Michael Pollan’s Big Idea
What critical question has Pollan asked to cause such an uproar?
Learn MorePoking a Sharp Stick at the Farm
As green-clad protesters filled the streets of New York City in protest of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech before the United Nations, a different set of Greens is planning to gather in Madison, Wisconsin this evening. They are farmers, and their grievance, they say, is that they have been misrepresented in Michael Pollan’s books. Pollan’s book on […]
Learn MoreWhy Read about Food?
Culture, economy, health, family, spirituality. Food touches everything, draws everything in for us to savor, and so turns us outward to the world in which we participate.
Learn MoreWhat’s on Your Plate?
One of the things that has blessed us in our time in this part of Wisconsin has been the chance to live close to our food. It’s not that we sat farther from our plates in the city where I grew up, of course; it’s that we sat further away from the land that was our food’s native home.
Learn MoreHomeschool Moments: Dishing Out BOF, Dealing with Prejudice
Overcoming prejudice and distrust is not a one-time attitude adjustment, but a continuing journey in the company of people who are not like us, but who may become our civic friends. Such a strategy might go a long way toward more important goals: building a supportive environment for homeschoolers, and reinvigorating the varied practices of education & learning in America today.
Learn MoreThe Hundred-Mile Diet Map and More
A new map of food sources within a hundred miles of Madison, Wisconsin, shows kind of connection and sharing that will allow us as human societies to learn to be conscious of and take responsibility for the earthly places in which we live and move.
Learn MoreProtected by a Child
How many times do my children protect me from harm? How does their innocence move me to seek innocence? Their natural desire to explore, learn, grow and create often protects me from losing context.
Learn MoreSacrifices and Community
Do we even know how much we’ve lost, how poisoned we are, how far away we’ve been driven from the land? By connecting the science of toxic materials with our human knowledge of childbirth in Having Faith, Steingraber gives us new knowledge; what would it mean for us to inhabit it?
Learn MoreDo you breathe the water?
During my first pregnancy, I lived on a truck route. My pregnancy manual, the ubiquitous and sometimes disturbing What to Expect When You’re Expecting, said that unless I was living in a bus terminal or a tollbooth, “breathing in the big city…isn’t as risky as you might think…. Even in the 1960s, when pollution was […]
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