Table For Six Billion, Please

Judy Wicks On Her Plan To Change The World, One Restaurant At A Time

You hear more lately about the concept of “food miles” — how far food travels to get to your plate. To most people fewer food miles just means that it’s fresher, but others are starting to make the connection to carbon emissions, though I don’t think that’s the primary reason people buy local. I think the local-food movement is more concerned with nutrition and community connection: people want to meet the farmers who grow their food, and they know that local food tastes better and is healthier and more nutritious.

My God Journal

Tonight was my third Christmas Eve service. My friend Diana was playing the organ and invited me into the choir loft with her. I sat looking down at the pews, which were two-thirds full. These people had braved the midnight cold of the Catskills to praise the birth of a king in a barn.

Tell Me Something

Everything of my brother’s fits on a couple of shelves: boxes of records, books, a few photographs. When you’re killed at eighteen, you don’t leave much behind.

The Things You Forget

You cannot remember winter. You cannot remember the way the weeks of gray stitched themselves together into a patchwork of cold, the sky the color of a galvanized bucket, and the mud frozen at the lip of the pond.

Ponchatoula

I was twenty-one years old and taking freshman composition, because I’d gotten a late start in college. I probably wouldn’t have gone to college at all if I hadn’t lost my left arm in a car accident at the age of nineteen.

Stuck

It was just my mother’s luck: Fred left, and then she couldn’t get her contraceptive sponge out. She had forgotten about it through the long night, as she and Fred had fought and car headlights had panned across my bedroom walls.

What They Taught Me

I am compelled to leave every few months with my backpack and cameras and a ticket to some distant place. I travel as simply as I can, with a tent, a sleeping bag, some cooking gear, and small gifts to give to people I befriend along the way. I am drawn in particular to the indigenous peoples of the world and their vanishing customs. They have taught me groundedness, humility, wisdom, and authenticity.

all i knew

One Argument For The Existence Of God