Magazine feasts locally

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Everybody’s talking about eating locally, but Sunset magazine actually did it. The August issue features a package on a feast made almost entirely from ingredients that were actually grown on the magazine’s Palo Alto campus. For those of us who get cranky just trying to keep up with zucchini and tomatoes, it is either inspiring or humiliating.

Spearheaded by food editor Margo True, staffers raised chickens for eggs, kept bees for honey, and grew most of the fruits and vegetables themselves in the magazine’s test gardens. About the only foods that came from off-site were the olive oil (their own trees were infested with bugs), ocean water (evaporated to make salt) and wine (from grapes harvested in the nearby Santa Cruz mountains, but crushed and fermented in the magazine parking lot).

The article documenting the project is presented in the magazine’s format, which means very short stories and lots of informational break -ut boxes and color art, and there’s more available on the website. Still, the thing seems to beg for a book.

--Russ Parsons

(Photo from Sunset magazine)