In high school I had a hard time with food: your standard type-A white girl adventure in restricted eating. In college, though, I fell in love with it. It was one of those things where a tiny accident completely changes your life: at the beginning of the fall semester of my sophomore year I ran into a friend on the quad and he said "come check out this class with me?"

It was a lecture on the psychology, politics and biology of food, and it actually wasn't that great, but it introduced me to Josh and Melina, who were then running the Yale Sustainable Food Project. I started interning for them that summer on Yale's one-acre farm, and ended up working at the YSFP almost straight through, eventually full-time in the office, for the next five years.

Working there was the first time I understood how people's work becomes consuming: the Project both needed and demanded everything I could give it. My first year as an intern I managed volunteer hours on the Farm, corralling anyone and everyone who showed up-- 30 or 40 people on a fall Friday, when we served pizza at 5:00 pm, and usually a big fat no one on bleak winter Sundays-- and explaining to folks who'd never touched a shovel before how to stale bed and seed, prick out and plant, why we grew three kinds of eggplant and that the weird Dr. Seuss-y looking things were actually late-season asparagus, which we'd let go to seed in order to support its complex and demanding perennial root structure.

I learned plenty about small-scale northeastern organic agriculture (!) but much more about project management: how to take a task list and a random, motley crew and a long afternoon and turn them towards a single, specific, productive goal. I've spent a lot of time since running events, and it always surprises me that not every gets off on it the way I do: the sense of razor's edge control over a shifting, amorphous mass, the necessity of both having a plan and always being able to change it, the ability to react clinically instead of emotionally when things, inevitably, start to go crazily wrong. 

I worked at the Project during a bunch of crucial years: my last few in college and first few out, those initial confused, confusing forays into making some kind of adult life for myself. Working on the Farm is where I met and fell in love with D. I took classes and read books because of it; I learned to cook because of it, and god, did I learn to eat. I learned the best way to stem kale, squeeze a lemon, shuck an oyster; how to knead and stretch pizza dough; how to build a fire from twigs and damp butcher paper and fat, splintery logs. Who Wendell Berry, Eliot Coleman, Carlo Petrini and Joel Salatin were. I once drove our pickup truck out on 95 to a horse farm where they filled the bed with manure. The farmer used a back hoe to tip in a layer and then I, wearing a pair of borrowed rain boots, stamped it down as far is it would go before he added another. I drove that truck all over Connecticut. I parallel parked it in downtown New Haven after the farmer's market on Saturdays to make deliveries of leftover produce to fancy restaurants. I knew the owner of every fancy restaurant in town.

When I moved to Los Angeles it was with every intention of continuing to work in the world of sustainable food and agriculture. I applied to zillions of jobs and was turned down for every single one, often very sweetly, with a too-close-to-dating-for-comfort line about how they had really, really loved me-- just not quite enough to, you know, hire me. There was a year of that before I found a job doing events for a different type of non-profit. I didn't know how it would turn out, then, that year that felt like grasping at air, but now I know that it was the year when I was writing A SONG TO TAKE THE WORLD APART.

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When I planned last week's trip to New York to read from SONG, I built in an afternoon in New Haven. The Farm still serves pizza on Fridays, but instead of a wild post-work free-for-all it's dished out to people sitting at long picnic tables, listening to a student lecture on her academic work in the food world. Everything's evolved in the years since I left, and I'm grateful: it's a living organism, that organization, and it responds to the demands of the world and the institution and the students it serves, who don't ever really know how different it used to be, and, you'll be shocked to hear, aren't that interested in hearing about it, either. The full-time staff is still mostly the same as when I worked there, though JPL is married and JWF and JDO both have babies, and I guess MJB has a beard?

Anyway. I couldn't believe I was back. I couldn't believe how long it had been since I had been responsible for the seedlings in the hoop house and the garlic under a layer of leaf mulch, how long it had been since I had sprinkled cornmeal on a pizza peel and finished my dough with olive oil and salt. How easily the physical habits of it came back to me: checking each gate as we walked up the driveway to see that it had been latched before we left. 

I say all the time that I miss the food world, and I do, but the truth is that I also miss that world, the specific one, which, because it lives in a college town, I can always revisit but never quite re-enter. I had to leave New Haven in order to have this life, to do more growing up or whatever, and I don't regret it, but god do I fucking miss it. I miss it so, so much.

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So it's especially nice to have a piece about a local urban farmer with my byline on it in the winter issue of Lucky Peach, which will be out in the world on November 15. Ann Friedman also drew a pie chart, and someone interviewed Eve, and the whole thing is about Los Angeles, which, you may not have heard, is my very favorite city.