Somewhere along the line, the knowledge base surrounding food dwindled as more home cooks turned to processed and even pre-prepared food. What influenced this loss of basic understanding? How did we become so estranged from the natural environment and the food web that supports us? Ann Vileisis spent a great deal of time researching those questions, and in “Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get It Back” she offers a complicated weave of historical events that persuaded us to adopt “an unspoken covenant between shoppers and an increasingly powerful food industry.”

A review I wrote of “Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives,” a new UK food-politics book by architecture professor Carolyn Steel, appeared in the Financial Times’ weekend supplement yesterday.
There’s a lot in the last chapter of the book that bears discussing here, including vertical farms and how historically ideas of utopia have always included […]

Should you find yourself in Portland, Maine, on the first Friday of the month, you can participate in the monthly art-walk, a self-guided tour of local galleries, studios, museums, and other venues. There are plenty to choose from —62 venues in June ’08, to be exact. One of those venues might Rabelais. You don’t know […]

I have an embarrassing confession: I am terrified of flying. I’ve tried everything I can think of to get over it (deep breathing, Dramamine, and even, yes, a self-help book called “Fly Without Fear”), yet I still end up locking the armrest in a death grip on every flight. It was after my last trip, […]

Dolcezza takes up a cute little corner spot at the intersection of Q Street and Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, an area perhaps better known for its shopping than for the university just a little father west. The gelato here is made in the Argentine style, meaning it contains no eggs but more cream (more cream!) than Italian gelato. It is, quite simply, some of the finest I’ve ever tasted — among the ranks of Capogiro in Philadelphia or the Bent Spoon in Princeton.

Taras Grescoe says he wrote “Bottomfeeder” (Bloomsbury USA, May 2008) for a somewhat selfish reason: he wanted to taste the world’s great seafood dishes — like bouillabaisse in Marseilles, fish and chips in England, bluefin tuna sashimi in Tokyo — before they disappeared or were dramatically changed by our plundering of the oceans. Whatever his motivation, Grescoe has given us a fascinating book that I hope will inform many about the dire state of the oceans, expose the dreadful environmental consequences of badly managed aquaculture, and prompt us to make better seafood choices.

To find the friendliest face of the Grand Rapids local food scene, you can’t go wrong by making Marie Catrib’s your first stop. The intentional care of customers and community is what has made this comfortable restaurant one of this city’s favorites and a chilly Midwestern foodie’s dream come true.

In-depth, offbeat, or thought-provoking features about aspects of SOLE food, from eating locally to farms marketing to methods of food preservation.

I hadn’t given the global coffee trade a whole lot of thought before a DVD of the Oxfam America documentary “Black Gold” crossed my desk. Coffee is the second most actively traded commodity globally, and though there’s a great deal of money involved in the coffee trade, very little of that money ends up in the farmers’ pockets.

There’s a full crop of reviews of “In Defense of Food,” and an interview with Pollan about it on NPR. Here are the raves and the contrarians, movie-marquee style: “A tough, witty, cogent rebuttal to the proposition that food can be reduced to its nutritional components without the loss of something essential.” — New York Times”Pollan isn’t just asking us to consider changing the way we eat. He’s asking us to join a movement that’s “renovating our food system in the name of health’” — L.A. Times”If you read one book about food this year,” this should be it —The Portland Mercury”Pollan lays bare with impassioned but clear-eyed intelligence the sinister machinations of the contemporary American food industry” — New York Post”[The food movement] couldn’t pray for a better mouthpiece” — Plenty”Page for page, it contains more intellectual and moral nutrition than practically any other book I’m aware of.”

“In Defense of Food” does more than merely stick up for the produce section: it mounts a damning attack on this diet, which in Pollan’s assessment is “a radical and at least in evolutionary terms, abrupt set of changes over the course of the last 150 years, not just to our foodstuffs but also to our food relationships, all the way from the soil to the meal.”… This is huge, evolutionarily speaking, writes Pollan: Of all the changes to our food system that go under the heading “the Western Diet,” the shift from a food chain with green plants at its base to one based on seeds may be the most far reaching of all…. “The food industry needs theories so it can better redesign specific processed foods; a new theory means a new line of products, allowing the industry to go on tweaking the Western diet instead of making any more radical change to its business model,” Pollan writes…. And while he for the most part acknowledges when he resorts to the familiar “good nutrient, bad nutrient” jargon, he could have emphasized more in the section on omega-3 fatty acids that, while the food industry is jumping on the bandwagon for this current It nutrient, whole foods like salmon that naturally contain it have far lower levels when fed unnatural diets from, you guessed it, grains…. He doesn’t mention that not only does Ames believe that deficiencies in micronutrient may be behind obesity — positing the very interesting hypothesis that “a body starved of critical nutrients will keep eating in the hope of obtaining them” — but like all good nutritionists, he is hard at work on identifying and developing artificial versions of those missing micronutrients.

The mass media’s coverage of food is a cacophony of quick fixes ("Eat a handful of goji berries and wipe out the effects of those two fast-food burgers you ate for lunch!") and hype ("Do cranberries cure cancer? Stay tuned for a shocking new report").
Heidi Swanson — creator of the 101 Cookbooks website — […]

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When you come from a smaller city in a rural area and your main local-foods choices consist of a couple of upscale restaurants or your own home cooking (with produce from the farmers market, of course), sometimes you want to know what it’s like to have […]

Never fear, I have plenty of corn puns left.

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