We started this blog more than a year ago, in order to be more active about our world and to be part of the change we wanted to see happen. Eating less meat, we thought, seemed like the “low hanging fruit” in reducing our impact on climate change. So we started posting about “why less meat” and even put up a few recipes for people to follow. Yet increasingly, this blog has become about our anticipated move to Iowa. And therein lies the rub - the move to Iowa has become ver

We have been really bad about writing in this blog. It is not that we don’t have a lot to say about eating less meat (please ignore the double negative) or about moving to Iowa someday in the not so distant future. It is just that life has gotten in the way and time continues to rush by dutifully like a Swiss bullet train. I knew in the beginning when we started this that likely our motivation would wane - keeping a blog going is hard work. It takes dedication in addition

So let’s be real for a moment. Iowa is beautiful. The land is some of the most fertile on earth. Water is plentiful (unlike here in California) and in the south, hills roll green and alive like waves of pure life. But farming - even in a place like Iowa - is a profession that doesn’t pay. Not “doesn’t pay” like teachers should be paid more or cooks make so much less than waiters. No, farming at small scale like we are talking about doing on the farm literally does not mak

It's been a long time coming, this less meat business. I've been in the food industry almost my entire life. I’ve been a dishwasher, a chef, a produce buyer, a wine buyer and most recently, a butcher for 13 years. That's a lot of food and drink. But before that, I grew up on a farm in Iowa. 18+ years of corn, soybeans, hailstorms, angry sows, breach cows, droughts, thunderstorms, late frosts, early freezes, record high and record low prices. On that farm, my father had ra