I don’t know anybody writing about food who does it better than Tom Philpott. You should follow his work for a really impressive handling of the culinary, political, agricultural, horticultural, and big-financial take on eating.

Here’s an important heads-up on recent events that affect us all: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/12/12/133814/68

The lines I’m wishing I could blur are those separating some of us into producers and others into consumers. Wouldn’t it be interesting if anyone in our circle of growers, cooks, and diners could play any of the roles from time to time? And that ties into the notion of scale. I’m trying to break up my cooking so that I’m serving some people on Friday and Saturday, others on Tuesday and Wednesday, rather than gearing up for a great marathon of cooking Monday and Tuesday morning to distribute Tuesday afternoon. I find I like to work at about the scale of a large family dinner. I don’t want to ask any more of the project than what I can pull off in a normal kitchen, with everyday tools. I picture an extended family of growers and cooks working at a similar or even smaller scale and buying, selling, trading with each other. Low overhead, or no overhead. Again, I find myself wondering whether I’m running a business or creating a kind of extended family or community of like-minded people.

Like cells in a revolutionary army, once a family got too big and unwieldy, a new group could spin off and begin to grow, so at once we’d be scaling down from industrial-type food production and scaling up toward a broader movement fostering infinite variety.

This is just late-night pondering, but the Peasant Fare project was motivated by a desire to develop and teach a way of eating that is specific to this community. It would be more interesting, more varied, and probably just better overall if there were more cooks in more kitchens, each with a bed of greens, onions, or tomatoes (or four beds, or a quarter-acre), a network of suppliers, and a raft of good ideas. As Colin Tudge wrote, “Cook! Cook and evangelize!”

I think most people eating our food have figured out that it isn’t very complicated. Two or three formulas for dealing with a few different classes of ingredients will produce a lot of variety. Vegan, vegetarian, or modestly carnivorous, there are a lot of paths to a clean, responsible, conscious diet that will keep you healthy and nurture the soil and the air.

I was thinking tonight as I pulled chunks of charcoal from the woodstove to add to my compost, if you pay attention you can close a lot of loops and turn waste back into food at all levels. Tepid water from soaking a batch of dishes goes into the worm bin to jump start a little microbial action. Rinsewater from clean dishes goes on the stove, and the empty nut butter jars go in there to soak.

We could also create loops that allow anyone who wants to move from consumer to producer, student to teacher, and back again. Seems to me that would allow for more variety in terms of participants’ resources and income, as well.

Just thinking online.