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Foie Gras Wars Back On
Foie Gras au Torchon/photos by Donna Turner Ruhlman I spotted a tiny news item in this morning's Plain Dealer, culled from The San Francisco Chronicle reports, and was thrilled to see people like...
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How Chickens Are Processed
Bradley Cramer processing chickens he raised at Schmidt Family Farms in Medina, Ohio. His dad, behind him scalding birds, helps./All photos are by me and my iPhone. What follows is an example of the...
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Pigstock, Traverse City, Michigan
Christoph peering through the pig. Photo by Jürgen Schmücking. I had one of the most inspiring days of my life Monday, watching Austrian farmer/butcher Christoph Wiesner kill and dress a hog. See video...
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Farm Transparency v. Farm Secrecy
A foie gras farmer feeding her ducks during the brief period of gavage. The ducks at the bottom of the photo showed no signs of illness or discomfort (they were quite merry, actually, if that's...
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How to Cook Morels
Fresh ramps and the coolest edible to grow out of the ground, morel mushrooms. Photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman. No surer sign of spring, this lovely photo above. And when wild edibles grow together...
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Family Farms
Forrest Pritchard is a seventh-generation family farmer (skip this intro and read his guest post below if you're pressed for time). His farm, Smith Meadows, is in Berryville, Virginia. The guy is...
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Stephanie’s Cheese Rant
Cheese. Photo by Stephanie. Stephanie Stiavetti (@sstiavetti) writes The Culinary Life blog. Her first book, Melt: The Art of Macaroni and Cheese, will be published next year by Little, Brown. by...
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Farmers’ Market Q&A with Forrest Pritchard
Forrest Pritchard at his honor system farm store. Toward the end of Forrest Pritchard's memoir Gaining Ground, about his becoming a livestock farmer, he writes a chapter that I want to call attention...
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Highlights from Pigstock TC
Organs and viscera removed. Christoph cuts through the center of the spine with saw and cleaver. (I took all the photos and the video below.) Christoph Wiesner, the Austrian butcher who raises...
View ArticleVegetable Porn
I have never seen Donna so unhinged by vegetables, behind the camera or eating them. She moaned when she tasted. I’d done almost nothing to the baby turnips. I’d sautéed them in a little butter. That...
View ArticleThe Spring Market
I’m finally home for a spell, long enough to plan out meals from my farmers’ market or, more precisely, growers’ market, and I was eager to see what was available this early in the season and after...
View ArticleThe Importance of the Soil
I want to call attention today to Dan Barber’s New York Times opinion piece from a week and a half ago, “What Farm-to-Table Got Wrong,” and his new book The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of...
View ArticleA Practical (and Selfish) Vision of a Sustainable Food Future
I had the great good fortune to interview Dan Barber before a sold-out crowd at Cleveland’s MOCA last night, talking to him about his fine book, The Third Plate (NYTimes review here). Barber, chef and...
View ArticlePacking It In At the Farmers’ Market
Treat your farmers’ market like your grocery store. That’s my motto (when I’m not on the road). My problem, though, is I can no more carry all the goods in two arms than I can the goods from my actual...
View ArticleHow to Help Small Farmers:A Farmer’s Words
I can’t remember how I stumbled on Kasha Bialas’s blog The Farm Girl Cooks, but I know I was immediately charmed by her photography and the clear integrity of her words about life on a working,...
View ArticleBlue Hill at Stone Barns
In June I interviewed Dan Barber at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland about his superb new book The Third Plate. Barber is not only one of the country’s leading chefs, he’s one of the...
View ArticleNow French Fries…Cause Cancer!!!
Beware the cancer lurking within these harmless-looking spuds/iPhoto by Donna The New York Times recently called my attention to the USDA approval of a new genetically modified potato intended to...
View ArticleCelebrate World Soil Day, Dec. 5
The following post by my fellow writer and former neighbor, Kristin Ohlson, is in honor of World Soil Day. Kristin argues in her excellent book, The Soil Will Save Us, how important it is to think of...
View ArticleBeyond Food
I want to call attention to an op-ed by Mark Bittman in the New York Times last week, headlined “What Is the Purpose of Society?” because it’s particularly incisive. He rightly asks us to reconsider...
View ArticleMore Oysters!
I’m back from a fascinating trip to Massachusetts, where I visited a hatchery on Duxbury Bay. It was only due to this trip that I thought about where oysters come from and realized I had no idea how...
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