What we eat is what we sow

Bits on food, gardens, nature & human nature

Whenever we cook we become practical chemists, drawing on the accumulated knowledge of generations, and transforming what the Earth offers us into more concentrated forms of pleasure and nourishment.

Harold McGee • On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen

My grandma was teaching me the most important lesson of cooking, but also of living: anything you really get into relationship with will reveal its secrets to you. All you have to do is stand in the kitchen with an open mind and heart, recognizing the honor of cooking food for your family. The recipe will come.

Nicole Daedone • Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm

“I think the reason there’s such good juicy kitchen gossip, and so much connection happens in the kitchen, is because you are usually kind of doing something repetitive, and that releases something in your mind that creates a space that doesn’t just reside in the brain, but also is something that becomes part of the body. And how often do we do tha... See more

Notes & Highlights for How We Show Up by Mia Birdsong

The internet certainly played its part. As we spend increasing hours buried in our computers the very fact that food can't be consumed virtually gives it a special resonance. You can, of course, post pictures of what you’re eating - people do that by the millions - but that’s no substitute for the scent of onions caramelizing in butter, the sound o... See more

Food Writing Grows Up

our relationship to food is an exact microcosm of our relationship to life itself. I believe we are walking, talking expressions of our deepest convictions; everything we believe about love, fear, transformation and God is revealed in how, when and what we eat.

Geneen Roth • Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

I have come to believe that food is history of the deepest kind. Everything we eat tells a tale of ingenuity and creation, domination and injustice—and does so more vividly than any other artifact, any other medium.

Robin Sloan • Sourdough: A Novel

For the Benedictines, gardening was an equaliser and nobody within the monastery was too grand or too learned to work in the garden for part of the day. This was a culture of care and reverence in which the gardener’s tools were to be treated with the same level of respect as the vessels of the altar. It was a way of life in which the body, mind an

Sue Stuart-Smith • The Well Gardened Mind

Gardening is not outcome-oriented. A successful harvest is not the end of a gardener's existence, but only a phase of it. As any gardener knows, the vitality of a garden does not end with a harvest. It simply takes another form. Gardens do not "die" in the winter but quietly prepare for another season

James Carse • Finite and Infinite Games Quotes by James P. Carse

Composers as Gardeners

Brian Eno

[11.10.11]

"My topic is the shift from 'architect' to 'gardener', where 'architect' stands for 'someone who carries a full picture of the work before it is made', to 'gardener' standing for 'someone who plants seeds and waits to see exactly what will come up'. I will argue that today's composer are more frequently '... See more