Beyond Boston baked beans or California-style pizza are foods through which we can actually reach a deeper communion with place. Cheese is one of these foods, its alchemy dependent on the subtle unseen of a place, as the microor­gan­isms that permeate the environ­ment work away to alter the raw material into the final product.

Spring’s arrival has brought big changes and weighty revelations to our backyard poultry ranch, not least of which is the snow melting. Bigger yet, though is this news: our goose is laying! I say “goose,”  because, contrary to what our previous beliefs of the gender distribution of our American buff goose flock – that is, two geese, one gander – it’s recently been revealed to us that we in fact have two ganders and one goose. That’s been a tough pill to swallow.

Perhaps you've seen them: Lone, bundled-up figures, miniature fishing rods in hand, they stand out on the stark white fields of lakes frozen over and glazed with snow. Those hearty people know that beneath a cold layer of ice swim hungry fish, lots of them, ripe for the picking.

...if you have an interesting food-related project in need of some seed dollars.
—by Adele Flail

Pigs are people too!
—by Carol Koleman

You could say Appenzell Farm started in 2008, when Jesse Corbridge and his mother Barbara read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and decided to dedicate their 10 acres to the sustainable farm movement. You could say that the Appenzell Farm really got it's start a year later, when Jesse's grandmother leased her fallow 70-acre lot to the farm.

For Julie and Rich Clifford of Clifford Family Farm, getting back to agrarian roots was a matter of necessity. Both grew up in Utah with links to the rural way of life—Julie's grandparents were farmers and Rich's family kept horses—so it was natural for the couple to keep a garden and a small flock of chickens when they married 30 years ago. But home-grown food became a way of life for the couple as they began raising a big family, not only for sustenance, but to foster the spirit of self-sufficiency.

When you first step through the gate, the rectangle of dead weeds and road base looks like any other leftover space in the city, a place where the tabs and slots of city planning never quite aligned during the tetrising of gas station and stockyard, store and coffee house—another blind-eye/eye-sore, an unintentional gap in the productive spaces of the city.

Refugees nurished by the food they grow—and the opportunities it represents. Fourth in a series.
by Adele Flail

Insect-husbandry might not be the first place one’s mind goes when considering local farming operations... but where better for would-be locavores to start than with the goody whose producers symbolize Utah’s human inhabitants’ industrious nature? Bees' Brothers family operation in Cache Valley was awarded a Slow Food Utah micro-grant this spring. Their application was written by Nathan Huntzinger, just 13, with brothers Sam, 12, and Ben, 9.