(This is the second part of my two-part series on West Virginia) “To come here originally as a volunteer was like stepping into a new world…I don’t want to just grow food for myself; I want to grow for my neighbor so they can see you don’t have to settle for Walmart.”...
Almost Heaven, West Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River Life is old there, older than the trees Younger than the mountains, growing like a breeze Country roads, take me home To the place I belong West Virginia, mountain mama Take me home, country roads. No...
…Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down. “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost Laredo, Texas is one of the more unique cities I have...
(This is the second in a two-part series that looks through a food lens at two New Jersey towns—Paterson and Ridgewood—that are only a few miles apart geographically, but light years apart socio-economically. Part I focused primarily on Paterson, while Part II will...
How do I tell an accurate story about places that are embedded in my subjectivity? On the surface it’s a food story because that’s nearly all I know, but it’s also a personal story rooted in the memory of my agitated youth. Decades of experience and reflections have...
Childhood obesity is very much in the news these days, as well as it should be. Reflecting back over several decades of work in the community food field, it feels incomprehensible to me that one in five American children now (compared to one in twenty in 1980) fall...
