Thursday morning, as he slid eight loaves, each stenciled and scored like artwork, into the Niedlov's Bakery & Cafe ovens, Erik Zilen – a little flour here, a lot of vision there – reached the end of a long journey.

Eighteen-hour days and back again the next morning. Your back aches, brain feels like mush and you can't remember the last time you slept eight hours, had sex or watched Netflix – just one episode – all the way through.

We're losing 10 acres of Tennessee farmland every hour of every day.

In the fall of 2017, Stacy Martin was living in Atlanta – she'd soon move to Chattanooga – when she got the news: her mom was diagnosed with stage IV uterine cancer.

Every day for the last 42 years, Sammy Norton has milked cows. Every morning, at 4.30. Every afternoon, again at 4.30.

Letty, Judy and Jane have known each other for seven years now, but it feels like a lifetime, the three bonded in ways only the heart understands.

It's good to say thanks, good to let people know how much they mean to you. Gratitude fills the heart like a big red balloon. Softens the mind like an afternoon breeze.

Once, Nate Carter begins, a man bought a birdcage. Inside, it was full of birds, but the birds were all locked up in this cage.That's why he bought it.

From their 400-acre Chili Pepper Ranch in Apison, Tenn., Jim and Amy Jo Osborn sell cuts of beef from over 200 head of cattle to hundreds of customers from Seattle to Miami to LA, all of whom ordered more than 60,000 pounds of meat last year.

Meet Uncle Jim. Get soaked in the rain. Savor greens that took two years to perfect at a restaurant without any recipes.

Not long ago, we went to one acre of Red Bank land for a routine afternoon interview with Carmen Joyce, a local beekeeper and owner of Nooga Honey Pot.What we found instead felt like a miracle.

People begin arriving by 8.30 am. By mid-morning, there are two, three dozen cars and trucks in line. Tags from North Carolina, Florida, Georgia.They're here for one reason: Aubie Smith's strawberries.

In early March, Jeannine Carpenter, director of advocacy for the Chattanooga Area Food Bank, estimated there was a 20% chance that the missing $7.2 million would get restored. Maybe 25%.

On Thursday afternoon, as it passed its $52.8 billion budget, Tennessee lawmakers voted to restore $7.2 million in lost funding for small farmers, families and food banks.

It takes five days to make croissants at Bread & Butter, the beloved bakery in Red Bank. Five days. By hand. You mix on a Monday, laminate on Tuesday, freeze, then shape, and by Friday, you bake. Five days.

When you walk into a dinner hosted by Sujata Singh, you enter a warm, welcomed space complete with flowers, beautifully set tables and air filled with the the most delightful spices and herbs.

It was during COVID and St. Peter's Episcopal Church was worshipping outside. As Kelsey Aebi – St. Peter's lay minister – set up the altar, communion table and chairs, the warm sun fell on her shoulders and the birds sang from overhead trees and she realized:I love this. I love worshipping outside.

After hours, days and weeks of talking with Nashville legislators, explaining to them how and why the state lost $7.2 million in funding for Tennessee farmers and food banks, the director of advocacy for the Chattanooga Area Food Bank may be witnessing this most beautiful event: a selfless, bipartisan response.

Imagine if we graduated agriculturally literate students who, in the words of the National Research Council, could "understand the food and fiber system and this would include its history and its current economic, social and environmental significance to all Americans."

The USDA says it sent six separate funding notifications. Tennessee missed them all.

It feels like teenage Kenyatta – "skinny as a rail," he remembers – and his six siblings – one brother is 6'5", another 6'4" – are eating 100,000 calories a day. His mother, with some loaves-and-fishes power, is somehow able to provide. But she can't prevent brothers from being brothers.

Working the land restores this connection in ways few other parts of modern life can. The very materials and methods present within farming are each wise teachers, each seed containing tiny scripted messages for us on life and how to receive it.

Welcome to all our new readers and friends. Thanks to Kristen Templeton's marvelous headliner story in Tuesday's NOOGAToday, our community at Food as a Verb grew a lot bigger overnight. 

Four years ago, Brad and Tara Smith were neck-deep in two careers – he was a landscape architect and planner; she, an elementary school principal – living near the Space Coast in historic and hip Ocala, Florida.

