Good Food is Everybody's Business
It’s time to be honest; so I’ll lay it all out right here. I’m into my third year of my 5-year plan to learn how to bake good bread, and somewhere around March this year, I lost my baking mojo! Every loaf that came out of the oven fell into two categories: brick or curling stone!
Every year the Snoqualmie Valley Preservation Alliance throws a party – food, drink, dancing, music, and auctions – to raise money to be able to evaluate, monitor, and mitigate the effects of too much (and too little) water in the valley. Erick and Wendy Haakenson, Jubilee Biodynamic Farm, were this year’s hosts.
Modern consumers hold a deep – and false – belief that food, especially good food, real food, takes time. A lot of time… It simply doesn’t. I prepared a menu that took only 2 hours and fed five people for less than $50 – with leftovers!
Raising a family is a challenge in itself; raising a family in Monrovia Liberia is fraught with difficulties of all kinds. For Nico Parkinson, raising a family in a city threatened by a deadly virus, Ebola, is not an option. As an aid worker for the Food and Enterprise Development Program for Liberia (USAID FED), Nico understood and accepted the risks of the job. He will not extend those risks to his family.
Farming is a high risk business, and when you are raising livestock – beef cattle, sheep, pigs, turkeys, ducks, laying hens and broilers, and rabbits – you are responsible for hundreds of living creatures. And when dozens of fires are burning hundreds of acres of pasture and timberland, that responsibility can be frighteningly heavy.
Raising a family is a challenge in itself; raising a family in Monrovia Liberia is fraught with difficulties of all kinds. For Nico Parkinson, raising a family in a city threatened by the deadly virus Ebola is not an option.
