Who's farmsteadtarian?

A farmsteadtarian is anyone who prepares healthy meals with ingredients sourced as close as possible from a farm, ranch or artisan food purveyor.

Farmstead Chef is anything but prescriptive, proclaiming you will die an early death if you touch an ounce of sugar, eat meat, or unwind with a strawberry daiquiri at the end of the day. It's about a balanced diet and the responsibility we take for what we eat and drink.

A farmsteadtarian is someone who eats as much as possible from their own gardens, community and, when necessary, from carefully selected sources as close to the farmers, ranchers, food artisans, bee-keepers, brewers or growers as they can. Local food systems operate within and should nourish the living systems of which they’re a part.

For a quick test to determine if you’re a farmsteadtarian: Can you name the person who grew or raised your food?

Why farmstead?

For those wishing to reclaim sanity when it comes to providing a healthy, ecologically-responsible meal for themselves or their family, we’re going to need to return to our farmstead: in the city, suburb or at the end of a country lane.

Our current food system is simply unsustainable: when as many as 20 calories of energy or resources goes into every one calorie of food nutrition that we end up eating; when government policy, like the US Farm Bill, provides cash entitlements for farmers that reward, in part, monoculture corn crops for animal feed, fuel (ethanol), and food (mostly in the form of high fructose corn syrup used by the food processing industry); when 2 percent of the population feeds the other 98 percent.

Because we now live in a period of rapid change, Lisa and John's blogs seek to capture the pulse of the transformation taking place at farmers' markets, community gardens and kitchens across the nation.

Click here to read the latest blogs from Lisa and John.