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Chef Furard Tate is the kind of man who never sits still. He flits from the order desk at Inspire BBQ back to the busy kitchen, where young men are seasoning sauce, cooking macaroni and cheese, and finishing off some dry-rubbed ribs smoked on a grill.

"We grill on a real grill," Tate says. "None of this electric stuff."

But as important as the food is, Tate says it's also important that it's made by young hands who must learn a slow, consistent process.

Washington, D.C., has a thriving restaurant market with a plethora of restaurants serving its multi-cultural residents. But this barbecue eatery offers more than food on its menu.

Inspire BBQ aims to reclaim troubled young people, teach them a trade, and give them a chance at success.

"When an adult realizes that a young person took that process and is actually learning how to make everything, it actually means even more, because it reminds us that: My education started at home," he says.

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Lots of consumers are smitted with local food, but they're not the only ones. The growing market is also providing an opportunity for less experienced farmers to expand their business and polish their craft.

But they need help, and increasingly it's coming from food hubs, which can also serve as food processing and distribution centers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that there are about 240 of them in more than 40 states plus the District of Columbia.

Donna O'Shaughnessy and her husband, Keith Parrish, are first-generation farmers in rural Chatsworth, Ill., about two hours south of Chicago. They sell dairy products and meat, and raise a host of animals, including a few colorful peacocks.

For many years, they ended each year in the red. But business took off about five years ago, with restaurant owners as far away as Chicago putting in orders.

They say they owe a lot to a year-round local food hub called Stewards of the Land, started in 2005 by Marty and Kris Travis, farmers in nearby Fairbury, Ill. It's one of two the couple started in rural Illinois.

The Travises became middlemen to fill a hole in the market. "As we go, we can incubate these farms, and get them on their feet to do their own things," Marty says.

Members of their food hubs include about 40 small family farmers, each of whom pays a small fee to join. In exchange, they get cheaper liability insurance, and access to a much larger pool of clients and training.

"The new generation of farmers is a little over half the group," says Marty. "Many of them were under the age of 18 when they joined. We're very interested in growing great produce, but we're also very passionate about growing great farmers."

One up-and-coming farmer is Derek Stoller, 16, of Fairbury, Ill. He joined Stewards of the Land when he was just 9-years-old and growing Indian corn. Since then – working in his parents' backyard and putting his family to work – he has moved on to other things like beets, parsley and carrots, grossing about $15,000 in 2012.

The Salt

Here's How Young Farmers Looking For Land Are Getting Creative

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Amazon has patented "anticipatory package shipping," a system that ships products before customers have actually bought them — based on what it predicts they will buy. The Verge explains: "Amazon plans to box and ship products it expects customers to buy preemptively, based on previous searches and purchases, wish lists, and how long the user's cursor hovers over an item online. The company may even go so far as to load products onto trucks and have them 'speculatively shipped to a physical address' without having a full addressee."

E. L. Doctorow tells The New York Times about his reading habits: "Sometimes I put books down that are good but that I see too well what the author is up to. As you practice your craft, you lose your innocence as a reader. That's the one sad thing about this work."

Biologist and author Lewis Wolpert has admitted using other writers' work without attribution in two of his books. In a statement quoted in The Observer, Wolpert said: "I acknowledge that I have been guilty of including some unattributed material in my last book to be published, You're Looking Very Well (2011) and in the initial version of my yet unpublished book Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?. This lack of attribution was totally inadvertent and due to carelessness on my part. It in no way reflects on my publishers, Faber and Faber, and I take full responsibility. When downloading material from the internet as part of my research, and coming back to it after a gap of maybe weeks or sometimes months, I simply did not recall that I had not written these passages myself." Wolpert added that he "would never ever knowingly claim someone else's material as my own."

