I often think about my grandmothers and grandfathers.
Not the immediate ones that I knew or that reside in the living memory of my family, but rather the ones from a very, very long time ago. The grandmother that spoke a dialect of Lenape, the grandfather that couldn’t conceive of…
American cultural identity began to coalesce around the “settlement” of the west at the beginning of the 20th century. The country both celebrated and mourned the closing of the American frontier, the demise of the fearsome-yet-admirable noble savage, and the disappearing wildness of the empire’s most recent conquests. Where once…
In a nutshell, the Justice for Black Farmers Act is a neo-Homestead Act that would transfer some 32 million acres of land (an area roughly the size of Connecticut) to African Americans in perpetuity, in addition to addressing the endemic racism in the United States Department of Agriculture, funding agricultural…
How America’s favorite farmer lost his way.
If you’re reading this, you probably know who Joel Salatin is. He’s the outspoken and vaunted founder of Polyface Farm — arguably the most famous farm in the world (as far as famous farms go) — a grazier, sustainable agriculture advocate, author of…
Racism, environmental decline, animal welfare, and human health are tied in a Gordian Knot around the issue of food. Common sense would suggest untying it be left to people with demonstrated expertise in its varying facets:
A new study has the conservation community abuzz with the (very, very old) notion that Native Americans lived in a pristine, Edenic wonderland whose ecological contours they barely altered.
This incredibly bold interpretation of the study’s results is being rapidly spread by shockingly irresponsible headlines such as “Native Americans Barely…
For fans of Braiding Sweetgrass, the following understated excerpt is probably the most important in the entire book;
“English is a noun-based language, somehow so appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things. Only 30% of English words are verbs, but in Potawatomi that proportion is 70%.”
This statement alone…
Let’s get this out of the way, first:
If you vaguely recall news headlines about an environmentally sustainable diet that recommends eating one hamburger a week, one steak a month, or two eggs a week… then what you’re recalling is the EAT-Lancet commission report:
“The EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health brings together more than 30 world-leading scientists…
