More on urban farming

My new Bookforum column is live today, and featured on the Bookforum home page as the Daily Review, so you can access it here or here. Whee! It’s about three urban farming memoirs–one by a former drag queen, one by a Brooklyn journalist, and one set in inner-city Oakland, CA. If that combination (or at least some part thereof) doesn’t whet your appetite, I don’t know what will….

Friday Food Writers: Farm Writer Edition, Novella Carpenter

I’m working on my next column for Bookforum, which is about urban farmers (including one former drag queen named Aqua….stay tuned!). One of the books I’m reading is about a year old but it’s so good and interesting I’m including it anyway (plus it’s just out in paperback). Novella Carpenter’s Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer is about how she transformed a weedy, garbage-strewn abandoned lot behind her house in Oakland, CA, into an amazing farm complete with pigs, ducks, fruit trees, vegetables and a bee hive. You can learn more about Ghost Town Farm here, but meanwhile, on this glorious spring day, I want to share with you this awe-inspiring description of what she made from nothing. Oh, to live in California where the weather alone makes growing a Garden of Eden in your yard possible….

In our neighborhood, there was some greenery, mostly in the form of weeds. But when you walked through the gates into what I had started calling GhostTown Garden, it was like walking into a different world. There was a lime tree near the fence, sending out a perfume of citrus blossoms from its dark green leaves. Stalks of salvia and mint, artemesia and penstemon. The thistlelike leaves of artichokes glowed silver. Strawberry runners snaked underneath raspberry canes. Beds bristled with rows of fava beans, whose pea-like blossoms attracted chubby black bumblebees to their plunder. An apple tree sent out girlish pink blossoms. A passionfruit vine curled and weaved through the chain-link fence that surrounded the garden.

Happy Friday!

Food Issues (on the Gastronomica Reader)

Greetings. It’s been a while…But quick! Before you focus on that, let me distract you with my latest Paper Palate column in Bookforum! It’s about The Gastronomica Reader and  food magazines both before and after the demise of Gourmet.

Click! Read! Savor the fabulous photo of a fried egg! There is more to come soon, I promise…

Brillat-Savarin, Guiltless Gourmet

My latest Paper Palate column is out, in print and online, in Bookforum. It’s about Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (okay, I confess: when I used him for a Friday Food writers a while back it was kind of cheating since I was actually dipping into The Physiology of Taste for the column. But it’s so good!).

As it happens, there’s a great piece about school lunches, one of my favorite topics, in the same issue. It’s by Kate Christensen and reviews Free For All: Fixing School Food in America, which sounds like a really interesting read.

Red, Wine and Blue

On this cool, gray post-Labor Day return to real life, I offer you the link to my latest Paper Palate column in Bookforum. It’s about drinking in America (mine and other people’s), which is what I’m sure we’ll all feel like doing by the time this manic first week of autumn is over.

Cheers!

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Summer sweets

For those of you who love cake and ice cream, click here to check out my new Bookforum column (now called Paper Palate) covering books on these esteemed topics.

All seems right with the world when your job involves a thorough investigation of the history of dessert.

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