I live in South Central. This is South Central: liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots. So the city planners, they get together and they figure they’re going to change the name South Central to make it represent something else, so they change it to South Los Angeles, like this is going to fix what’s really going wrong in the city. This is South Los Angeles: liquor stores, fast food, vacant […]
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Rowan Jacobsen | The Taste of Place
My neighbor Paul has a field that grows great carrots. That’s a good thing, because Paul makes his living off that field, but it’s also a bit of a surprise. At first glance, you wouldn’t expect it to grow great anything. It looks too high, too cold, and too poor. The soil is little more than ground-up schist. After a rain it looks like old pavement. Only after you’ve lived […]
Cary Fowler | The Future of Food
I’ve been fascinated with crop diversity for about thirty-five years now, ever since I stumbled across a fairly obscure academic article by a guy named Jack Harlan. He described diversity within crops — all the different kinds of wheat and rice and such — as a genetic resource. He said, “This genetic resource,” — and I’ll never forget the words — “stands between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale […]
Leslee Goodman | Chicken Consciousness
I’ve lived most of my life with a chicken superiority complex. Largely because I have an opposable thumb and—on a good day—a higher IQ than my Buff Orpington and Barred Rock hens, compounded by the fact that I “own” these chickens, I’ve considered myself superior. I’ve justified eating their kind because they’re “dumb” animals—not just mute, but intellectually inferior to myself and other animals, probably just above fish, which congregate […]
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