The Best Books Coming Out This Week:

Richard Powers' Orfeo holds some of the most beautiful music writing you'll ever encounter. In the book, Peter Elds, a composer who spends his evenings playing with DNA in his home lab, is suspected of bioterrorism and goes on the run. He wants "only one thing before he dies: to break free of time and hear the future." Powers is the king of the elegantly unexpected adjective: a stillborn smile, a curt ratatouille, stark raving mod. The finale of Mozart's Jupiter "spills out into the world like one of those African antelopes that fall from the womb, still wet with afterbirth but already running." Powers spoke to NPR's Audie Cornish last week: "The great beauty of being a novelist is that you can spend three or four or five years vicariously pursuing those imaginary Walter Mitty-like lives that you never got to pursue in the real world. I do have a stack of youthful compositions sitting on the bottom of my closet, so it was a great pleasure to spend these years working on this book — not just rediscovering the 20th century and this avant-garde tradition, but also to imagine myself into the life of somebody who sees and hears and feels the world through sound."

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 spans the Nobel laureate's long career, from 25 Poems, which he published as a teenager, to his latest collection, White Egrets. The collection is edited by the poet Glyn Maxwell, who once wrote of Walcott's poetry: "The verse is constantly trembling with a sense of the body in time, the self slung across metre, whether metre is steps, or nights, or breath, whether lines are days, or years, or tides." Walcott is at his greatest when he writes about the sea — which he does constantly — as in a section from The Prodigal:

"When we were boys coming home from the beach,

it used to be such a thing! The body would be singing

with salt, the sunlight hummed through the skin

and a fierce thirst made iced water

a gasping benediction, and in the plated heat,

stones scorched the soles, and the cored dove hid

in the heat-limp leaves, and we left the sand

to its mutterings, and the long, cool canoes."

If you're a football fan, Sunday is kind of like Christmas.

Two conference championship games will determine the teams that advance to the Super Bowl, and the matchups couldn't be more exciting: Denver vs. New England (Peyton Manning vs. Tom Brady). And some would say the other game, pitting San Francisco against Seattle, might just feature the two best teams in the league.

America shows its love for the sport in many ways beyond breathless anticipation of big games. It also gives back to the National Football League with tax breaks and publicly funded stadiums.

But does the multibillion-dollar business really need the help, or is the NFL getting a free ride?

Not For Profit

If you walk into NFL headquarters on Park Avenue in Manhattan, "you think you're in the headquarters of Goldman Sachs," says Gregg Easterbrook, author of King of Sports: Football's Impact on America.

The NFL is registered as a not-for-profit, tax-exempt organization — even with a commissioner who makes nearly $30 million a year. From the tax code to big stadium deals, critics say the NFL is getting millions of public dollars that would be better spent elsewhere.

The NFL league office is organized as a 501(c)(6), a part of the tax code that exempts thing like business leagues, chambers of commerce and trade associations.

But that's just the league office, not the 32 individual franchises. "There is no tax break at the NFL for revenue earned from things like ticket sales or jersey sales or corporate sponsorships or television money," says Jeremy Spector, outside tax counsel for the NFL and a partner at Covington and Burling LLP.

Spector tells NPR's Arun Rath that the NFL, including its teams, brings in around $10 billion of annual taxable income.

"None of those revenues are escaping tax. It's the league office — that organizational or administrative arm — that's exempt," Spector says.

The administrative arm handles things like writing the rulebook, hiring referees, running the college draft and negotiating stadium deals.

Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma says it's absurd to call the NFL a "trade association." He's proposed changing the tax code to end the exemption and start collecting taxes from pro sports organizations.

"In a time when we have a $640 billion deficit — and that's the best we've had in five years — shouldn't very wealthy ... sports leagues pay their share?" he asks.

Spector, lawyer for the NFL, says sports organizations are being unfairly singled out.

"I think it's very dangerous if Congress starts picking and choosing which industry or which industry trade associations are eligible for the tax exemption," he says.

If You Build It ...

Besides the tax exemption, the NFL can also get a break through big stadium deals. Take, for example, the Dallas Cowboys.

In the late 1990s, the Dallas Cowboys and the team's owner, Jerry Jones, began plans to expand their stadium or build a new one. Jones shopped in and around Dallas for years, asking for public assistance to fund the stadium.

He found an audience in Arlington, a city just outside of Dallas. The price tag for the public was $325 million. (Jones was responsible for the balance of the money for the $1.2 billion stadium. Dallas News says Jones' contribution "was paid with commercial loans, league funding and proceeds from a ticket and parking tax.")

Arlington Mayor Robert Cluck saw an opportunity for the city, and a tough sell to voters.