to the one i love

Valentine’s day, sometime after 3pm, and I’ve got nada. No card, no candy, no flowers, no nothing. OK, that’s not entirely true, because we sloughed the kids off on the ‘rents yesterday, for just long enough to spend a bright and lazy Sunday afternoon canoodling over wine and chocolate, which surely counts for something. The […]

Get Your Neurotoxin Off My Strawberry

I apologize in advance for what promises to be an angry post, but everyone has a line, and I draw mine at toxic strawberries.

In case you haven't heard, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) recently decided that the soil in which some 90% of the nation's strawberries are grown may now be treated with the known carcinogen and neurotoxin methyl iodide, or MeI. How bad is this stuff? Well, for starters, use when they want to create cancerous cells in the lab... Read More >>

Because it rhymes with ‘orange’

I may have seen a cloud this week, but if I did, I don't remember it. Really, our weather has been impossibly nice. And really, it ought to worry me - the lack of rain, the risk of budbreak before a frost - but it's hard not to simply soak in it, the whole of our little wine country valley like some great, tickly bubble bath of pea shoots and sunlight.

When Vegetarians Eat Meat

The Dalai Lama eats meat because his doctors tell him to. My wife was a lacto-ovo vegetarian for many years, until she got pregnant and we went to Paris for lunch; now, she’ll eat meat, but only from animals that she would kill with her own hands. My father’s wife will taste meat, but only […]