The Local Food Report

In this week's Local Food Report, Hal Minis shares why we should be tending to apple trees.

On this week's Local Food Report, smoked tuna belly is on the menu.

Digree Rai and her son David are farmers in Truro. They emigrated here from Nepal in 2011 and they say there's one crop that's common there that almost no one recognizes on the Cape.

Digree Rai and her son David are farmers in Truro. They emigrated here from Nepal in 2011 and they say there's one crop that's common there that almost no one recognizes on the Cape.

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The bananas were a hit and he ended up building an entire banana industry — starting plantations in Jamaica and shipping the fruit to the United States.

I grew up in farm country, in Maine. Like most of us, I associate food with farms—big cultivated fields, animals grazing in pasture, aquaculture racks in the sea. But recently I've been thinking a lot more about wild foods. What would the world look like if more wild places filled our bellies?

Have you ever had a black raspberry? Until about ten years ago, I thought they were made up—a way to describe a commercial flavor, like a blue raspberry Jolly Rancher. I know, it's a little embarrassing.

This week on the Local Food Report, black trumpet mushrooms.

My friend Drew Locke is a seventh-generation farmer in Truro. He's always trying new things — partly because he's curious and partly because even though he comes from a long line of farmers, a lot of intergenerational knowledge has been lost in recent decades and he's focused on relearning the old ways.

All over eastern North America right now, chestnut breeders are pollinating tree flowers.

My friend Drew Locke is a seventh-generation farmer in Truro. He's always trying new things — partly because he's curious and partly because even though he comes from a long line of farmers, a lot of intergenerational knowledge has been lost in recent decades and he's focused on relearning the old ways.

All over eastern North America right now, chestnut breeders are pollinating tree flowers.

Our native forests are full of food. The understories are packed with blueberries and huckleberries and for thousands of years, local overstories have been full of nut trees: hickories and chestnuts and walnuts and oaks.

Mob grazing is a strategy Dan Athearn is working with to try to control what's growing on this unique stretch of grassland. His family took over managing the land with a group of other local growers and cattle farmers in 2021.

When Debbie Athearn's father bought the 25 acres that started Morning Glory Farm in Edgartown, times were different.

Almost fifty years ago, when Haraldur Sigurdsson first came to the University of Rhode Island from Iceland, he got interested in what makes some clam shells more purple than others.

My friend Nicole Cormier is a registered dietician and studying for a masters in herbalism. And when she told me she eats pine pollen — and that in fact, it's one of her favorite things to forage, I had to tag along.

Many of our native bees — and a few other surprising insects — evolved with and rely on many native edible species.

This week on the Local Food Report, a Korean Natural Farming teacher on the relationships that create healthy soil.

John Bunker has spent the past fifty years learning everything he can about North American apple varieties.

Earlier this year, I finally made the journey north to meet John Bunker — a farmer in his 70s who arguably knows more about apple varieties than almost anyone alive in New England today.

This week on the Local Food Report, a naturalist takes Elspeth hunting for hazelnuts.

This week part three of a mini-series on big picture local food issues—today with a focus on what we can change with a little hyper-local creativity.

This week on the Local Food Report, weekend meals to help hungry kids.

Liz Wiley is executive director of the Marion Institute — a non-profit focused on improving human and environmental health and food quality in southeastern Massachusetts. And when I asked her what she's working on right now, she said regional communication.

This week part one of a mini-series on big picture local food issues—starting with the shellfish industry.

Years ago, Lou Quattrucci's neighbor came home from a trip to Italy with a gift. It was a bottle of creamy limoncello.

Around this time every year, Elspeth talks with a local farmer or gardener about ordering seeds for the upcoming growing season. This year, she's branched into aquaculture.

You've probably heard that you're supposed to prune fruit trees. But did you know that it's also important to prune berries?

I sat down with Russell Norton a horticulture and agriculture educator with the Cape Cod Cooperative Extension and started by asking him: why do we prune?

Back in 2001, Lauren Leveque and her husband Josh learned to seed save as professionals with High Mowing Seeds in Vermont.

This week on the Local Food Report, five ways to eat a cabbage.

Melissa Lynch works with Sustainable Cape, a non-profit dedicated to connecting local food to healthy places and people. Since April of 2024, she's been running the organization's Food is Medicine program, where Mass Health actually pays Sustainable Cape to deliver some of its patients' local food:

One fall, I lead a foraging walk with visiting fellows from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. I pointed out Prickly Pear Cactus — a plant that I've heard you can eat, but that we're not allowed to harvest in Massachusetts, because here it's considered an endangered species.

Imagine yourself sitting down to dessert at the end of a holiday feast. What are you looking for in a pie? This is the question a panel of judges in Provincetown asks themselves each year at an event at the Provincetown Commons called Pie Fest.

This week, a Falmouth man heads to the Midwest to meet a rare local fruit.

This week on the Local Food Report, a re-telling of the Thanksgiving story with an unexpected narrator.

Until the other day, I'd never thought about how an animal's diet affects the ways farmers control them. When we talk about the differences between farm animals raised on grass versus grain, we usually focus on health. But there's also a set of relationships that's lost when these animals follow the sound of grain in a bucket instead of grazing.

When Brewster farmer Ron Backer first read about honeynut squash, he knew he wanted to grow it.

This summer, farmer Dave Dewitt of Truro told me he's growing something I've always thought of as a southern crop — okra.

Harvesting Dinner—and Jewelry—from the Sea.

For years now, farmer Stephanie Rein of the non-profit Sustainable Cape in Truro has been teaching kids about growing food. She does this in multiple elementary schools on the Outer Cape, and when she first started, she had the kids make something she called a seed wish list.

A few years ago, a Philadelphia arborist named Max Paschall read an article about a man named John Hershey. Hershey ran a tree nursery and experimental farm in Pennsylvania in the 1930s.

Helen loved kvass. The flavor, the fizz, everything about this drink made from fermenting stale bread with water and sugar. But when she got home, she forgot about it for almost forty years.

I have a friend in Barnstable who's always telling me about unusual edible plants, particularly perennials. Recently, he told me he's planting something new called a Cornelian Cherry.

To plant a fig tree in our climate is an act of faith. Most figs are native to the tropics—and in the heat and sweat of this world they do amazing things. They've co-evolved with a wasp that crawls into the fruit and pollinates it from the inside out.