Raise and grow what you like to eat. This may seem obvious. Perhaps it is the lazy Southerner in me, but too often would-be farmers are focused on the business and not the pleasures gained from working the land. They visit our farm and I hear the schemes with numbers and data. Slow down, I tell them. What do you like to eat each night, I ask? For special occasions? Focus on that. Give yourself the goal of feeding yourself and your family. Then see if you can turn a profit. But make the profit the byproduct.

And, you don’t have to live in the country to produce a significant part of your diet or at least add to your table. We all know someone in the city who has a magnificent garden, even keeps hens or bees. I have a niece in Oregon who, with her fiancé, raises crawfish in a mini-aquaculture system next to the garage. If you have even a small parcel and are willing to work, Mother Nature can be a wonderful partner.

Eat what you grow and raise. The rural French, God love ‘em, have an elevated peasant cuisine. All cultures have a cuisine of want, born of the land, hard work, and frugality. But country French cuisine makes a special art of not only not wasting but also turning the cast-off into something special and memorable. Take your inner French peasant out for a stroll, and use what you have raised and grown and use it all. Learn to make stocks out of bones, pâtés out of organ meat, delicious terrines out of a hog’s head. Save the tough stems of asparagus for soups, the zucchini as big as a bat for savory pancakes. And learn to compost. It is not hard; nature knows how to rot.

Celebrate what you grow and raise with friends and family at the table. Use what you have raised to rekindle family ties and build community. Put the phone away, log out of Instagram and Facebook, and prepare a meal that is as much from your land as is possible. Experience real joy in that act of preparation. Make that your goal for every meal. When dining alone or with your loved one, be mindful of the food. Make each meal a Thanksgiving. And as often as you can, invite others to share in that act.

Yesterday we had a full day of work on the farm. But we found time last night to have four guests join us for a dinner on the front porch. The night before, I had braised one of our pork shoulders, then minced and rolled it with various herbs from the garden. The ultimate dish began with a potful of grits cooked with raw milk from a nearby farm; next came a large mess of freshly picked turnip greens, cooked in homemade chicken stock and homegrown garlic. The minced pork was fried in medallions and served atop the greens and grits.

It was a mindful celebration of eating and drinking wine with good friends that paid homage to the work we do. A sharing of that bounty that rewards us for the sore backs and the stress of maintaining the farm. No scheme, no data, just a simple conviction that producing, eating with love, and sharing with neighbors just might help feed the world.

(This is one from the archives. And it still is, I say modestly, relevant.)

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Reading this weekend: a history of Beaujolais, some Wodehouse, and A River Runs Through It (Maclean). The latter is one of my favorite books that I reread every year or two.

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