Recent Posts

I love a good winter winter squash, but I don’t have many go-to recipes other than roasting one or making soup. For kabocha squash, however, neither of these is ideal. What is a kabocha? Developed in Japan, kabocha squash look like little pumpkins, except that they are usually pale to dark green. (I’m also aware...

When it comes to grass fed beef, one major source of confusion is the role of hay. If grass fed cows should only eat grass, what’s this hay stuff? How does it fit in? Luckily, it’s easy to understand once we get our terms straight Like the grass in grass fed beef, hay is actually...

Clarifying a confusing topic On paper it sounds perfect. The chuck is one of the most flavorful cuts of beef out there, which is why it makes such great pot roast or stew. But while a few parts of it are tender enough to eat as steaks, most notably the chuck eye, as a whole...

I sometimes imagine myself a few years in the future, standing in Price Chopper looking at a full display case of lab grown meat. In this vision I am shaking my head skeptically even as I watch people buy pounds of the stuff. “It’s a gimmick,” I mutter. “They must be subsidizing the cost somehow....

In a tragedy that could have been far more tragic, our dog Oban was hit by a truck earlier this month. He was unconscious for five minutes, and he also suffered a deep gash to his chest. Either the head injury or the cut could easily have killed him, but two weeks on he is...

A Scientific Inquiry Taste is a funny thing. Wine poured from bottles with fancy labels tastes better than the same wine poured from drabber bottles. (The drinkers must see the labels, of course.) Whether people think blue foods taste good or bad is a surprisingly interesting and fraught topic.  Subjectively, I expect brighter colored foods...

“Travel may be very difficult or impossible,” the bulletin said as a gray front of clouds rolled in, with as much as 16” of snow in the forecast. By the following morning, the roads being at least theoretically clear, the “or impossible” had been removed, but nevertheless the occasional town plow truck was the only...

If you haven’t been paying attention to what’s happening in artificial intelligence, now would be a good time to start. While I remain a skeptic of the idea that we will have a computer program capable of thinking like a human anytime soon, I am convinced that AIs built for more discreet tasks, from generating...

I’ve noticed that when we (meaning farmers like me) argue for the merits of small farms we do it by pointing out the failures of the industrial food system. From mistreating animals and workers to degrading the environment, big farms do a lot of things wrong. Small farms can have exactly the same issues, albeit...

The chemicals in LaCroix Here are a few wacky things I believe: that anyone who puts raisins in stuffing is a monster; that the combination of social media and artificial intelligence is a potentially existential threat to humanity; that geese are the biggest jerks of all animals. Here’s a wacky thing I don’t believe: that...