And with dishes like his version of the potato and cheese dish Aligot, he rejuvenated the old soul of his region.

To be seated at his farmhouse table 30 years later with his wife Ginette for lunch, the master at the stove showing me his famous Aligot, was to be pulled into a dream. (3/3)

His style was improvisational, whimsical and elegantly unconventional. Vegetables and herbs and the landscape were his inspiration—the tools he's used to push the boundaries of French cooking and, in the process, craft a new cuisine entirely. (2/3)

This week we peeled away the Acquerello’s decayed outer layers to see—and taste—how the burgundy-flecked inner heads have fared.

It’s going to take genetic selection, and a lot of farming know-how to make it work. We could do no better than starting with varieties like Acquerello radicchio to push the limits of the late winter harvest.

...Too late for all the real cold snaps that make vegetables tastier and sweeter; too early for what the southern states and California do with their early jump into spring. Solving for March in the Northeast means a harvest (and revenue) for farmers year-round.

Riding the rebellious streak, Blue Hill chefs have been working on a new kind of frito using rebellion corn—nixtamalized, ridged and spiced.

Dr. Frank Kutka fought back with breeding. His solution is brilliant and elegant. He crossed landrace varieties of dent corn (grain corn) with popcorn varieties to create incompatibility—popcorn contains traits that make it hard for GMO pollen to enter non-GMO corn silks. Rebellion corn was born.

So organic farmers’ qualms with GMOs are deeper than the technology itself— it’s really more about the unchecked power of big agribusiness and how they play willy nilly with nature and our food supply without penalty.

Wind and insects carry GMO pollen into adjacent fields of non-GMO corn, compromising their organic genetics and creating a nightmare for the farmer in the form of rejections from grain buyers and lawsuits from big seed companies.