Exploring food,farming,health,and technology through a lifetime of experience
I spent an hour last week looking for a photograph. Not a photograph of anything important — just a shot of the almond rows in bloom from a few springs back, the kind of light you get maybe four mornings a year if you're paying attention. I knew
Aug. 12/26 I've been watching a number on my wrist for about a year now, and it took me most of that year to stop overreacting to it. Resting heart rate moves. Mine sits somewhere in the mid-50s most mornings, and I used to check it
Three things landed on my desk this month, from three different directions, and they all turned out to be doing the same trick: something quieter and more automatic took over a job I used to have to do myself, on purpose, with effort. What was interesting wasn't the
Harvest season had a smell before it had a sound. Apricots first — that sweet, almost fermented smell that hung over the orchard rows in the early morning before the heat came up and changed it into something sharper. Then later, when the rice fields dried down before cutting, a
Aug. 7/26 I typed my email address into a form on Tuesday and caught myself mid-keystroke thinking about how many times I've typed that exact string in my life. Thousands, probably. Same twenty-some characters, same finger pattern, over and over since sometime in the nineties.
August 5/26 For twenty-seven years I knew hunger as a kind of weather. It came in on its own schedule, sometimes gentle, sometimes a front you couldn't ignore, and you planned your day around it the way you planned around rain. Lunch wasn't a
August 4/26 That thirty-second habit at the produce section, the ten-minute TextExpander snippet, the single line dropped into Everlog — none of them look like much on their own. What struck me this week is how little they had to do with the size of what they
Yogurt used to be something I ate on and off — a good morning, maybe, not any kind of ritual. That changed since I started taking Mounjaro. Appetite works differently now, and yogurt has quietly become a staple, something I reach for because it sits well and it's
I typed the same sentence four times last week before I noticed I was doing it. Something about foodborne illness risk, the same four lines I tack onto any post that touches diet or health, worded almost identically each time, my fingers finding the same path across the keyboard like
There's a sound food used to make in my head. Not literal — nobody was talking to me from the refrigerator — but a kind of pull, a hum that started around four in the afternoon and got louder until I did something about it. I'd
July 28/26 I spent twenty-seven years walking fields I thought I knew end to end, and it still took me until my forties to notice that the low corner of the back forty flooded first, every single time, even though I'd have sworn on a stack
July 27/26 When I was young and first cooking for myself, I didn't think about seasons at all. I thought about what was easy, what was cheap, and what I already knew how to make. The farm ran on seasons — it couldn't not —
I've been moving some things around behind the scenes at Gardener of Life, and I figured I owed you a straight account of it rather than just letting you notice the schedule had changed. Three months into this, I had enough real publishing under my belt to see
This week's ledger, three items. Same lesson underneath each one: what you assumed was there and what's actually there aren't automatically the same thing, and the only way to close that gap is to go look. Monday, Food & Diet — Twenty-seven years
July 24/26 I never set out to track anything. That was the whole point of the farm — you didn't need a chart to tell you the ground was dry, you just walked out and knew it by the color of the dirt and the way your