This Thing Now: Crop Stories Magazine

We're pretty obsessed with This Thing Now. Here's how to get it into your life.

Sure, you could just go to the farmers' market, nab a bunch of radishes, take them home and eat them without a second thought. You could also go see a new favorite band play live, come home and not scour every single interview, hunt down YouTube clips of their early work, and download all the songs from their side projects. It's the blessing/curse of the information age, this insatiable hunger for more backstory on the stuff you love. And when it comes to produce, the editors of Crop Stories want to feed that need.

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Fresh off the presses and "straight from the field" (per the mag's tagline), this quarterly zine, produced by the Athens Farmers Market, digs deeply into a single crop in each issue, telling the stories of the people who grow it and how best to honor it when you get home. Mind you, it's not a glossy, dewy-eyed, Instagram-filtered tale of idyllic farm life. Editors André Gallant and Caitlyn Hardy pull no punches when it comes to the blood, sweat and dirt that goes into raising the blueberries (issue one), winter squash (issue two) or radishes (current issue) that bring such pleasure to your plate every season, but they're also not going to leave you gaping at your haul, too in awe to eat it.

Alongside the histories, farmer portraits and interviews are innovative, accessible and stunningly photographed recipes, which highlight the themed ingredient. The current issue touts Lemon Ginger Radish Granita, Radish Curry (Mooli Sabzi), Citrus Radish Pound Cake and 16 other radish-centric recipes to carry you through until the next issue, without burning out your freshly amped appetite for them.

And in our book, that's pretty damned rad(ish).