You are what you eat.

Through processed food, factory farming, and the rush to get large amounts of food to the table as quick as possible, it's frightening what we have lost. On reading "True Grits" (based on chef Sean Brock's Southern food restaurant--Husk--in Charleston, SC.), Burkhard Bilger reminds us that the loss of extended crop rotations (some up to 17 years) and the substitution of more common, viable crops, has made thousands of foods disappear over the past century. Brock's intention: to go back in time (by diving into history books, diaries, etc...) and resurrect those heirloom vegetables that have been lost to convenience.

I pulled these two quotes: one poetic, one philosophical. Yet both inspiring.

"Southern food is more than a collection of recipes and seeds. It's a distillate of memory and hard-won experience, of ocean crossings and forest clearings, turnip winters and radish springs."

"It changed my life growing my own food," Brock said. "You start to see why farmers are so strange: they have a lot of time alone to ponder the questions of the universe."

-M.C.