Max Watman’s latest book chronicles his attempts to distill white whiskey in his basement, the history of ridge-running moonshine in souped-up muscle cars, and the slow renaissance of regional liquors.
Liquor manufacture tends to focus on purity, but there are also regional variations, like peach liquor in Georgia or apple...
Support your regional seed saver.
When Tom Stearns was 19, he started saving seeds from his garden and sharing them with friends. He learned how to conduct germination tests and eventually, in 1996, he turned his hobby into a company, High Mowing Organic Seeds in Hardwick, Vermont. The company, which ships seeds all over the...
Is foie gras foul or a freaking delicious model for meat production?
We are a culture of duck lovers. There’s Daffy, Donald, and Daphne. Rubber duckies, ugly ducklings, and Make Way for Ducklings. A duck, we know, may be somebody’s mother. Then, there are all the jokes that are made funnier with ducks, like this one:
A...
We need a new generation of young, local butchers to take up the cleavers and get to work.
By now, you’re probably tired of hearing about bacon explosions, bacon cocktails, and the big bad bacon backlash that’s been launched against overly pious eaters everywhere. It’s time to get down to the belly of the matter: If we want to...
Ten years of organic, local, and a lot of unsavory processed food.
This decade has changed our relationship with food. Food went from a fringe conversation to full-on obsession, especially if it was local and organic. Another decade of food safety scares drove more consumers to understand the origins of their dinner. Natural and organic became...
Stop caring about your virtual farm and start caring about real ones.
The sun always shines. Pink cows produce strawberry milk. Soybeans take two days to grow and ripen. Something is not right. It’s too clean. Nothing smells. Coffee bean grows next to squash. Millions of first-time farmers plant new crops every week....
Are we entering a new age of micro-brewed sauerkraut?
My kitchen smells like a boy’s locker room. At least that’s what my roommate says. Feet and food just do not mix, so I lug my crock full of fermenting sauerkraut—45 lbs in all—into my bedroom, because it’s too cold on the back porch. After studying the smell for weeks, there are some...
Cookbooks often read better as literature than as technical lab manuals. That shouldn’t stop us from reading them, or from improvising our recipes.
We no longer learn to cook solely from generations-old oral traditions. Our recipes don’t tend to get handed down from village bakers, local brewers, or blood relatives. So, when...
Can your food choices help make you more healthy?
Vietnamese pho is next to godliness. Fresh noodles, steaming amber beef broth, and herbs. The soup’s spices enhance and concentrate the flavor of beef. There’s magic in pho. But is there medicine in it, too?
Pho contains star anise. Star anise contains shikimic acid, the active ingredient...
If we don’t eat dogs, should we eat any meat? Should you care about the vegetarian author’s latest provocation? I do.
Almost everything intersects with animal agriculture. Almost everything we talk about and care about: whether it’s the environment; whether it’s what it means to be human; whether it’s how we treat people; how we treat...
