Food-Focussed Fridays

I’m in dire need of some blogging discipline and to that end I’m experimenting with a weekly feature. I’ve been doing a lot of reading about food lately so I’ll make that my focus. Welcome, then, to Food-Focussed Fridays. Every Friday, I’ll report in on or offer up a quotation from whatever I’m reading on the topic of food be it a memoir, a cookbook, a social history, a food industry exposé, a treatise on nutrition, a manifesto on eating locally, or just a particularly toothsome passage of fiction.

Fridays are also the days that I expect to have a bit of time for cooking this term, so I may double up and report on my culinary adventures here too. Mind you I’m not very domestic, and just turning on the stove is a culinary adventure for me. Nevertheless, in a quest to up my vegetable intake, I’ve resolved to attempt a new soup recipe every week for the remainder of the winter. If I make good on that, I can offer up soup reviews alongside book reviews.

Here are some of the recent acquisitions that I expect to be writing about in the coming weeks:

Andrew Carmellini & Gwen Hyman: Urban Italian: Simple Recipes and True Stories from a Life in Food;

Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life;

Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: the Transformation of the American Diet;

Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America;

Marion Nestle, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health;

Michael Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals;

Paul Roberts, The End of Food; and,

Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon, The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating.


And two new releases that I haven’t got my hands on yet but that I’m keen to acquire:

Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating; and,

Hank Cardello & Doug Garr, Stuffed: An Insider's Look at Who's (Really) Making America Fat.

On the menu for next week then, a post on Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle accompanied by a report on the soup of the day. Right now it’s a toss up between Warm Pea Soup (surely the “Warm” in the title is redundant? would anyone serve cold pea soup?) and Carrot with Red Lentils…