Vernalruminations

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...

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...