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…
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The 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…
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A 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.…
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Hashi 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…
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Farming 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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