From Small Goat Farms To Megafarms: The Shared Reality of Urban and Rural America.

Born in Royal Oak, Michigan, raised in Troy, I really didn’t interact with the city of Detroit until I went to Wayne State University located in mid-town, south of Grand Boulevard and what used to be the General Motors Building, and north of Cass Corridor and dire poverty.  My whole stay in the Metro-Detroit area … Continue reading From Small Goat Farms To Megafarms: The Shared Reality of Urban and Rural America.

Unsettling America

Grant Wood’s 1930 painting of a pitchfork-wielding farm couple heralds our return to Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. How to interpret this portrait?  How to interpret American Gothic, which to my mind means the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe.  Through the lens of The Unsettling of America, an interpretation becomes … Continue reading Unsettling America

Know Thy Eating.

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin writes, and there can be no question the answer philosophically challenges us.  This blog seeks to engage with the aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of food.  I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act, writes Wendell Berry … Continue reading Know Thy Eating.

And Now For Something Completely Different . . . And Yet There’s Always A Bone.

Two years ago I fell into reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and this act opened the books of Joel Saladin, Carlo Petrini, Sir Albert Howard, Aldo Leopold, Daniel Barber and many others.  And, of course, I read Wendell Berry.  Poet and farmer, Berry coined the key sentence for all of us who understand there … Continue reading And Now For Something Completely Different . . . And Yet There’s Always A Bone.

Bones!

I love cooking with bones.  Over the next few blogs we’re going to consider the artistic and sustainable aspects of all sorts of bones: buffalo, chicken, fish, lamb and pig.  For the joy of it, I’m also going to include shells as bones.  As we consider the shank and neck, spine and trotter we’ll also … Continue reading Bones!