Farm & Food File
A syndicated column by Alan Guebert
Traveling
On the Road: Ireland’s Farms, Food, and Future
Posted on July 11, 2018
Dublin, even in June sunshine, can’t entirely shake its smoky, troubled past. Bullet holes the size of grapes still pockmark the pillars and walls of the General Post Office, the epicenter of the 1916 Easter Rebellion and its cobblestone side streets look more 18th century than 21st.
Still, it’s sunny and warm and Dublin’s streets are packed […]
Grandmother’s Quilt, Grandfather’s Ghost
Posted on January 17, 2018
A slightly frayed, white and peach-trimmed quilt now lays unfolded on one of our spare beds. Twenty-nine of its 30 squares each feature the carefully stitched name of one member of the Ladies Aid of Immanuel Lutheran Church in rural Rising City, NE.
The stitching on the quilt’s 30th and final block, also in peach and […]
In Search of “Community”
Posted on November 30, 2016
Recently, a baker’s dozen of old farm and food friends got together with a group of young farm and food friends to discuss everything from yesterday’s disappointments to tomorrow’s hopes.
The differences in our age (mid-20s to early 80s), vocation (farmers to poets), education (undergraduates to Ph.Ds.), and experience (beekeeper to university dean) fueled warm—and, sometimes, […]
On the Road: Meandering through the Canadian Maritimes
Posted on November 2, 2016
Some people like to travel by train, others prefer planes.
I like ferries, and the bigger the ferry the better the ferry.
The MV Fundy Rose, the ferry that makes the two-hour run between St. John, New Brunswick, and Digby, Nova Scotia, is a colossally big ferry. With mechanical jaws on both bow and stern, the 400-foot-long […]
On the Road: New York City
Posted on December 30, 2015
Chelsea Market, a block-long, block-wide brick building in New York’s lower west side, was built 120 years ago on the edge of the city’s then-bustling meatpacking district to house a rising food powerhouse, the National Biscuit Company.
It was no accident that the-state-of-the-art food factory was located near the city’s slaughterhouses; the neighborhood was knee-deep in […]
Mind the Gap
Posted on October 14, 2015
A lashing, late afternoon thunderstorm roared through Chicago Friday, Sept. 18 to power wash Northerly Island, a tongue of land jutting into Lake Michigan just east of the city’s Loop and site of the 2015 Farm Aid concert. By noon Saturday, however, a bright sun danced with puffy clouds and the Windy City’s sweeping skyline […]
The Summer of Honey
Posted on September 30, 2015
Faithful readers of this weekly effort may recall my darling, but dangerous Uncle Honey. He was my hometown’s quiet, easy-going milkman who retired to the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth to break, bend or beat up any plant, animal or machine unlucky enough to be nearby when Honey “helped” my father.
It wasn’t intentional; […]
On the road: California
Posted on October 20, 2013
From the baking but breezy rest stop in the middle of California’s Mojave Desert, Interstate 15 disappears into the low mountains southwest toward Los Angeles and northeast towards Las Vegas. The desert is huge, brown and desolate. The highway is flat, gray and jammed with cars roaring both directions at 70 miles an hour.
It’s the […]