Growers and Grocers

Lucy Arin was born and raised in Ohio. She began cooking at her mother’s side at age 7, and has never stopped being fascinated with the chemistry of cooking. She rarely follows a recipe as written. Because she and her husband both have family histories of heart disease and diabetes, and both work full time, […]

A 9-month investigation by the Washington Post has left newspapers across the country calling foul over farm subsidies that are going to non-farmers.
According to the Post, it’s not the landowners that are to blame but a poorly written law that was intended to give farmers more freedom to respond to market changes. The law, […]

Most people can’t say what they would be doing as an occupation when they were 4 or 5, or even 15. But I am not most people. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a writer. And although a number of people attempted to talk me out of pursuing writing as […]

Environmental group Defenders of Wildlife is making news by reporting that mercury levels in many imports of canned tuna exceed federal mercury limits. Canned tuna from Ecuador and Mexico were the worst offenders. Defenders of Wildlife previously targeted the same countries for their failure to follow dolphin-safe tuna practices.
The higher mercury […]

The Way We Eat – Why Our Food Choices Matter by Jim Mason and Peter Singer
I generally have two concerns with any book about food ethics. First and foremost, that the authors are inadvertently “preaching to the choir”; that is, unless you are already interested or concerned about where your food comes from, you’re unlikely […]

The Sacramento Bee recently published a feature on the Black Mission figs of local farmer Buck Novak. Novak “had quite a stack of them at the Cesar Chavez Plaza market in downtown Sacramento,” despite their rarity in stores and farmer’s markets in the area. The price was $5 a pound, and “he expects […]

I was a water lawyer in a former life (okay, maybe it was just a couple years ago). Through that job, I was able to travel up and down the great State of California and meet not only with the people who run the state’s water system, but also with the farmers who used […]

Sheryl Kirby is a freelance writer and editor from Toronto, Ontario. She studied Culinary Arts at Toronto’s George Brown School of Hospitality, and ran her own catering and concert production business for many years. Sheryl got her start in journalism in Toronto’s thriving zine scene of the early-90s, and was the editor of a website […]

I’ll have to admit that I was a bit startled when the email from new Well Fed Network owner Cate O’Malley arrived in my inbox. I had been cruising along as the editor of FitFare and hadn’t really thought about taking on any more work. The other writing I do for Toronto online food magazine […]

The American war between federal rights and states rights is as old as the Constitution.
The latest salvo has been fired by the House of Representatives, who want to pass a bill that would prevent states from passing stricter pesticide laws than the federal government’s. Curiously, the bill has been put forward by Republicans. Didn’t they […]