Gidon Eshel

I am a research professor of environmental physics at Bard College, in upstate NY. Earlier, I was, in reverse chronological order, an assistant professor of geophysics at the Univ. of Chicago, a staff research scientist at the Dept. of Physical Oceanography at the Woods Hole oceanographic Institution at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and a NOAA Global and Climate Change Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Earth and Planetary Physics at Harvard. In 1996, I got my Ph.D. in physical oceanography from Columbia's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory.

I grew up mostly on the ocean, on board small, old, ships captained by my communist, labor leader father.

At age 13 I left home, and moved to a kibbutz, an Israeli agricultural commune. A key element of this new world was excellence in and complete devotion to agricultural work, which all kibbutz kids participate in every day after morning schooling. I chose to work in the kibbutz dairy farm, and threw myself enthusiastically into this work, immersing myself in nutrition, veterinary medicine, fertility, and production cycle of hyper performing black-and-white Friesian dairy cattle.

After some years of traveling the world on a bicycle, I went back to cattle, this time raising beef cattle in a less communal but still cooperative form of Israeli agriculture, Moshav. While the herd was considerably smaller than the kibutz's, and was raised much less intensively, the lessons were equally valuable. Much of the detailed descriptions in Planetary Eating of practical agriculture in general and cattle in particular are based on the lessons this decade taught me.