Tamar Haspel's ticket is to Cape Cod, to eat “first hand food"

Tamar Haspel writes the James Beard Award-winning Washington Post column Unearthed, which covers the intersection of food and science: How what we eat affects us and our planet. She’s also written for Discover, Vox, Slate, Fortune, Eater, and Edible Cape Cod.

Together with journalist Mike Grunwald, Tamar co-hosts the Climavores podcast, which takes a good, hard, entertaining look at food’s impact on climate and environment.

When she’s tired of the heavy lifting of journalism, she gets dirty. She and her husband, Kevin Flaherty, grow their own tomatoes, catch their own fish, hunt their own venison, and raise their own chickens. If she tells you a wild mushroom is OK to eat, you can believe her. And her book, TO BOLDLY GROW, will convince you to try it.

On this episode, Tamar shares her one way ticket, with her husband Kevin, to Cape Cod, to eat “first hand food” — where every day they eat one food they grew, hunted or fished. This entire journey is captured in her phenomenally written book, TO BOLDLY GROW, which we discuss.

During the conversation, Tamar also shares the joy and satisfaction for continuously being on the steep part of the learning curve, why human nutrition is incredibly difficult to study, that there’s no taste difference between fresh eggs and store bought eggs, why gardening is even more local than politics, the best way to forage for food in a city, and more.