In my previous post, I motivated a web application that would allow small-scale sustainable meat producers to sell directly to consumers using a meat share approach, using constrained optimization techniques to maximize utility for everyone involved. In this post, I’ll walk through some R code that I wrote to …

A personal interest I have is the ethical and sustainable production of food. I’ve been a member of and helped run Community Supported Agriculture groups, and my wife and I currently purchase the majority of our meat from a group of upstate NY pastured-livestock producers who sell their products through CSAs. It’s an …

Hah, it rhymes! The fall haul (hah!) from the CSA inevitably means two things, root vegetables and ungodly numbers of pears. I love root vegetables, but tend to find pears to be pale imitations of apples. But when poached in red wine, or cooked with butter and sugar, pears can have some redeeming value. Recently, for …