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Writing yesterday about Michael Pollan’s Cooked got me thinking about other great books about food and its preparation. In my mind, Harold McGee’s masterful On Food and Cooking is the best writing I have found on food, covering chemistry, preparation, taste, individual fruits, vegetables, fish, cheese, meats, and pretty much anything else you might eat—algae anyone?

Whether you want to know about sugar substitutes and their qualities (p. 660-661), how baking pans affect the qualities of the item being baked (p. 563), what drinkers mean when they talk about the “tears” in strong wines or spirits (p. 717), or how you get from tea leaves to black, Oolong, or green tea (both Chinese and Japanese) (p. 438) there is something here for you.

Along the way, McGee includes recipes, food lore, quotations, and more, but the heart of the book is the comprehensive exploration of how cooking, fermenting, and other…

The advent of the Nutrition and Health Claims regulations came about because there was concern amongst regulators and politicians that products were being sold in the European market with health claims that were false or unable to be substantiated by science. From that moment on regulators made it clear that in their view food is not a medicine.

A medicine is defined as a drug or other preparation for the treatment or prevention of disease. Over the past fifty years the pharmaceutical and retail industries have developed a readily available selection of drugs for minor ailments that keep us away from doctors. Pills or a course of anti-biotics have become part of life as the means to allow us to carry on with our lives without being troubled by minor illnesses.

Food therefore has become a means of providing the fuel to keep us going. Product nutritional detail is angled…

Dear Slow Food friends, 

One of us has been killed in Gaza.

His name, Emad Asfour.

Here’s what Slow Food founder, Carlo Petrini wrote.

As for me:

One power it would seem is to use my social media and blogging to express a strong conviction that the methods and outcome of Israeli military might in Gaza, and Palestine, is definitively wrong.  And encourage others to do the same.

I didn’t know Emad Asfour, but when someone dies– killed by a bomb– and that someone shares things with you, you grieve.

I have tried to think through what’s happening in Gaza this past month through the lens of a cookbook called The Gaza Kitchen, and the work of Zaytoun, a Fair-Trade local-produce company working to ensure UK markets for Palestinian produce.

Through all the death, destruction, carnage, uprooting– I’m also thinking a little about the small gardens people plant, the rabbits, the bakeries…

From author Michelle Houts new book The Practical County Drama Queen:

“What Sarah Cuthbert and other town kids just don’t get is that farm kids have a life beyond the swimming pool. But, that’s okay. I’ll try to make it there once or twice, just to see people and show that I’m not a complete and total farm nerd.”

How true. How true. During my childhood, I spent more time with my cows or in the garden or in the fields than at any typical kid-friendly summer activity.  And this summer, in particular, my farm boy is doing the same.  Farm kid summers are different and that’s okay.