Stories and food, that’s all we really want. Maybe a drink. As we sat on the tarmac, delayed for a transatlantic flight, everyone around me poked at the screen on the seat-back in front of her, hoping to get them going with the promised movies or television series. When the plane took off, and those
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Persian cuisine elevates rice to high art, but it wasn’t always so. When the ten-year-old Cyrus II sat down for his first meal in the palace of his father, Cambyses I, around 568 B.C. he probably didn’t eat rice. As I researched the foods available in ancient Anshan (probably Tel el-Malyan in the modern Iranian
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I participated in my first “crop mob” yesterday at Bellair Farms (CSA). If you’re already lost — what’s a “crop mob” and what is “CSA”? — you’re not alone. Both are pretty new ideas out of the old world of agri-culture, sustainable and sweet. First, CSA: It stands for “community supported agriculture” and is a way
A version of this post first appeared in Christian Century‘s “Theolog.” It’s spring, and Richmond is busting out in lush green. White pompoms of elderberry blossoms are bustling with bees. Hard new figs are attached impossibly to smooth branches, and my grape vine sports countless tiny clusters of lime green nubbins. The cats stretch out in
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“In the beginning,” the Bible says, food meant plants. Everybody — human beings, birds, beasts, everything that moves and breathes — vegan. Yup. “It was so… and very good.” Or so the authors/editors of the first chapter of the Bible tell it. Not till after the great Flood and Noah’s (meat) sacrifice do the biblical narrators
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Hospitality in fierce climes is crucial. The hospitality of the desert is legendary, and several biblical stories hinge on it. Who knows, some suggest, but you might at any time be entertaining angels. Abraham and Sarah made a comfortable place for visitors, undercover messengers of God, who declared that the elderly Sarah will finally have