Ella Livingston's story could start with that moment – her moment – in Japan. Before Cocoa Asante became Chattanooga's luxury chocolate brand known across the world, Livingston was studying in Tokyo, 2013, when her entire perspective turned.

The distance between Medellin and St. Elmo is not as far as you think.

This year, the Chattanooga Area Food Bank will deliver, provide, donate and offer more food for hungry families and individuals than ever before in its 51-year history.

For me, there was cantaloupe sliced in half-moon pieces with knives sharp enough to split hairs. And pimento cheese sandwiches on white bread served on plates the color of egg yolk. The crystal was high on shelves, out of reach, never used. Glass bottles of Coke and Lays chips and homemade chocolate sauce poured warm from pint Mason jars over peppermint stick ice cream.

This is the story of our city's urban farm looking backwards – its land, leaders say, was a place of horrific forced removal and plantation slavery – in order to shape the future.

During COVID, Hannah Wright began posting Instagram videos about diet and nutrition.That's good. Hannah, 37, is wise, grounded and has a keen and trained ear for discerning diet and nutrition truth from snake oily, exploitative motivations.

Two Wednesdays ago, we set up shop at the Main St. Farmers' Market. We had the grandest of afternoons, more fun, as Bobby Weir once said, than a frog in a glass of milk.

Olson is the owner of Scenic City Wine in St. Elmo. For the last 20 years, Olson, whose career shifted to wine during culinary school, has been immersed in the global wine scene, from distribution to importing to enjoying. As he loves to say:

In churches across the region, the communion sacrament takes many forms: wafers, crackers, pieces of store-bought bread. In Red Bank, loaves are baked by hand, from scratch, in prayer.

In Sewanee, three friends are growing gourmet mushrooms inside a renovated wood shop. There are foggy fruiting tents, a machine called the Swirling Death Blender and gorgeously good (and sexy) mushrooms. What's not to love?

Mallory Grimm left a thriving Nashville business to move back to Sewanee and open a restaurant devoted to local food and community. Folks are gushing.

Gwen works two jobs: an eight-hour shift offering sit-in home health care that also includes 12-hour shifts every other weekend. In her spare moments – late afternoons, Sundays – she sells government-issued phones from nearby parking lots.

This country superstar has been working a second job: breeding cattle, stewarding the land and cultivating dung beetles. Lots of them.

Here's a thought exercise: travel anywhere in the US, walk into an Indian restaurant, any Indian restaurant, and odds are pretty good that wherever you go, the experience will be mostly the same.

In 1965, Wendell Berry left a teaching job in NYC and moved with his family to a farmhouse in Henry County, Kentucky. There, he began his abundant writing career: more than 80 books of essays, novels and poetry, all of which seem to revolve around naming both what's been lost and the path back to it.

When you know where Bryan Slayton was, you'll know where he's going.

Imagine bread, beer and whiskey made from grains grow locally. From Niedlov's to Sequatchie Cove Farm to Red Clay Farms.

Within American capitalism, I can only think of one other class of laborer whose livelihood – day in, day out – exists in such a vulnerable, trusting and insecure position.Servers.

The Palestinian-Jordanian chef has a rare vision for what his restaurant can accomplish. People across the US are noticing.

There are 17 items offered. Mushroom grits. Blackened trout. Cheesecake. Okra with beet hummus, bee pollen, pickled onion, honey, cilantro and naan.And nearly all the ingredients are locally-sourced.

The summer sun rises above us at Sequatchie Cove Farm in Marion County, Tennessee. The flock of 2,000 Novogin laying hens is protected by a series of strands of moveable electric fencing. A white Pyrenees moves through the flock with authority of soldier guarding the wall. Full of summer freedom, a boy rides by on an electric dirt bike followed by a pick-up carrying a flat bed of garlic harvested earlier that day.

Over the last year, Ian “Sully” Sullivan has served some three thousand bowls of oatmeal to Chattanoogans. He’s the owner of The Oatmeal Experience, a food truck that specializes in specialty oatmeal he says “aren’t your granny’s oats.”

Get to know Spencer Perez – founder of Coffee Machine Service Co. and our city's espresso machine repairman – and you'll see the world – and coffee – in brand new ways.

"One of my goals of moving here was to help open hearts .... that we can come together as a community.”