Before I began work as a full-time butcher, I had little interest in the intricacies of knife-sharpening. Even as a restaurant cook, I often did the bare minimum when honing the blade on my chef's knife. And because I usually only skinned a few animals each year, my hunting blade was, I now realize...

The stone walls in the wine cellar are cool to the touch. I have goosebumps even as the mid-August Hungarian sun scorches the grass 10 feet above us. We're in Etyek, 30 minutes east of Budapest, sipping wine under a bare lightbulb hanging from the low arched ceiling. The translator explains that the...

For the first few millennia of bread's existence, it was flat. The dough was made of stone-ground grains and seeds, mixed into a porridge, and baked on a stone heated by fire. Historians disagree about when exactly humans began to eat leavened bread, but the first use of wild yeasts in bread dough...

If you’ve ever found yourself dripping sweat with socks full of grass clippings in the middle of June, having just pushed your lawnmower in concentric circles for an entire Saturday, then you can thank the French and English aristocracy of the 16th century. The fact that lawns exist at all in North...

Salt is the only rock that humans regularly consume in its raw form. Despite its ubiquitous use today, salt was once used as currency due to its rarity and difficulty in manufacturing. In fact, the word “salary” comes from the Latin word salarium which was a payment of salt given to Roman soldiers...

Sometime around 6,000 B.C., in the far reaches of what is now South America, an early human held a swollen root in their hand. The root was infected by a genus of bacteria called Agrobacterium which replaced a segment of the root’s DNA with its own, causing it to proliferate and grow tumors. As the...

Organic over conventional. Regenerative over sustainable. The recent shifts in our preferences when it comes to agriculture illuminate our modern understanding of how agricultural practices can and should work. Although the term “regenerative agriculture” is not new (the Rodale Institute coined it...

Approximately 2.5 billion years ago, as the earth began to experience an increase in atmospheric oxygen, the lactobacillales genus of bacteria emerged and started to diversify. It wasn’t until 1780, however, that the Swedish chemist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, first isolated and identified what we now...

Imagine tomorrow you wake up having traveled 100 million years back in time to the late Cretaceous period. Depending on where you live in North America, you could be on the Island of Appalachia (present-day East Coast), the Island of Laramidia (present-day West Coast), or underwater in the Western...

Biodynamic farming methods were born of a nearly century-long struggle to right the wrongs of conventional, chemical-laden agriculture. Biodynamics is, essentially, a system of farming that relies on a deep connection to the cycles of nature and the interdependency of soil, plants, water, animals...