Vernalruminations

NORTHERN HARVEST: TWENTY MICHIGAN WOMEN IN FOOD AND FARMING https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/northern.harvest CAROL WORSLEY Carol always loved to cook. Growing up on the Upper Peninsula with a French grandfather and a Finnish mother who prepared huge breakfasts daily for the menfolk working in the copper mines, she loved helping in the kitchen and feeding copious meals to enthusiastic friends.  "My mother made the most beautiful cakes and tortes. . . . She and her friends would save up their eggs [during WWII] until they had twelve eggs, and then they would come to our house . . . and they'd make a sponge cake with twelve yolks and an angel food cake with twelve whites. They were heavenly." But the big adventure came after she was married with little children, and with a cottage on Glen Lake, and a neighbor on Glen Lake who taught cooking classes in French cuisine.   Through that friend she later met Julia Child and Simone Beck and traveled and

NORTHERN HARVEST: TWENTY MICHIGAN WOMEN IN FOOD AND FARMING Wayne Press Catalog: Northern Harvest AMANDA DANIELSON Born in Detroit, Amanda with her husband opened their first restaurant in Traverse City, Trattoria Stella, in 2004, proclaiming this community the ideal place, as it was and has been, and will continue to be in defiance of the pandemic and recession of 2020.   Like many other restaurants, Stella’s provided take-out meals for their clients during the shutdown, and is now reopening within the social distancing guidelines. Sadly, Amanda and her partners have had to close the second restaurant described in her story, The Franklin, a venue that I and others have loved since its opening. 2020 has been destructive in ways this country has not seen since the flu of 1918 or the great depression of 1929. Food, its preparation and its delivery, were part of Amanda’s experience from childhood.   With Lebanese and Polish grandparents she was exposed to differen

NORTHERN HARVEST: TWENTY MICHIGAN WOMEN IN FOOD AND FARMING https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/northern-harvest MIMI WHEELER       Born on the small island of Morso in Denmark to parents who ran a small grocery store to serve their community, Mimi told me,   “I loved the community of people. . . . I knew that when I started my business I wanted to create a community coming to my little store so people would meet each other and have face-to-face contact. . . "      In this moment of social distancing, we all yearn for that sense of community and that contact, and it’s slowly returning as the virus abates.      From childhood Mimi valued home-cooked food. “I think I’ve always been a little bit of a foodie.”  She moved to Michigan with her American husband in 1980 and for many years followed her passion for community with a career in social work. “Throughout these years I had this dream of starting my own business.”              When that time came Mimi fol

ANNUAL MIGRATION            When I started my blog back in September I truly intended it as a place for reminiscing, ruminating, thinking about the past, about my parents, about les neiges d’antan . But then I got caught up in the heartbreak on our Texas border with Mexico and the asylum seekers and volunteering with World Central Kitchen, and then this spring the world was hit with covid-19 and everything stopped.        In the months since then—three long months of quarantining—my book came out, Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming , at a time when bookstores were closed and the multiple book events planned for the summer were canceled or deferred.   And so this blog stopped its ruminations and instead told bits and pieces of the stories of the twenty amazing women in that book, their stories, not mine. And I will continue that until I have presented all twenty, but today, with my front hall filled with the boxes that will accompany me on my annual m

NORTHERN HARVEST: TWENTY MICHIGAN WOMEN IN FOOD AND FARMING Wayne State Press Catalog: Northern Harvest ANGELA MACKE Until I heard Angela talk as part of a team of discussants about biodynamic farming following one of the foodie movies in Michael Moore’s 2015 film festival, I was unaware that she had created an extraordinary tea farm, the only certified organic and Demeter biodynamic tea farm in the country, here in northern Michigan. That was the moment when I first dreamed of this book, wanting to celebrate her achievement and that of the other women whose stories are told here. Born in Adrian, Michigan, Angela’s childhood was also in Hawaii, a place she later returned to and where she first began to learn about holism, about meditation and yoga and holistic health. “When you look at the globe [Hawai’i] is like the center of the universe . . . I remember in the hot tub there was somebody from Alaska, somebody from Japan, somebody from San Francisco, somebody from A