Eat
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Please Don’t Eat That!
A Short Primer On Farmers’ Market Etiquette. It was a mild mid-spring day and Nancy Skall of Middleton Farm had a few baskets of rare French strawberries for sale. Each basket held a precious clutch of maybe 15 of the delicate, tiny things—so fragile that they would need to be consumed that day. “May I…
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Climbing the Walls
Ag’s next wave of innovation goes floor to ceiling at growUp Farms. There’s a farm in Rohnert Park that has been growing watermelon and sunflowers all winter. Its squash are in bloom and its cucumbers are setting. Even the tomatoes look great. This oasis of August isn’t outside, but rather inside the SoCo Nexus building…
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Sharp Edged
A new group of butchers open shop just as the County closes down. Lying on a marble table at the front of the room, a body is draped with a clean white cloth, a slim hacksaw placed nearby. An aproned man with a thick metal chain around his waist approaches the body and removes the…
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Speaking for the Soil
Naomi Starkman communicates for legislative change. Pepsi One won’t kill you, as long as you don’t drink an entire can. “Natural flavors” are genetically engineered. Some 5.1 billion pounds of pesticides are applied to U.S. crops each year, a direct health threat to the estimated 2.4 million farmworkers who tend them. These and other stats…
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Word, Words, Words
Your words can change the world. You know you’ve arrived at the rural Petaluma ranch Douglas Gayeton shares with his wife, Laura Howard-Gayeton, because you can literally see the writing on the walls. The ranch walls. Gayeton, 53, is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker whose unique “information art” includes a heavy dose of his own…
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Micro Retail
The Locastore aims to be your (tiny) new corner market. Sure, Sonoma County might experience some food aridity, but an actual food desert is fortunately difficult to find here, particularly since the Target on Santa Rosa Avenue began selling groceries to the underserved residents of the southeast part of town. But food deserts, generally defined…
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What the Rains Bring
Charmoon Richardson on the finer points of foraging. While the woods of Salt Point State Park just south of Gualala appear to be sleeping each winter, they are in fact rustling, popping, and spreading with a carpet of fruits. Not with apples or prunes or grapes—this fruit is the mushroom, that rain-born annual miracle that…
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Want Not
CropMobster’s new-style electronic grange hall stems food waste. Standing amid 50 glorious acres of fecund farmland near Bloomfield, Nick Papadopoulos rolls facts out of his mouth so quickly he could be reading them. But he’s not. He’s reciting from memory. As the lacinato and other kale fields warm in the early morning sun, Papadopoulos reports that so…