blogs, rants, publications, and podcasts on farming and the world
If a committee were assembled whose purpose was to simultaneously impede commerce, stifle innovation and discourage local food production, it might come up with something like this: Subpart B – Requirements for Specific Standardized Fruit Butters, Jellies, Preserves, and Related Products Sec. 150.110 Fruit butter. (a) The fruit butters for which definitions and standards of…
Continue ReadingDavid Graeber’s last book, co-authored with archeologist David Wengrow, is a glorious trampling of conventional discourse about what makes us human and what makes human societies work. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity takes on the conventional controversies about these questions and plies the annals of anthropology and the most recent findings…
Continue ReadingThere was brief talk of an emergency evacuation plan – helicopters would ferry Americans to the civilian airport in Kabul, the capital – but no one raised, let alone imagined, what the United States would do if the Taliban gained control of that airport, the only safe way in and out of the country…. New…
Continue ReadingCooking for the Long Haul: Or, The Kindness of Friends, Bits and Scraps, and Chaotic Invention Our friend Pooba – music promoter, clown, and avid fisherman – had brought us another sink full of steelhead trout and I was casting about for ways to cook up the last and biggest of them. Sara suggested I…
Continue ReadingWhen AI serves you your next meal, it may prepare the portions based on your body weight. Or your height, or girth, or age, or gender. Or some combination of these. The nutritional balance will be perfect, if perfectly based on the variables identified by current science as “essential daily allowances.” AI may even “learn”…
Continue ReadingThe Power of Craft Alexander Langlands, Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017. Alexander Langlands is a working archaeologist who has spent the last few decades relearning, and in some cases recreating the old handicrafts that sustained traditional farming societies in England and…
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