United States
Meredith Leigh is a writer pursuing stories and experiences that invigorate the land-to-people connection. She is a specialist in food and agriculture with expertise in ethical supply chains. She consults and writes from these foundations, with a focus on the lesser-explored and often ignored margins in the realms of science and food. Her books are The Ethical Meat Handbook: Mindful Meat Eating for the Modern Omnivore (3rd place, MFK Fisher Award, 2015) and Pure Charcuterie: The Craft and Poetry of Curing Meat and Home.
Flashback to last October, and I'm sitting in the quiet clutter of my office, trying to settle on a recipe for soujouk, one of the most time-honored sausages of the Old World. My notes are everywhere.
"I was always a leader in my community, but maybe not leading people to do the best things," said Kikkoman Shaw, sitting at a picnic table outside Asheville Housing Authority's Southside Kitchen on a recent afternoon.
An essay about mentoring young farmers in the age of #MeToo
This group is learning hog butchery together, and plans to split the meat among its members. Photo by @KnoxFoodie For decades, efforts have bubbled from the ground up to raise animals with respect for their well-being. This includes a conscientiousness for the quality of their deaths as they become food for people, and a regard for them that isn't wasteful or careless.
Ingest the foggy air, sea salt, and terroir of Ravenna, Italy, and absorb the poetic science of how these elements combine to make dry Italian salami what it is. Shutterstock/Barbajones Born in Paris, Kevin Caradeuc spent his childhood living between France and the small province of Ravenna in northern Italy, just a few miles from the Adriatic Sea.
The James Beard Foundation is guided by our mantra of "good food for goodTM," which encompasses all aspects of the food system, from safe workplaces, to culinary innovation, to the environmental impact of the methods used to grow and catch our food.
"We didn't even own a shovel." This is what Sharon Dubuc told me as she walked me through her pastures toward the sheep she and her husband raise at Black Thorn Farm & Kitchen in Sandy Mush, North Carolina.