When our road trip took us through South Carolina, we asked Sean Brock (the chef at Husk and McCrady's) about farmers to check out near Charleston. He recommended the Joseph Fields Farm. This piece of land has been in the Fields family for three generations and has gone from organic to conventional and back again. Joseph gave us a tour of the area and also a taste of his baby "squash, evangelism, and collard greens" philosophy.

School garden programs have sprouted up in so many places they're almost commonplace -- but that doesn't make it any less exciting to watch kids learn about where their food comes from. We spent this week's episode with a group of students who were planting, harvesting, and tasting their very first radishes with teacher Ashley Rouse of Georgia Organics. Kids are in a lot of our videos -- after all they're cute and they are the future.

We are interrupting our weekly Perennial Plate episodes to bring you a quick adventure through the streets of Vietnam. Last month, we were invited to go on an Intrepid Travel trip to this fascinating country for two weeks. Our assignment was to document this food-focused journey across the country and we're really proud of the video that came out of it. Also: Here is a winter version of a classic Vietnamese recipe.

Meet the farmer, forager, and chefs behind a farm-to-plate event in Georgia. I think this captures the fun, passion, and ideals that go into the interactive dining experiences we've been experiencing all year.

On our way through Atlanta, we stopped at a very diverse community garden run by Friends of Refugees. It's home to the vegetable patches of several Iraqi, Burmese, and Nepalese families, as well as a lovely Bhutanese family. We surprised them by inviting ourselves over for a home-cooked Bhutanese meal and learned a bit about their path to the U.S.

John McEntire is possibly the only person in the world who grows Crooked Creek Corn, a once-common crop in the South that is now the chief ingredient in Troy and Sons' moonshine. On our trip across North Carolina, we stopped at his farm, heard stories, and tasted both the moonshine and a special juice made from sorghum stalks.

On our way across North Carolina, we stopped to chat with some Native American farmers trying to change the food and work situation in their communities. Plagued with high poverty rates and little access to good food, these folks were inspiring in their efforts to farm in a sustainable way:

We've made films about hunting pigs and squirrels, about fishing for trout and diving for sea urchins, and we've been to many ranches. For this episode we decided to go in a different direction. On small farms across the country, some very compassionate people are providing a sanctuary for animals to live out their lives without fear of being eaten. At Star Gazing Farm in Maryland, we filmed one shining example.

Our videos are often inspired by whatever it is I'm in the mood to eat. Such was the case with this short trip we took along the Rappahannock River in Virginia, where oyster farmers are helping clean the Chesapeake Bay and replenishing the native oyster population (now down to just 1 percent of what it once was). These bivalves are a remarkable, sustainable food and if you are in an oyster-growing region, I recommend you partake as soon as possible. Winter is oyster season! (Just make sure your cameraperson isn't prone to seasickness.)

Around 40 percent of the food we produce in the U.S. gets tossed; but that's not to say a lot of it isn't still edible. Here's the story of a father who feeds his family with perfectly good finds from dumpsters behind Trader Joe's and Whole Foods (and admits that most of his newborn baby's molecules probably originate from dumpster food). Join us as we dumpster dive with him and make breakfast from the treasures we find: