08/31/2026
What a warm reflection by Trevor & Breanna Daugherty on their family's week at Friedenswald this summer.
We were glad to have you here and are grateful that the place and the FOOD were restorative and delicious!
Hope to see you back!
A letter from our publishers:
"We spent a week this summer at Camp Friedenswald, in the woods and lakes of Southern Michigan, less than an hour from our front door. It’s a family camp, with almost no technology, no notifications, no reason to check anything.
We didn't expect the food to be the part we remember most. Eric Emerson, the chef at Friedenswald, sources from farms around the camp with a diligence you'd expect from a restaurant with a much louder reputation, but none of the fuss. Meals arrived three times a day, made from things grown close enough to drive to.
We enjoyed the quiet that comes with a reprieve from technology forced by a remote location. We noticed the lake more and, for us, the opportunity to spend time with our kids. You notice that you're hungry in a way you haven't been in months.
By Thursday morning, the sky started to change. Smoke from the Canadian wildfires drifted down over Michigan, and air quality warnings kept us indoors for 24 hours. The lake was right there but off limits.
We drove home thinking about how the same week held a table of food grown within a few miles of where we sat and a sky full of something that started hundreds of miles north. We know our local farmers are familiar with this feeling around this time of year. Abundance and fragility arrive together.
That is more or less what harvest is. Not a guarantee, but a return on months of attention, weather permitting. In August, we get to eat the results.
So, a small ask for the season: Eat something grown close to you and know whose hands it came through. Then find one afternoon when the phone stays in the drawer.
Thanks for reading, and for being part of Edible Michiana."
— Trevor & Breanna Daugherty
