On the Table

Last year, as part of my first attempt at vegetable gardening at home, I planted a couple of seedlings of zucchini, hoping for a bountiful reward. To my dismay, the flood of zucchini that I was expecting never materialized. I know that such flooding happens — to other people:   I was still cheerful two […]

“We’ve never had such a breakfast: heaping cuts of wild pig, some with skin, some with crust-crunchy bones, and a smoky tenderloin chop….” Photo courtesy of flickr.com user drazz. This is a memoir of a Humboldt County legend, a restaurant that broke all the rules, sold incredible food cheap and, like a meteor, came and […]

This week’s Table Talk is not about what’s on the table, it’s about what’s not on the table. There are no elegant grilled oysters on the table. There’s no gourmet Japanese sushi topped with simply delightful Unagi sauce. There are no chocolate bon-bons. There’s a can of string beans and a can of refried beans. […]

People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way the others do? … The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems […]

So what I want to know is, in terms of food writing at large, what’s this burning obsession with restaurants? I mean, obviously we all like food — have you been to Florida? Those people are huge! My problem with most food writing I’m finding online is it seems so heavily weighted on the side […]

In the days when we thought we had money, we used to go for breakfast to The Crest House in Culver City, a big "family restaurant" with a dark, dingy bar attached. We’d play racquetball for an hour, shower, then sit in the bar (away from the "family" section) and have Bloody Marys and a […]

Food and agriculture issues might not make the headlines very often in a presidential race, but they affect everything from health to energy policy, and touch on a lot of ethical, economic and environmental issues along the way. Thus, I’ve been trying for weeks to reach Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton […]

Are we obsessive about food? The popularity of Michael Pollan’s recent books (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, preceded by The Botany of Desire, and followed by In Defense of Food) suggests that we are. Pollan is a serious science writer and director of UC Berkeley’s program in Science and Environmental Journalism. But science battles pseudo-science in the […]

I am glad the Arcata Farmers’ Market has started its 2008 season. My Saturday mornings are once again convivial and exciting. I have already tried two kinds of previously untasted greens (purslane and amaranth greens) as well as the hulled barley I mentioned in a previous “Table Talk” article. A round of culinary explorations is […]

The Kentucky Derby is a hard luck race in a hard luck town. It was settled by people who tried to beat life with a pair of treys. The pickpockets are the only ones who go home winners on Derby Day. Unless you count the concessionaires, who put a nickel’s worth of bourbon in a […]