Fermenting a Revolution Off the Grid

Burkhard Bilger, eminence grise of food writers and regular New Yorker contributor for the last decade has written a doozy for this week's foodie issue of the New Yorker. It's a must-read for anyone interested in the subversive subculture that's cropped up around the local and sustainable food movement, which now threatens to tarnish the credibility of the movement's increasingly high public profile.

An excerpt from "Nature's Spoil's" by Birkhard Bilger for The New Yorker:

The house at 40 Congress Street wouldn’t have been my first choice for lunch. It sat on a weedy lot in a dishevelled section of Asheville, North Carolina. Abandoned by its previous owners, condemned by the city, and minimally rehabilitated, it was occupied perhaps infested is a better word--by a loose affiliation of opportunivores.  The walls and ceilings, chicken coop and solar oven were held together with scrap lumber and drywall. The sinks, disconnected from the sewer, spilled their effluent into plastic buckets, providing water for root crops in the gardens. The whole compound was painted a sickly greenish gray--the unhappy marriage of twenty-three cans of surplus paint from Home Depot. “We didn’t put in the pinks,” Clover told me.

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