by Will Parrish
Raj Patel’s first book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, can be read as a ten-chapter exegesis on the ills of global capitalism, as manifested by its gut-wrenching stranglehold over people’s access to food and other basic necessities. At one point in the book, Patel notes in a manner typical [...]
by Steve Heilig
My earliest memory is a hazy but lasting one. I was around five years old at most, with my father, fishing on the beach where we so luckily lived. He caught one, a big silver creature at least as long as I was tall. Once he had it on the sand, he unhooked it and [...]
In the biggest Mendocino County wine deal ever, Fetzer Vineyards of Hopland is being sold to a Chilean company for $238 million. Vina Concha y Toro S.A., Latin America’s leading wine producer, is the buyer of a landmark winery operation that has languished locally in recent years. The Chilean company exports wines to 135 countries [...]
They came to California by FedEx in September, two dozen grapevine specimens collected on a government fruit-collecting trip to the Republic of Georgia. They will eventually be rooted at the US Department of Agriculture’s tree fruit collection in Winters, California, where they may produce their first crop in three years – and Kenwood winemaker Richard [...]
I didn’t know Barney Fetzer, a lumber executive turned legendary wine entrepreneur. He had already died when I arrived in Mendocino County 25 years ago. But over the years I have had the privilege of getting to know Barney Fetzer’s wife, Kathleen, and their 11 daughters and sons. On Friday in Ukiah there was a [...]
Pie Bake 2010 The first time I made my very own homemade apple pie, I was ecstatic. There is nothing as satisfying as making you own pie crust and filling it with crisp apples. — Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, cookbook writer We can be assured that all is right in our world and that some things go [...]
When Bison Brewing Company’s bourbon barrel-aged brown ale goes to tap late this spring, the brewery’s owner, Dan Del Grande, may be required by a new law to pay a hefty liquor tax to state collectors. That’s because the Berkeley-based Bison, like scores of other craft breweries in the United States, has been hit by [...]
There is a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco a few blocks from my parents’ house. The Garden is indistinguishable from dozens of other Chinese restaurants in Beijing-By-The-Bay: harsh fluorescent lights, black metal chairs that look like they were stolen from a VFW Hall in Fresno, a pair of grubby tanks in which lobsters and fish await the executioner’s pot. A place where rock cod and appetites come to die.
by Freda Moon
I wrote a sweet little piece of fluff on Fort Bragg’s new artisanal bakery and its hulking wood-burning brick oven. Normally, I’m not one for quaintness. And I especially bridle at the idea that the way to resurrect America’s abandoned downtowns is to rebuild them in the image of the past — as if cutesy [...]
by Freda Moon
I spent most mornings of my childhood standing, with legs splayed like a saw horse, above an old gas floor grate furnace in my dad’s house on the Mendocino Coast. I love that heater. There was a time when nearly every pair of my shoes had grid lines melted into their souls from moments I [...]
