Speak Friend and Enter--

You've made it this far! You probably didn't hear about this blog from the internet, which means you've found us through our website, www.sabbath.farm. I'll be using this space to give farm updates, musings, and other things I think you might want to know about.

For my first "share", I'd like to point you to this great read on the history of food by Ruth Reichl, who has been writing about food in America for the last 50 years! The realities of food that she writes about, specifically that food has become more industrialized, tasteless, and unhealthy for us and the planet, are realities that have made us want to start a farm that will be different than the status quo.

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This is Just to Say: pt 3 in How I Became the Hog Farmer's Wife

A year or so ago I checked in with my good friend Diane, who wanted to know how I had spent a recent afternoon without my children. To her approval, I shared that I had spent the afternoon at the local independent bookstore and had walked away with a treasure. A fellow reader, she got that twinkle in her eye as she asked me what I had brought home. "Two cookbooks" I said, having spent an hour or so in the bowels of the small bookstore basement, perusing, getting lost really, in their cookbook section. Her response was unexpected. "Oh," she said, her expression almost sinking. You did? It's laughable to me now, though at the time I felt a little bit of shame (though none was intended from her) at having spent my precious moments looking at cookbooks instead of poetry (what she expected me to have looked at) or fiction (what she would've liked to have looked at)...I felt a bit sheepish, like the good fiction student who goes through the whole of his graduate ...

Zanzibar: pt 1 in how I became The Hog Farmer's Wife

Do you sometimes stop and ask yourself what are the events and people from earlier in your life that really shaped you into who you are today? I was reflecting on this the other day--specifically what caused me to be passionate about food and raising animals that would become good food? The two are not mutually exclusive, although there are many American chefs who are interested in the concept of Farm to Table and restaurants that incorporate food from local, small farmers are increasingly becoming more visible in the restaurant world. To patronize your local, small farms is very en vogue, so to speak, in the food world right now--wonderful news for the small farmer. My infancy in the food world began at Zanzibar, a restaurant in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that has now been closed for years, whose chefs and owners had great dreams but perhaps too much real estate to support them. Though Zanzibar, like many restaurants, was the product of many individuals, its main proprietors I knew we...

The Omnivore's Dilemma: pt 2 in How I Became the Hog Farmer's Wife

Photo by John Jackson To give some context--I graduated from Eastern Michigan University with a Bachelor of Arts in December, 2004. I started my MFA in Poetry at the University of Michigan's Creative Writing program in the fall of 2005, and having been awarded a fellowship was able to take some time off of working at Zanzibar while I studied before graduating in April of 2007. The Omnivore's Dilemma , by Michael Pollan, was written in April of 2006. It is hard to overstate the effect that this book has had on my life, to say nothing of the effect that it has had on the rest of the American food landscape. If you haven't read this book, or haven't read it in awhile, I would recommend picking it up again. For me, it was perhaps akin to my parents' experiences of reading Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. From the publisher As the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous landscape, what's at ...

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