The only thing separating you from eating sustainably on the cheap might be a nice, sharp blade -- and the knife skills to use it.

Cooking at home -- from scratch -- makes it possible for many of us to afford to eat local and organic foods. But the No. 1 barrier people have to cooking at home is time. And, for amateur cooks, following recipes is much more time-consuming without strong knife skills.

The more capable you are in the kitchen, the more flexibility you have when it comes to buying and eating whole, less processed (often more affordable) foods. For instance, two people can get three meals out of one whole chicken for about the same price as buying two pre-cut boneless, skinless chicken breasts. (Of course, the vegetarian equivalent may not apply exactly, but you'll eat more veggies for your dollar if you're comfortable cutting and cooking them at home.)

For some folks, this season is about peace and good tidings. For others, it's just about the presents. In my family, the holidays were, and still are, all about the food. There are many items that must be on the table at my house, or it simply isn't Christmas. Among these are the wild rice dressing, cornbread, grandma's cranberries, and mom's bourbon pound cake. Now that pound cake is a very closely guarded family recipe, but the other recipes are below. Wild rice Photo: WhitneyI would have never thought wild rice dressing could be improved upon until I discovered the …

Photo from the video Tamar Adler Talks About An Everlasting Meal.Editor's note: It's unanimous these days: Cooking food from scratch at home is one of the best ways to eat sustainably without breaking the bank. It also enables eaters to easily support food producers who use environmentally sound, ethical, and humane practices. But most Americans can't pull this off regularly. We recently invited Kurt Michael Friese and Tamar Adler -- two people who have strong feelings about the importance of home cooking -- to have a conversation for Grist. Adler is a chef, cooking teacher, and the author of the …

Folks across the country know something is wrong.  There’s just something about the system we’ve created over several decades that is inherently flawed. Some blame the government, others big banks, still others blame political parties, but all agree that there’s something that’s just not quite working the way it should.  People are losing homes, jobs, and health coverage at an alarming rate because of the societal turbulence in the enormous yet formless thing we call the economy. Enter Change.org and their 10 Ideas for Change in America.  Taking advantage of the concept of “the wisdom of crowds,” Change.org launched a …

Ever feel like you were playing checkers and the other guy was playing chess? That's the impression I get when watching many of the recent spate of food documentaries. Activists announce that this or that is wrong with the food system; on the rare occasion when something appears to be getting done about it, the folks who are doing things badly simply change their tactics, not their strategy. That's how it's gone with the British 2009 documentary film Pig Business. I watched this film in several 10-minute segments via YouTube (Part One) because it hasn't been released in the U.S., …

In Sunday's New York Times, Damon Darlin has now weighed into a debate which I am suddenly making a career of noticing, that of publicly lambasting locavores. Normally a tech writer (and perhaps better suited to it), Darlin has wheeled out some of the same tired points that others have recently, making them officially clichéd. It takes only 12 words before he drops Michael Pollan's name, whose best-selling books argue eloquently for a better food system, and in the next paragraph he mentions Michelle Obama's organic garden at the White House, though he makes no mention of her new "Let's …

In the latest edition of The Atlantic magazine, Caitlin Flanagan has written a surprisingly harsh critique of the popular and growing movement to include gardens in our public schools. In a nutshell, she states that pursuing this activity over and above the three R’s will turn our children into illiterate sharecroppers. Right from the start, though, she gets it wrong. She has the reader picture the son of undocumented migrant workers entering his first day at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley, home of the well-known Edible Schoolyard project, “where he stoops under the hot sun and begins to …

Chowing down for better school lunches in Iowa City.Photo: Kurt Michael FrieseAll across the country this past Labor Day, folks gathered for picnics. That's no surprise, of course. After all, it was a holiday, and the weather was grand across nearly the whole continent. But there was something unique about one group of picnics; 307 of them to be exact, in all 50 states. They were dubbed "Eat-Ins" (modeled on the sit-ins of the '60s), and they were a call to action by Slow Food USA At those picnics, including one right here in Iowa City, more than 20,000 people …

Consider the egg. Photo: Kurt Michael Friese UPDATE:  The owner of the hatchery in the video mentioned below has spoken out, says there were violations of procedure but makes no apologies.  He calls "instantaneous Euthanasia" "Standard industry practice."  Read the story here. Iowa is the number-one producer of eggs in the country, with more than twice the number of laying hens than Ohio, the number two state. There are nearly 20 times as many hens here than there are people, producing a shade over 14 billion eggs a year. As one might expect, their living conditions are less than ideal. …

Are corndogs a vegetable? There has been a cultural revolution in this country over the last 50 to 75 years, a sort of intellectual cleansing that has removed from most people's minds any understanding of food, of cooking, of the pleasures of the kitchen and table, and replaced it with the language of the drive-thru, the shopping mall, and the convenience store. Michael Pollan recently addressed this problem well. Nowhere is this more evident than in our schools, where our kids are not taught about food and cooking, not even the "Home Economics" of my high school years. No, instead …