Oh January 1^st, how I hate you.  If you’re like me you’re still recovering from the month long holiday food hangover.  With three months until spring and swimsuit season on the horizon, you’re feeling the pressure to lose the winter coat!  As always, you make that infamous New Year’s resolution: TO LOSE WEIGHT!  

How many people do you know, including yourself, who swear that this is the year…

“Gym membership here I come!”

“I will not touch another carb for the rest of the year!”

“No sweets ever again… after this one!”

“I’m on a new diet, I eat nothing and when I feel like I’m going to faint I eat a cube of cheese!”

Okay the last one is my favorite quote from the...

I have this huge grapefruit tree in my garden. It is at least 30 feet high and just as wide.  It must be at least 70 years old and yields hundreds of pounds of grapefruit annually. The variety is an old standard variety called "Marsh." Marsh grapefruit were introduced in Florida in 1860 and it has been in the industry ever since. It is relatively cold hardy variety and has survived many hard freezes here in northern California. Even though our grapefruit tree gives us a lot of fruit and it has a very long harvest period (February to August), I have to say it isn’t the best tasting variety of grapefruit I have ever had. No, that honor would go to some of the more recent grapefruit introductions. There are several hybrid...

What got me started on this contribution is a book I recently read, called Hungry Planet by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio. It photo-chronicles what an average family from different regions around the world eats in a week. Fascinating reading, but not the topic of this blog, just the inspiration.

I’m writing about food waste, specifically fresh fruits and vegetables. First let’s look at the facts. In a 2011 report commissioned by the Food and Agriculture Organization, it was found that “Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tons — gets lost or wasted.”

The report does distinguish between loss and waste,...

"Some hae meat, and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it . . ."

The words are old and a little hard to understand, but they tell a story that's as true today as when the poet Robert Burns spoke them back in the 1790s. They were old words even then. Always, it seems, there are those of us who are fortunate enough to eat well and those of us who go hungry, even in a country as rich as ours.

One morning last May, I got to meet some folks who help ease that hunger in the community where I live. That morning I drove with my wife to an industrial area on the northeast side of Woodland, California, where the Food Bank of Yolo County...