David Moscow grew up in New York, and knows our area well as any kid who had summers in the Catskills. Today he lives in Los Angeles, though his parents, including Jon, his father, still have a house in Ellenville. David said, "I still love that area. Every time I fly to the city, I go up there."

And the bond with his father continued right into the work that led to the two men writing a book together called From Scratch, which has also been made into a TV show of the same name.

The book chronicles the family’s fair share of adventures. They took summer vacations in places like Montana and David remembers interesting food from the great outdoors — fish that he caught himself, meat that came from animals he could see — a contrast with the modern way of life, with convenience in everything, and an absence of the "real" when it comes to food. This is an issue everywhere in the world of the "advanced" economies.

Meat comes in plastic wrapped packs. Few of us today ever see any grain growing in a field, let alone harvest it. Fish and sea food are equally as remote. Of course, that minority among us who hunt deer and eat them are in another category. And the vegans, of course, have even less connection to animals that are eaten.

This kind of thinking led David Moscow to pursue this project. Aside from writing, David is also an actor, who debuted on screen as a 13-year-old in the movie Big, playing the young version of Tom Hanks’s character. He has dozens of film credits following that performance. And now he has, From Scratch which has become a hit among foodie TV fans.

"We will be going to streaming in the new year," David confirmed in an interview with the Shawangunk Journal. Until then you can view past shows on DVDs via Amazon, or get the “flavor” of things from this smart, well-written book.

Part of credit for that must go to the father in this pair, Jon Moscow, who has credit as a writer on From Scratch, and is a co-executive director of the Ethics in Education Network.

David described the genesis of the concept, "It came while I was eating Korean BBQ at Sun Nong Dan in L.A. It came while Donald Trump was running for president in 2016 and talking about immigration and walls on the borders." David looked into the kitchen at one point and observed a hard-working Mexican amidst the Asian cooks, and he felt an urge to document how immigrants from Mexico and Central America are, in fact, pillars of modern American life. Indeed, in the Mid-Hudson Valley, it's a rare restaurant that doesn't depend on Latino workers in the back of the house. Before long the father/son duo were working on this project that morphed from a conceptual documentary into a TV show with a remarkable premise.

David said, "I thought that having people see what goes into our food would be important. For instance, about 60 people work on the ingredients in that pizza slice."

The other aspect is the way that our foods affect the environment. With seven billion people on Earth, we have become the prime factor in environmental degradation or repair. David said, "With ‘unconscious consumption’ people really don't think much about it at all. And the producers like it that way. They like to keep a distance between what we put in our bodies and where it came from and what it contains."

He pointed to the dramatic consequences of modern food production. "So, we have the so-called ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico that is caused by fertilizer runoff coming down the Mississippi from the corn and wheat growing areas in the heartland. Agribusiness is just too huge, too important to turn that ship around easily."

In the show, David will go somewhere, find a top restaurant and make a meal with ingredients that he personally goes out and finds, kills, harvests... whatever. And through that process we can see how much work goes into that dish on the menu. The book and the TV show hit these topics with any number of memorable single line concepts, such as, "We live our lives around our need for beef."

Indeed, the production of beef dominates much of American and South American agriculture.

In the first chapter in the book From Scratch, David investigates oyster harvesting, something that was once a major part of the diet on the East Coast. Today it has declined due to environmental damage and the rise of the hamburger and steak. "Oysters have 3 ounces of protein, they take two years to grow and as they do they clean the ocean. There is a huge contrast there with the other ways of creating animal protein."

And this kind of perspective is what David and Jon Moscow write about, and what David traveled the world to shoot for his show. He's been everywhere it seems — Iceland, Mexico, South Africa, Wyoming, Finland, Texas, even New York City.

The book takes us behind the scenes, as it were, for all these adventures. And so, in one show he goes to the Amalfi Coast in Naples, Italy, to make authentic genuine pizza, which became a saga, beginning with a bit of hazing by the workers at the mozzarella plant, who didn't understand that David was there to make his own mozzarella balls with his own hands, not to just watch them like some weird tourista!

To add to their confusion, he made his from buffalo milk, not cow's milk, obtaining a richer end product.

