Sign up to get Matt Kettmann’s Full Belly Files, which serves up multiple courses of food & drink coverage every Friday, going off-menu from our regularly published content to deliver tasty nuggets of restaurant, recipe, and refreshment wisdom to your inbox
To be completely honest, I’m getting a little tired of typing the word “regenerative,” and I imagine some of your eyes glaze over when you see it in nearly every article you read about food, wine, and farming these days.
I’ve already written about it a number of times in 2026 (including for this newsletter here ), and my Earth Day–aligned cover story for this week’s Santa Barbara Independent is titled “Jumping Into Regenerative Wine: Santa Barbara County Vintners Join Global Effort to Fix Farming.” (Fun fact: I was in the barn hustling the sheep out of the barn for the epic leaping lamb cover shot by Macduff Everton.)
