Good Food is Everybody's Business
The Farm Bill is anything but bureaucratic trivia. Rather, it’s is an essential economic and policy engine that drives the food and farming system. The Farm Bill matters! To be informed is to be armed…
Two books written by two women, one a poet and one a journalist. More than two decades separate them in age, yet both write about food – growing it, preparing it, and eating it. No, these are not the “usual women’s books.” These are not diet books nor cook books, but books about their very personal experiences with food.
Atina Diffley is the neighbor we didn’t know we had! Her new book, Turn Here Sweet Corn, is heart-felt, heart-warming, heart-stopping, and in the end heart-soaring! Ms. Diffley is clearly a poet speaking from her heart and yet has a steel backbone when it comes to meeting the challenges of nature, changing land use, and encroachment by the world’s most notorious polluters, Koch Industries.
That fall I was nominated for the MN State Sheep Award, “The Silver Bell,” by our County Ag Agent. I protested that I was not ready for that honor, and asked him to wait a couple years, but he went ahead with it anyway. I did not win the Silver Bell Award that year, but surprisingly, I finished in the top quarter of contestants!
It is inevitable! If there is a need, there will be an “App for That!” The latest is ScanAvert for folks – or their children – with food allergies, intolerances, and diabetes and taking certain medications that preclude certain foods.
We’ve pulled five books from the GoodFood World library, spanning a critical period in American agriculture – the late 1880s through the early 1940s. Before the development of “agro-chemicals” as an off-shoot of chemicals used in both World Wars, farming methods were naturally “organic.” These books, while considered somewhat dated today, are our grandfathers and great-grandfathers teaching us how to care for the land and animals.
The wealth of the world comes from the land, which produces all the direct and immediate essentials for the preservation of life and the protection of the race. The farmer, who produces all the necessities and many of the luxuries, and whose products are in constant demand and never out of vogue, should be independent in mode of life and prosperous in his fortunes.
At last, a beautiful spring, the ewes and lambs were out on pasture, and life was good once more! The kids were counting the days until school would be out, and so was I, as it would mean I would not have to attend to two ponies and a horse every morning, along with my other chores. We had lovely pastures, and it was a temptation to just turn everything loose in them! Unfortunately, our ponies were prone to founder, and our sheep to bloat.
