January is harvest time for most edibles growing on our property, mangos being the exception that comes mid-year. Near the top center of the image above there is a cluster of bananas. Roughly a hundred on that bunch. Bananas come in many varieties, I learned while living in India. To my surprise, just in recent months I learned that while banana is a fruit, it is botanically in the berry family. Large herbaceous flowering plants that have served as shade for coffee on this property for most of the last century, just a few feet to the right of those few banana trees are a few coffee trees. Continue reading →

From Saturday cucumbers, leeks, carrots and about 30 other fruits and vegetables will no longer be sold in plastic in France. Photograph: Thibault Camus/AP

We know that there is too much plastic in our lives and that something must be done about it. Over the weekend, in France, the most obvious thing was done:

Vijayapura, Karnataka

A holiday tree made of recycled wood, displaying ornaments made from recycled other materials

Yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, I posted on themes that are central to our work with Authentica and Organikos. Recycling creatively is a focal point of that work, as is more careful management of natural resources. The tree in the photo above, and the ornaments adorning it are examples tailored for the holiday season. The bottle full of birds in the image to the right is another example, as are the images below.

There was an article I posted a couple weeks ago that has been on my mind constantly, wondering how so much plastic can be generated per person. Which raises the question of what we can do about it, apart from the obvious need to reduce the plastic we each are responsible for generating in our daily lives.

One answer comes from the woman who single-handedly brings plastic waste full circle with her love of birds, for others who love birds. She makes these in a little workshop, and we display them with the same affection with which she crafts them.

She cleans up her community, removing plastic waste. Instead of sweeping it under the rug, metaphorically speaking, she celebrates the part of nature she cares most about with these striking reminders of our need to reduce. And what’s still leftover, re-use. Creatively.

Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Sophia Pappas.

In yesterday’s post I shared a photo that offers a kind of poetic symmetry to the photo above, which accompanies Gabrielle Hamilton’s column below. Our urn of wooden pebbles is a twist on the more common offering of polished stones for people to take home from their vacation. First, polished stones do not qualify in any way as sustainable–a non-renewable resource mined in another part of the world becomes a pretty shiny thing that has no connection to the place where it is bought, except that it was bought in that place. The wooden pebbles are a recycled and renewable resource that serves as a reminder not only of Costa RIca, but of the wonder of trees.

The essay, and the fable it is drawing from, talks about villagers adding to the pot what they can spare. Our woodworkers add to the urn what they can spare–leftovers from their woodworking–that made me think of the symmetry. And I just noticed that the only other time we featured one of Gabrielle Hamilton’s essays, the same thing happened with photo symmetry:

The pre-Columbian ruins of Monte Albán, which overlooks the city of Oaxaca, Mexico. Once an ancient Zapotec capital, it was later occupied by the Indigenous Mixtec peoples. Stefan Ruiz

Authenticity, especially culinary, is a tricky topic. But it is one we choose to wrestle with for commercial purposes as well as for more personal reasons. Especially during our seven years in India, developing menus for visitors, we had to adapt local spice levels (leaning heavy on the Scoville scale) to a broader palette while maintaining tradition. The specific question in the article below is about an introduced ingredient into one of the world’s richest culinary traditions. I want to know the history, I respect authenticity, but I also prize adaptation. So, thank you to Aatish Taseer for the excellent details and to Stefan Ruiz for the stunning photographs in this story: