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.

Bostonist: get on the Slow Food ARK of Taste

I plugged this event last week, then I attended it last night. Considering I'm missing the Slow Food Nation fest in SF this weekend (by choice, sort of, since I had an invitation to stay in SF with the bff, but decided an NYC getaway would be cheaper and easier), this Slow Food event came as sort of a consolation prize. The premise was to try some foods on the SF "ARK of Taste", a seed preservation project, and to learn more about why it's important to preserve these items and America's biodiversity overall. The result: I learned that I have been miserably deprived in the produce department, and that now that I'm hooked on some of the fruits and cheeses I tried, I've found that they are hard to find or prohibitive in cost. But hopefully, it won't always be this way, and hopefully, some foodies who happen upon my post will be willing to seek them out and support their growth in Mass. (And I just finished watching Obama's speech at the DNC, so I am full of hope-iness.)

Bostonist: Veggie-gasms and other events

"Veggie-gasm" is really the only way I can describe the upcoming meals at Upstairs on the Square. Luckily, I came up with some other serviceable words for the rest of these rad events.