Figuring out first-hand food
If you come here often, you’ve heard me mention our friends Al and Christl. Besides being our friends, they’re the people we want to be when we grow up. They’re older than we are – in their seventies, I think – and they’ve done, or are still doing, a lot of what we do. We [...]
When we lived in New York, drought was an abstract concept. I understood that, for people across large swaths of the world, it meant a serious threat to lives and livelihoods, but for us it meant that the weather was nice and that we didn’t flush the toilet. Now, though, I’m getting just the faintest [...]
This morning, right after we found the tomato that was finally ripe but now had a huge bite taken out of it, we saw the tell-tale signs of hornworm damage – the denuded stems, the gnawed-on leaves. Hornworms have evolved to look very much like the plants they eat, so they’re hard to spot. Kevin [...]
It was back in 1965 when Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson did their now-famous experiment about the effect that teacher expectations have on student performance. They gave an intelligence test to a whole schoolful of elementary school students, and then told their teachers that 20% of them were marked for extraordinary intellectual growth and achievement [...]
I am not having the last laugh in the gardening department. I had high hopes, going in. After last year, which was so wet and cold that nothing grew until well into July, I saw our warm May and weeks of sun as harbingers of lush tomatoes and big, firm cucumbers, succulent eggplants and full, [...]
In the nutrition world, fruits and vegetables get lumped together all the time. They’re the things that are good for you, the things you’re supposed to eat more of. They occupy the same tier on the food pyramid, the same section of the grocery store, the same place in dieticians’ hearts. Fruits and vegetables are [...]
I’ve never been much of a bed-maker. It seems silly to spend a lot of time on fixing the sheets and blankets when only Kevin and I will see the bed from morning until night, when we just mess it up again. If I make it at all, I tend to try and get rid [...]
My husband is a genius. This particular manifestation of his genius came about because I didn’t think ahead. I had the brilliant (!) idea of planting romaine lettuce in the cold frame. We could start it very early, I figured, and have our first crop in May, before some of our other plants are even [...]
Today is the last day of February, and we planted our first seeds of the season. It’s just an experiment. We don’t know if it will work. We planted two kinds of romaine lettuce in our cold frame. One was a standard-issue Burpee, and the other was a fancy-pants organic Thompson and Morgan. Last year, [...]
Back in 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and Mark R. Lepper of Stanford published the results of an interesting study that shed light on how people make choices. In their experiment, the choosers were customers of a grocery store in Menlo Park, California called Draeger’s. (They bill it as “upscale,” and I’ll vouch [...]
Tamar Haspel has been writing about food and health for over a decade. She recently moved from Manhattan to Cape Cod. She’s adjusting well. [Read More …]
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