Essays
Self Esteem: The Repair Kit
Janine Latus spent years looking for validation in all the wrong places–until the day she discovered it was hers to give all along. In high school I was voted ‘biggest flirt.’ (Look at me! Value me!) I justified it by saying I was being fun. When I got older that clamoring morphed into something more…
Read MoreThe Friendship Game
The first year after I first moved to my block on the south edge of Columbia, Missouri, I only knew my neighbors well enough for a one-finger-off-the-steering-wheel wave as our minivans passed. Maybe we’d nod in the grocery store, or make some kind of acknowledgment across the room in a restaurant. I remember once ducking…
Read MoreA River Of Chips
Mount Jackson, Virginia – Inside a beige cinderblock building half an hour from Harrisonburg up I-81, 15,000 pounds of potatoes a day thunder down a stainless steel chute and through a chamber where they’re tossed by an auger, knocking off farm soil that is then captured and reused as topsoil for Route 11 Potato Chip employees.…
Read MoreHashi Food Truck
Ross Riddle ladles rice porridge as thick as grits from a stainless steel pot, steam billowing. He adds a dollop of butter, then a bit of Virginia breakfast sausage he has dressed up with cilantro and salt, plus sugar and chilies and vinegar, the flavor a meld of Southern Americana and Southeast Asian. He tops…
Read MoreFarming Of The Future
Inside an arched and insulated 60-foot-long building down a dirt road behind Hunt Club Farm in southern Virginia Beach, 8,000 heads of lettuce grow in what its owners call a “plant spa.” John Pierce and Jacob Gold shuffle their feet through a low tray of disinfectant before entering a control room where a computer controls…
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