In This Issue: Fall 2018

I’ve been mulling over the title of one of our fall stories: “A Hands-On Education in Food.”

For one thing, I wonder if there is anything other than hands-on education when it comes to food. We all eat something, somehow, every day, and that shapes our understanding of food. Our food histories are as individual as we are—just as varied and just as personal.

This got me reminiscing on my own food journey. It started in a small upper Mid-western town where I grew up with a backyard full of fruit. There was an apple tree I could climb that hid bird nests in spring and grew three kinds of apples in fall. There was a huge standard pear tree that gave us bushels of small, hard, sweet pears to eat and many more bushels falling to the ground over-ripe and attractive to yellow jackets. And a white trellis of purple grapes that tasted better than candy, although I had to spit out the seeds and the skins to enjoy them. At this time of year, when the trees are bathed in autumn light, these memories are as fresh as if they were yesterday.

In my early food education my mother was at the center. She’d set us kids out on the back porch to shuck sweet corn and put us to work in our community garden patch. She cooked our meals but showed us how to make our own lunches, helped me learn to bake so I could satisfy my own sweet tooth, and eventually insisted that everyone in the family take one night a week to cook dinner. I had an enlightening experience on a farm during high school and when the time came for college and I set out for ag school she was surprised. As I look back on it now, it all made sense for me. My early experiences had hooked me for good on food and nature, and my path has since taken me through farms and restaurants, into grocery stores, delis and warehouses and on millions of daily food adventures at home.

Now I enjoy the work of being an editor in a magazine about local foods. It is endlessly fascinating to me to hear from the farmers, chefs and food workers, the vintners and brewers, the home cooks and food enthusiasts who make up the food community we have lately come to call our “foodshed.” I always learn something from their stories and gain a deeper appreciation for the fruits of their labors. I hope that the stories ahead in this autumn issue might do the same for you.

Not everyone chooses a career in food but everybody has a food history. How we eat is part of the story of how we relate to the world we live in. And it’s never perfect, is it? Sometimes it’s fresh apples and home-cooked meals; sometimes—by necessity or by choice—it’s carryout and canned foods. But we have opportunities every day to continue our own hands-on education in food. So go ahead! Explore, inquire, taste, discern, devour—it’s your one life to live.

Enjoy the journey,

Barb Tholin