This week The Daily Meal put out a list of America's 50 Most Powerful People in Food and the jumble of powerful people was by the site's own admission very subjective and a bit random but also a) a great indication of the schizophrenia at work in our...

Earlier this summer, as I was hauling a bag of farmers' market produce home 15 blocks and up four flights of stairs, sweating bullets, cursing my choice to buy a melon (they're heavy!), I stopped mid-step.

"Does it really have to be this hard?" I asked myself.

My story is...

Dear McDonald's,

Happy Birthday! Don't be mad, but I didn't get you anything. It's not that 56 isn't a big important milestone. It means you're old enough to retire! (Something to consider?)

One of the first birthday parties I ever went to was at a McDonald's. It was Tiffany's...

1. The intersection of food, culture and class is a conversation we might finally be ready to have. In the course of 2 short weeks The Washington Post, Newsweek and The New York Times all ran articles about how class and food divide us, or don't. At...

A nice piece of grilled fish is supposed to be the healthy menu option. A few pieces of tuna sushi were just what the doctor ordered right? With fears about mercury levels in fish, concern about seafood from China, and news of the impending extinction of the Bluefin...

What do most of us know about Moby (not the whale, but the music artist)? I, for one, know that he makes good dance music, he likes tea, and he's an outspoken vegan. So how did he end up editing a book with a contribution by

Thanks to Cathy Erway I right now have bread dough rising on my kitchen counter. 3 years ago I read Mark Bittman's NY Times article with Jim Lahey's phenomenally easy bread recipe, but it took sitting down with Erway's new book, The Art of Eating In, for me...

Some people want to be told what to eat. Ever get asked about "the Slow Food diet?" I do. Countless times I've explained that there is no slow food diet, that it's not meant to be a dogmatic philosophy. But this doesn't stop well-intentioned people from wanting someone to spoon...

This week I did a guest post for the blog of an amazing 12-year-old named Orren Fox. He asked me to explain why I care about food/why kids should care about food.

I think it's hard to tell someone why they should care about something. When I meet...

In dieting, I learned early on, exercises in extremes do not yield good results. Starve yourself of chocolate, and you can be sure the first thing you'll do when no one is looking is dive into a kiddie pool of chocolate, roll around in it and then lick your own...

Sunday night, using leftover bread from Friday night's dinner, some Hudson Valley milk and cream, and two big Jersey zucchini, I baked up a savory zucchini bread pudding. It was cheap to make, and super tasty. I carried it with me over to a community garden in the East Village...

Just because something is dying, does that mean it's worth saving? I was raised by antique book dealers, chronic flea marketers. It's in my bones to hold onto the past. In this way I was an old woman before I turned 20, mourning the loss of old traditions and razed...

This past week was nuts--a sustainable food activist's dream come true.

Tuesday, a few hours after I put up my grumpy post about Obama not mentioning food in his health care talks, he proved me wrong by getting up in front of the AMA and saying that junk...

Back in October, Obama read The Omnivore's Dilemma, and he was feeling the Michael Pollan rapture. He even talked about it in an interview with Joe Klein, saying "our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating...

This is my coming out party. To my close friends, family, and colleagues, this will come as no surprise, but, um, I drink soda. Specifically, Diet Coke. Sometimes I manage to quit, but then I always come a'crawlin' back.

In Mexico, regular Coke is made with cane sugar and it...

Without getting into the gory details, industrially produced chickens lead a (how do I say this nicely?) less than charmed life. This point was driven home for me reading Nicolette Hahn Niman's new book Righteous Porkchop, which spends a good chunk of the book discussing the roots of all...

I grew up in the golden era of the microwave (an era you might call the '80s but which I myself call "middle school'). People were momentarily so excited about ye olde heating box, they were buying cookbooks about how you could cook everything in the microwave--before they discovered...

It is my pleasure to come to you today with some foundational advice on how to go slow in your kitchen. We can get into the nitty gritty in posts to come, but these here are my four basics for getting started.

1. Stop buying random kitchen...