-Japan-trip blogging, a few photos and comments about seasonality and urban farming in Japan. Seasonality Although the Japanese can get any food at any time, seasonality still plays an important part in their food culture. I was there in October, which is apparently chestnut season, as advertisements for chestnut ice cream and other chestnut […]
(Update, 3/6/17: fixed broken links, updated photos) A few weeks ago, I visited Gold Ridge, Luther Burbank’s experimental farm in Sebastopol while touring the wine country and counting the hours until our reservation at Ubuntu in Napa (which unfortunately closed in late 2011). Luther Burbank may not be a household name, but his work touches […]
The photo above shows the four post-harvest states of an almond. From left to right, the almond with intact hull; the hull peeled back to reveal the shell; after hulling; and finally hulled and shelled nut. Almonds are related to apricots—the botanical name for the almond is Prunus amygdalus; apricot is Prunus armeniaca. If […]