Agriculture + Climate

This piece ran on CivilEats.com on Oct. 20th.  The food system, like every other sphere of life in America, has been shaped by...

When  Cattail Creek Lamb  owner John Neumeister was younger, he would devote one day per week to making the 110-mile drive from his ranch...

This story appeared on Civil Eats on August 2nd.  In the late spring of 2014, Janaki Jagannath and her colleagues had left a community...

When Agnes Nyinawumuntu began her career as a coffee farmer two decades ago, she picked coffee “cherries" indiscriminately and with...

In late February, I read an Op-Ed by Nicholas Kristof called " Trump Voters are Not the Enemy" that really resonated for me. Like...

A few weeks ago, wine writer  Katherine Cole  invited me to be a panelist on her new podcast, the Four Top. On the podcast, which just won a James Beard media award, Katherine and three other food-world insiders (usually members of the media) talk about hot-button topics in the food and beverage culture. For this episode , Peter Platt of Andina restaurant, OPB reporter Roxy de La Torre, and I discussed Sanctuary Restaurants, undocumented immigrants in the restaurant industry,

I've been traveling to Cabo for years with my mom and step-dad and every time we go, it seems, there are more restaurants touting their...

I'm pretty excited about my first story in Food & Wine , about Dana Frank's beguiling new natural-wine-focused restaurant, Dame.  Reporting this meant I got to know the Oregon winemakers who are on the menu at Dame, as well as their wines. Five of the winemakers were at the dinner: Kelley Fox (of Kelley Fox Wines), Dan Rinke (Johan), Chad Stocks (Minimus and Omero), Steven Thompson (Analemma), and Scott Frank (Bow & Arrow), Dana's husband.   Frank pouring wine from a banquett

This explainer-style piece on grass-fed dairy was published in Organic Life last month but with all my travels this winter, I forgot to...

This story originally appeared on Civil Eats on August 18th.  Claw, who is from Burma, fries up veggies for a pad thai  It’s 10:00...

I've been wanting to write about Ecotrust's the Redd on Salmon ever since VP of Food and Farming Amanda Oborne explained the concept to...

A version of this story is in the summer issue of Modern Farmer.  Believe it or not, Haiti was once the largest coffee producer in the...

I wrote about dulse, a crimson sea vegetable that's got the umami of bacon and the nutritional punch of kale, for the February issue of...

At a recent dinner celebrating “dry-farmed” Oregon wines at Portland’s Southeast Wine Collective, diners listened intently as winemaker...

I got to interview one of my favorite Oregon winemakers for Portland Monthly's Long Story Short column . Cameron Winery's John Paul, a longtime advocate of dry farming, isn’t worried about this summer’s heat waves. John Paul was finishing his postdoc in chemistry at UC Berkeley when he found himself drawn more to the wineries of Napa than to the lab. By 1984 he and his wife, Teri, had purchased a vineyard site in the Dundee Hills, and Cameron Winery was born. Since then, Pau

In a famous early sketch on Portlandia , Peter (Fred Armisen) and Nance (Carrie Brownstein) interrogate a server about the chicken on the menu. Who was he? (He was Colin.) Where did he come from, and how did he live? (Very nearby, free range.) What did he eat? (Sheep’s milk, soy, and hazelnuts.) Finally, Peter, still not quite convinced he can devour Colin in good conscience, asks, “Does he have a lot of friends—other chickens as friends?” A parody, the scene nonetheless capt

{This story was published on Civil Eats on July 27th.} Sofresh Farms , in Canby, Oregon, is not what I expect. When I finally find it, on...

If you know me, you know I'm obsessed with craft bakeries, particularly my local one in Portland: Tabor Bread. The baker at Tabor makes a...

I got to write about superstar organic plant breeder Frank Morton for Communal Table , a new literary and food publication created by the...

{This story was published on Civil Eats earlier today.} Last fall, after wondering for years about whether I should buy produce from...