Food & Diet
Oct. 13/26 Oct 13/26 During harvest, the day started before the sun did, and breakfast wasn't a suggestion — it was fuel you loaded before a shift that might not let up until dark. Eggs, usually two or three. Bacon or ham off whoever raised it. Toast
Food & Diet
Oct 6/26 Some mornings I know the number before I look. Roll over, tap the phone, and there it is, confirming what I already felt — slept fine, low resting heart rate, nothing to report. Other mornings the number disagrees with me flat out, and my first instinct isn'
Food & Diet
You don't trust a season, you trust a run of them. That's not something a study taught me — it's just how farming teaches you to read anything, because a single season lies about as often as it tells the truth. A wet year looks
Food & Diet
I spent a lot of summers learning that the feeling telling you something's wrong is usually the last one to show up, not the first. By the time you notice, whatever's actually happening has been happening for a while. This week's reading kept handing
Food & Diet
There's a pattern I ran into three times this week, in three rooms that don't usually talk to each other: something that used to happen on its own has quietly stopped happening on its own, and getting it back means doing it on purpose now. I
Food & Diet
Sept. 14/26 I spent twenty-seven summers watching a thermometer do things that would alarm a person who hadn't grown up with it. Sacramento Valley heat in the summer doesn't announce itself gently. It sits on you by nine in the morning and doesn'
Food & Diet
Sept. 8/26 Trust what you can see and touch over what sounds good on paper. I wrote that line about food this month, half-thinking it belonged only to food. By the end of the week it had shown up twice more, in a glucose graph and in an
Food & Diet
Sept.1/26 I used to think most of the important systems in a life ran themselves. The body handled its own business overnight. A letter sealed in an envelope stayed private without anyone doing a thing to keep it that way. You didn't manage these things — you
Food & Diet
August 31/26 Inflammation is one of those words I heard for years before I understood it as anything besides a doctor's term. I knew it from the trees before I knew it from myself — a scraped limb on an apricot that swelled and wept sap for weeks,
Food & Diet
Aug 25/26 I've come around to trusting the small, boring, repeatable thing over the elaborate one. That's not a new belief exactly — twenty-seven years of watching complicated systems, irrigation timing, rotation, weather nobody could predict, will teach you that lesson eventually whether you'
Food & Diet
I didn't know what inflammation felt like until somebody asked me to pay attention to it. Before that it was just background noise — a stiffness in the morning I chalked up to twenty-seven years of climbing in and out of a tractor cab, a heaviness after certain
Food & Diet
Aug. 18/26 There's a decision every one of us makes constantly without noticing we're making it: do I trust the instrument, or do I trust what I'm carrying around in my body. Most days it doesn't matter which way you lean.