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A Better Sort of Pig
In May, I went to Iowa, primarily to learn more about so-called conventional agriculture, those thousand-acre farms growing corn and soybeans, planted, tended and harvested largely by machine. (We...
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New Farmers in an Unlikely Place
North Haven, Me. When Brenna Chase was farming in Connecticut a few years back, new farmers weren’t always welcome by oldsters. The pie, she says, just wasn’t big enough. “But now,” she said to me...
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Maine Attraction
Maine, to the outsider’s view, seems as food-conscious right now as California. (The Winter/Spring issue of Maine Policy Review, devoted to food and with a very cool cover, is 250 pages, some of which...
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The Best Little Tortilla Soup in Texas
The chili harvest of West Texas, southern New Mexico and Chihuahua, Mexico, begins in late summer and lasts through the first hard frost. You can encounter the smell of chilies roasting anywhere, with...
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Food Blooms in the Desert
Last month, I stood in the midday sun a few miles north of Anthony, N. M., and Anthony, Tex. — a town divided by the state line created in 1854 — staring out over a 15-acre plot of land that didn’t...
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René Redzepi: Prince of Denmark
Whether Copenhagen’s Noma is the world’s best restaurant doesn’t matter: René Redzepi, its chef, has responded to his well-deserved recognition with the kind of inspiration and energy that guarantee...
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The Puebla International Mole Festival
Last week I was lucky enough to get to speak at the International Mole Festival in Puebla, Mexico. Why Mexico? My interview with Mexico City food writer Lesley Téllez (copied below and originally...
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Everyone Eats There
California’s Central Valley is our greatest food resource. Why are we treating it so badly? I left Los Angeles at 4 in the morning, long before first light, and made it to Bakersfield — the land of...
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Strolling in Paris, With Menus in Mind
Paris is, of course, a walker’s city. But which direction to take? And to what destinations? With previously unknown (to me, at least) restaurants as my end points, I started at Notre Dame (essentially...
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This Armenian Life
Greater Los Angeles is a collection of not just smaller cities but also exotic populations. Among those cities is Glendale (not so small: it would be the second-most-populous city in New England), a...
View ArticleChop Suey’s Next Wave
The history of Chinese immigrants and citizens in California is long, complicated and not entirely pretty. Like every nonwhite immigrant group (and many white ones), the Chinese were treated as...
View ArticleWhat Oysters Reveal About Sea Change
This is kind of the good news/bad news department, as so many things are: The good news is that terrific oysters are being farmed in several locations in California; the bad news is that ocean...
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A Weekend in Des Moines
By Mark Bittman Photos by Mark Bittman I was in Des Moines this past weekend (wasn’t everyone?), in part for the Niman Ranch “farmer appreciation dinner” as, more or less, an observer. The weekend was...
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The Original En Papillote
Text and photos by Mark Bittman When you’re buying fish in a strange place, it helps if both you and the person you’re buying it from know all about marine taxonomy, including the Latin for everything....
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