In fact, the pizza chapter of the book includes a trip to a mediaeval southern Italian hilltop commune to meet with Antonio Pellegrino of the Associazione Pro Loco di Casell in Pittari, and go out and harvest ancient wheat varieties, such as the Ianculidda, a "soft wheat" that was once used for flour. It grows four feet tall, and is disease resistant. To harvest it, David went out in the field with Pellegrino wielding the actual kind of sickle that is used to cut wheat stalks the old-fashioned way. As he did so, he mused on how in South Africa he had harvested spelt, a close relative of modern wheats, while inside a big tractor and was divorced from the actual process involved.

After cutting the wheat comes the threshing, and that is done by slapping the wheat heads against the side of a special shallow basket, dropping the wheat kernels to the bottom. Then they winnowed the wheat kernels to remove the "chaff," which blew away. Then came the grinding of the wheat kernels to make flour.

Exhausting? Well, depends on how big your field is and how much work you can do. David noted in his book, "Neuroscientist Kelly Lambert has tied modern depression to lack of ‘hands on’ work, "physical activities that involved our hands, particularly activities that produce tangible products that we can see, touch, and enjoy."

David added, "Working with my hands on the wheat gave me joy." Pellegrino noted that the labor connected him to his "peasant identity."

Then it was off to the local artisanal mill, and once the wheat was milled, David went in search of tomatoes. Tomatoes are, of course, from Andes, via Mexico, and, along with potatoes, chili peppers and maize (corn), are the major contributors to the global human diet of the Americas.

David writes that the intoxicating smell of tomato sauce, with some basil added, left him about ready to plunge his hands in and scoop some up by the time it was ready.

And the final touch: anchovies, of course. So he went down to the shore at Pisciotta and out for night fishing with ancient "menaica nets," the same as used by Greeks 3,000 years ago. They fished all night and then gutted, decapitated, cleaned and layered the anchovies between salt in a terracotta jar, with a wooden disk on top that would squeeze out liquid that can be used as a fermented oil dressing. But also, nicely salted anchovies for the pizza.

Okay, it's time to make the dough! However, there was a slip up. The anchovies had not been washed to remove some of the salt. And the pizza was slightly misshapen, but after cleaning off the anchovies, it reportedly tasted fine and Moscow could finally relax and eat a genuine Neapolitan pizza. The differences were obvious. The essence of the thing was doing everything by traditional and authentic methods.

Bread, cheese, tomato sauce, salted fish, the classic for pizza "From Scratch."

David said, "That whole experience was magical. And along the way as you are collecting the ingredients, you are getting hungrier and hungrier."

"My pizza was not the most beautiful, nor perhaps the tastiest ever, but it was incredibly satisfying. One of the top pizzas I ever had in my life."

This is the approach that runs through the book in chapters from oysters, to chanterelles, to an unfortunate female wild boar that he shot in Texas and fixed him with a disappointed eye before he blew her brains out, "Why me?" she might have said.

Along the way the Moscows discuss the horrors of the industrial meat industry, horrors that the consuming public does its absolute best to avoid knowing anything about. They point to what is most likely, though it will take time, a move by the human species away from meat and fish to alternative sources of protein, to go with carbohydrates and nutrients. The warmed-up future will almost certainly force this dietary change on us, whether we welcome it or not, as our grain and potato producing lands dry out, heat up and lose productivity.

Among the approaching crises in human food production, David Moscow points to the South China Sea, which he adds is the most productive area in the world for fish. But, it is in the process of being "fished out." The competition among China, Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Indonesia for every last edible fish is, he notes, "a classic case of the tragedy of the commons." No one is taking care of the fish stocks; everyone is taking as much as they can.

"We need to have some thoughtfulness," Moscow says. "And to be humble. Look at Costa Rica and Iceland, and the Philippines. They had crises, they found ways to protect stocks and keep their fisheries alive."

He ends with hope. "I have a young son and daughter. I want them to be able to enjoy great food during their lives. Our show is an effort to present the reality behind what we eat and help us as a society to make wise choices, going forward."

The book From Scratch is available on Amazon books, and the show can be purchased via DVDs.