Farms

From bitter Italian greens like tardivo and puntarelle to specific varieties of beets and spinach, chefs collaborate with farmers to introduce new products to the Midwest.

When you go out to eat, it’s not just the chef who influences what ends up on your plate – farmers do, too. A recent event hosted by Green City Market in its new, permanent home showed how. 

Ever look at a restaurant menu and wonder, “How do they get all those gorgeous, ripe heirloom tomatoes every week?” One answer lies in businesses like Chicago’s Midwest Foods.

How and why did Americans stop eating beef from dairy cows? It has something to do with Chicago's meatpackers and stockyards.

A new short documentary shows Kruszewski's charming and relaxed approach to tending an orchard of Asian pears, persimmons, and pawpaws, a fruit native to North America that has similarities to tropical fruit. 

As another outbreak of a highly contagious bird flu devastates flocks around the country, we spoke to some small local farmers about their concerns. 

Acclaimed for their beer and pizza, Middle Brow has begun applying its local, sustainable approach to wine, sourcing grapes from Michigan and experimenting with hybrid varietals tailored to the climate there. They're opening a second location in the state.

Mint Creek Farm raises turkeys and other animals via rotational grazing, a practice that improves soil health and produces healthy, sought-after animals. 

The dishes at Cellar Door Provisions are constantly being tweaked and refined according to the fresh ingredients they have, in an effort to keep things hyper-seasonal and generate as little waste as possible. 

The ocean “is where our solutions lie,” says Andrew Zimmern, and the new series Hope in the Water illustrates some of the possibilities of feeding more people from our oceans while also protecting the waters.

“Everyone should have access to locally grown, sustainably produced food,” says the executive director of Green City Market, which has changed Chicago's food scene since its inception 25 years ago.

The new series America the Bountiful goes beyond food scenes in cities to explore the culinary traditions of America's heartland via individual ingredients linked to specific places, like wild rice in Minnesota.

Independent Lens' Greener Pastures follows four Midwestern farmers as they face challenges outside their control that are inherent to their profession.  "There’s so much of a stigma out there that you can’t have a bad day," says one. 

For a loaf of bread from Publican Quality Bread to reach you, wheat must be grown and harvested and sent to a stone mill to be ground into flour, which then goes through a process as long as 60 hours at the bakery. 

Joe Weber, founder of Four Star Mushrooms near the West Loop, thinks mushrooms are a prime example of how to produce food that is both good for the environment and for people.