Weekly Dig: eat gooder

I forgot to post this quick writeup I did for the Weekly Dig's Greenland column, which is out this week. I interviewed Kenji Alt, the co-founder of GoodEater.org, a new Boston and New York-based blog that features interesting stories about the intersection of food, politics and the environment. (Coincidentally, I'm thinking about buying a house at that intersection, cause I spend so much time there.)

My meetup with Kenji had to be quick -- he was racing from his job at Cook's Illustrated to the kitchen of Rialto, where Jody Adams was going to be demonstrating a recipe for his upcoming blog feature, Great Chefs @ Good Eater (which I mentioned in my writeup, but that bit was unfortunately cut from the Dig piece). While we sat down to chat and split a plate of sweet potato cod fritters at Green Street, the manager stopped by to talk about a seasonal cocktail recipe for the feature. Before his stint as a food writer, Kenji spent a while cooking in the Boston restaurant scene (at No. 9 Park, Clio and Uni), so he Knows People. I think his blog will be very successful, and I hope to see it rolled out in several cities beyond Boston and NYC in the coming years.

I'm propping Kenji's blog now not because I think it'll be novel to the best and brightest among Boston's food-conscious readers -- it won't be. But I know there are still people out there who have yet to get the memo. Sometimes it seems to me like everyone and their mother is caught up inside this local-seasonal-organic triangulation, but then I'll visit a restaurant in the North End, where veal is in every other dish and they're serving caprese salads with tasteless tomatoes and imported asparagus in effing November, and realize that this food revolution still has a ways to go. And I'm hoping that Kenji's methods (did I mention he killed a duck and posted the photos on his blog? Or that he advocates patronizing a startup mobile chicken slaughterhouse? Or that his co-founder, Josh, has suggested that, in the event of a major doomsday scenario in which our traditional communications and food systems break down, we all emulate the bartering methods of a little African country called Lesotho, where they communicate by colored flags?) might just get the message across.