Published Work Archives - Page 12 of 23

The American Way of Eating: I got hired to do the hardest job at Applebee’s

January 22, 2025February 15, 2012

Slate

Slate • Feb. 15, 2012

Nearly three years ago, Tracie McMillan left New York to go undercover within the American food system. McMillan had grown weary of lectures about local food that dismissed the importance of price to working-class people. At the same time, she knew from her work as a poverty reporter that poor families cared about the quality of their food, too. McMillan hoped to get a ground-level view of how Americans actually make decisions about their meals, especially when money and time are scarce.

Read more

Growing: Grapes

January 22, 2025January 1, 2012

Edible San Francisco

Edible San Francisco • January 2012

I am out the door at 5:15 and head east toward the dawn, careening over shoulderless two-lane roads crowded with farmworkers. Nobody is at the appointed intersection, so I drive past it to a line of trucks and realize they’re for the workers already in the field to my right: Bulging burlap sacks line up like soldiers, and white orbs litter the ground, nearly glowing in the early light. Onions. I turn around and go back to Panama and Tejon, and this time Pilar is waiting for me. She signals for me to follow her and we drive farther east, pull off the road, and wait.

Dirty South: Youth farms keep New Orleans teens in school gardens

January 22, 2025December 16, 2011

Grist

Grist • Dec. 16, 2011

Smack in the middle of a half-dozen shipping containers and striding up a mound of gravel, Johanna Gilligan, 31, can’t contain her excitement. “This looks so awesome!” She nods her head at an alcove between two containers, painted the pale color of new celery, with dry sinks attached. “That’s going to be for processing.”

Sweet Crusade: Jim Cochran’s Strawberry Secrets

January 22, 2025June 21, 2011

Saveur

Saveur • June 21, 2011

On a clear September morning, I set out for the source of California’s most delicious strawberries—quite a trip if you take the scenic route. South of San Francisco, you trace the cliffs of Devil’s Slide until the two-lane highway—and your grip on the steering wheel—relaxes. A couple of hours later, just north of Davenport, you see a 1950s pickup truck on the side of the road with hand-painted signs declaring HERE LIES SWANTON BERRY FARM. It’s a storybook scene: a view of the Pacific, a farm stand stocked with fresh baked pies. But read through the news clips on the wall, and a weightier tale emerges. When Jim Cochran founded Swanton, in 1983, he was just another hippie farmer. But he became the man who unlocked the secrets of growing strawberries without pesticides and paying workers a fair wage to do it.

When Detroit Says ‘Eat Local,’ It Really Means It

January 22, 2025October 28, 2010

The Atlantic

The Atlantic • Oct. 28, 2010

The bed of watercress beneath chef Andy Hollyday’s barbecued pork belly? Local. The ruby-hued crabapple jelly made by the Detroit Zymology Guild? That too. And the pectin for the preserves, the sorrel in Brother Nature Produce’s salad, the scarlet beets and crisp dilly beans hand-pickled by Suddenly Sauer. In fact, the food offered by Detroit’s hottest restaurateurs and food vendors at Home Slice, a recent benefit for Detroit’s contemporary art museum, could probably have been found any food-conscious event in the country. But—this being Detroit—there was a unique twist: For the Motor City’s food vanguard, “local” isn’t measured in miles, but in city blocks.

“Lunch Line”: A Meaty Lesson for Moviegoers

January 22, 2025June 10, 2010

The Atlantic

The Atlantic • June 10, 2010

How did it get so hard to feed kids healthy food?

This inquiry undergirds most recent efforts to examine what we feed our kids in school, yet from Two Angry Moms to Jamie Oliver’s School Food Revolution, the focus has tended to be on documenting what is wrong with school lunch: the chicken nuggets, the greasy crackerbread pizza, the nacho cheeze products, and the mozzarella sticks. But it’s the former question that matters most if school lunch is going to change—and that is precisely where Lunch Line, Uji Films’s ambitious new documentary that premiered in mid-May, makes its mark.

An Urban Farming Pioneer Sows His Own Legacy

January 22, 2025May 18, 2010

New York Times

New York Times • May 18, 2010

John Ameroso didn’t hoe the rows of vegetables that help feed the Bronx at the Padre Plaza Success Garden in the borough’s Mott Haven section. He didn’t pick any tomatoes from the vines at the Brooklyn Rescue Mission’s farm. And he didn’t turn the composting bins that kept East New York Farms! fertile ground for collards, cilantro and chard.

But he’s responsible for all of it, along with the rest of more than 18 tons of produce grown in city lots for market last year.

Better Off on Big Farms

January 22, 2025November 2, 2009

Slate

Slate • Nov. 2, 2009

I love food, but I’ve never been much into farms. I’ve ignored friends’ repeated encouragements to travel the world picking organic vegetables or do a cow-milking internship. But this summer I sucked it up and headed for the fields—the big ones in California’s Salinas and Central valleys, where half the country’s fruits and vegetables are grown. I went there to start research for a book, for which I aimed to work my way through America’s food system, from farm to table. At the outset, that meant spending 50-plus hours a week under the hot sun hoeing weeds, sorting peaches, and cutting garlic. I knew going in that I’d learn unexpected lessons, but of all the new thoughts crowding my head, none have surprised me as much as this: God bless big farms.

Beets in the Hood

January 22, 2025March 1, 2009

Mother Jones

Mother Jones • March/April 2009

Forget organic and locally grown food—in America’s poorest urban neighborhoods, it’s hard to find any affordable fruits and vegetables at all. Six grocery stores serve South Los Angeles’ population of 688,000. West Oakland has no supermarkets but close to 60 liquor store. But thanks to former NBA draft pick Will Allen, a couple of American cities are experiencing a produce renaissance.

Read more

The Saveur 100: Item 3. Garden Cities

January 22, 2025February 1, 2009

Saveur

Saveur • February 2009

The distance from farm to table in American cities is getting shorter. In parks, in vacant lots and even on the grounds of abandoned factories, urban gardens and farms are growing better food than their commercial counterparts and bringing fresh produce to lower-income neighborhoods where markets are often scarce. In Milwaukee, for instance, an organization called Growing Power, established in 1993 but the former pro basketball player Will Allen created a two-acre urban farm whose organic produce is as popular with the community as it is with the city’s chefs. (Allen was awarded a MacArthur “genius grant” for his efforts in 2008.) In Detroit, the Garden Resource Program has turned vacant lots into over 100 gardens, where local residents grow spinach, garlic and more. Farms are also popping up in cities where cheap real estate is scarce. In Brooklyn, New York, the Red Hook Community Farm supplies a Community Supported Agriculture club from its three acres, and in Boston, the Food Project has encouraged official to incorporate food gardens into community development plans. The dividend for these urban communities? Better access to fresh food, and a sure path to delicious meals.

Read more