Youthful stints doing slug labor on a Midwestern dairy farm (hot!) and being tossed about on a commercial fishing boat off Nova Scotia (frigid!) taught Estabrook that writing about how food is produced is a hell of a lot easier than actually producing it. For several blissful years, he received a steady paycheck from the late, lamented Gourmet magazine. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times , Eating Well, Smithsonian, Reader's Digest , Saveur , Epicurious , OnEarth , and AtlanticLife.com. He also blogs at www.politicsoftheplate.com. He has won the prestigious Migrant Justice Award and three James Beard Awards and lives on a 30-acre plot in Vermont where he putters around in a large vegetable garden (a great place for a procrastinating writer), tends a small flock of laying hens, makes maple syrup, and brews some of the vilest hard cider on the planet.