This Feeds Me Hungry Musings of a Gastronomic Gypsy – NC-based freelance writer Victoria Bouloubasis

More than 20,000 residents live in the 300 blocks of Northeast Central Durham. It’s also an area that has been labeled a food desert, with many of its residents lacking access to fresh food. This week’s story, Hungry for choices: Fresh food finds its way to Northeast Central Durham, details plans made by the community [...]

I’ve posted a couple of dispatches on Indy’s Big Bite blog from last weekend’s Carolina Farm Stewardship Association‘s 26th Sustainable Agriculture Conference, held in Durham. BURLAP. Portraits of Piedmont Farmers opens with a reception tomorrow at Bull City Arts Collective and Piedmont restaurant. Read why local photographer Raymond Goodman sought inspiration from the personas of [...]

This week’s Now Serving highlights Kukia’s Cookies, the home bakery of Kifu Faruq. She whips up organic lavender cookie varieties in the name of food justice: the former biochemist is the product of two Black Panther parents, an urban farmer and co-founder of Green Space Initiative LLC. Read more about her and try those cookies!

A lot of people in the Triangle area have asked me about volunteering at local community gardens this summer. There is a plethora of options,with a local guide to gardens here. I also wrote a piece in this year’s Indy Green Living Guide titled Gardens of goodness: Community gardens help feed low-income people, build neighborhoods. [...]

Tomorrow (Saturday), the Piedmont Environmental Alliance hosts its 6th annual Planet Party Earth Day Fair in Winston-Salem. (Click here for details on time and location.) I’ll be volunteering; stop by! The folks at PEA also asked me to help pub the food options on hand. Y’all know I can’t say no to a bit o’ [...]

This week’s Now Serving column details events and agricultural workshops that give you a chance to participate in (literal) ground breaking as our local food movement evolves. Ever wanted to learn how to start a community garden, keep bees and chickens, plant potatoes or picnic with a baby goat? Read the column and dig in.

My first piece for SavorNC Magazine is now in the January/February issue. Inspired by the upcoming National Truffle Festival in March, held every year in Asheville, NC, I delved into our state’s blooming truffle farming industry. What I found out didn’t necessarily surprise me: North Carolina is a pioneer in yet another culinary, agriculture movement. [...]

Taking part in a small society, which lives more or less self-sufficiently of sustainable agriculture, was my only alternative draft of a place where you can actually live a life at peace with you and the rest of the world. This isn`t always true, but to a great extent it worked

The composting toilet and I weren’t always on good terms. Indeed, we gave each other shit regularly. But at the end of the day, my time there was always well spent, and I always emerged a better man than when I had entered.

But I’m back in full swing. And so very excited to be back in full swing in North Carolina. I don’t take this place for granted. No ma’am.

On a calculated whim this past summer, I set off for a three-month stint to volunteer on organic farms on Portugal’s Algarve coast. My wanderlust needed a fix and my mind needed a stimulant. In covering local NC sustainable agriculture for the past couple of years, I craved the first-hand knowledge to really understand the movement.

When it comes to food, my friends share my obsession. My fondest recent food memories include moments with my friends in Carrboro, or La Banda, as we’ve dubbed ourselves, gathered around an oven adding spices and herbs (and our “two cents”) onto a leg of lamb,  standing at a kitchen table spreading cookies with dulce [...]

Beginning May 1, the Carrboro Farmers’ Market will accept benefits from SNAP, the federal assistance program that helps low-income households buy food. It is one of the few farmers’ markets in the country that does. “Our whole goal is just to make it an easier way for everyone to come to the market, so it [...]

Check out the 15th Annual Piedmont Farm Tour! And if you’ve never eaten a fried duck egg, sunny-side up, you’re in for a treat. “Want breakfast?” my friend asked. “I have one duck egg left!” She reached into her fridge and pulled out the egg, almost double the size of a chicken egg, tinged a [...]

Joel Salatin let out a big-bellied laugh in front of more than 600 people while serving on a speaker panel at Meredith College last month. A sense of urgency escaped from his jovial, Southern lilt, as the celebrated sustainable farmer delivered tongue-in-cheek opinions unabashedly. “I don’t know why [farming's] not sexy. To me, a hoop [...]