Let’s all try to go out and affect some kind of change today — no matter how small. (Me, I’m still trying to figure out how to recycle that plastic — can’t do it in Livingston, so I’ll have to check next time I drive to Bozeman. Otherwise, I’m mailing it to one of you who has plastic recycling in your town …) From “All My Habits are Bad” the Salon interview with A.M. Homes (via Bookslut) Do writers have a moral obligation? Oh, I think all human beings do. So if all human beings have it, then writers have…
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The San Francisco Chronicle had an article a couple of weeks ago about pastured chickens, followed closely by this article in the NY Times questioning whether “cage free” as it’s practiced in chicken houses around the country is really any more humane than battery chicken. I’ve been buying eggs for a couple of years from a local outfit called Willow Bend Eggs. They are the most astonishing eggs I’ve ever eaten. They’ve ruined me for all other eggs. They’re brown, and large, and the yolks are the deepest marigold color you’ve ever seen and they stand up all perky and…
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Since I seem to have lost the day to a series of lighting fixtures I put up (don’t even ask about the screw with the stripped threads, and the hacksaw, and the swearing …), here’s some Friday Links to keep everyone entertained: Had lunch today with another Livingston Blogger: Go check out Livingston, I presume Found an interesting piece over at Ethicurean on the sort of small meat processers that we depend on around here. I’m planning to buy a lamb this fall from my dog groomer, and without Sheep Mountain Processing, I’d be sunk. Check out Postcards from Cowboyland …
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I haven’t had a chance to read Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, Animal Vegetable Miracle yet (it’s still out at the library, which I’m trying to use more because if I fail at living small, it’s on the book front), but the sheer volume of press it’s getting has had me thinking that it was time to revisit Joan Dye Grussow’s earlier book on the same subject, This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader. One of the things that sold me on this house was the big, if fallow, vegetable garden in the back yard. Eight children grew up in…
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We’ve been having a little dispute here in Livingston with a local developer — he accused those of us who disagree with him of being victims of “class envy” — oh, and he called us stupid too. We were a little pissed off, and I wrote a letter to the editor of our local paper. Looks like it’s been picked up out there on the internets — go have a look: “Class Envy” in Montana: The Ameya Preserve Saga
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A few groovy new sites I found: Leslie Land, the GreenGrower: check out the instructions for building a gorgeous twig garden arch in her blog. The Daily Green: has a piece on an upcoming scientific paper on colony collapse disorder. Also, in the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert writes about colony collapse disorder and her own experience keeping bees. There’s also some great footage of the pulley system she’s devised to try to keep the bears out of her hives.
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From CNN: Eat your Yard From Salon: Why I pick lettuce for the Black Panthers
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Swamped with work today, but there’s an interesting piece over at the Columbia Journalism Review on the new direction food reporting is taking: “The world of food reporting had been divided,” Severson told me recently. “You’d have an agriculture reporter who didn’t understand how a kitchen worked and a reporter covering hunger who might not understand what it took to put food on the table at night,” plus the restaurant critics and the recipe editors. Newspapers today, she adds, “are really bringing all of that together.”
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This morning, the food section of the San Francisco Chronicle covers the conflict between Carlo Petrini and the Ferry Plaza Market farmers. There’s a really interesting conversation going on in the comments over at Steve Sando’s blog — Sando, who runs Rancho Gordo is one of the farmers who sells his stuff at Ferry Plaza, and he’s on the board for the non-profit market. He also is one of the folks who met with Petrini when he was in town last week promoting the upcoming Slow Food Nation event next Spring. Petrini has a book out, and was supposed to…
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I’ve been seeing reviews all over the place of Barbara Kingsolver’s new book about eating locally — she’s not necessarily one of my favorite writers, but between this interview over at Salon, and this piece she wrote for Mother Jones I might just have to go get a copy. Here’s a quote from the Mother Jones article: Supermarkets only accept properly packaged, coded, and labeled produce that conforms to certain standards of color, size, and shape. Melons can have no stem attached; cucumbers must be no less than six inches long, no more than eight. Crooked eggplants need not apply.…