Celebrity foodies Joanne Chang and Corby Kummer, along with national food-sustainability expert Helene York, explore the relationship between our love affair with food and our desire to protect the planet.
A Cambridge, MA cheese expert explores what is going on in our brains and palates as we decide to interpret cheese as delicious. Considered one of the most subtle and flavorful of all foods, cheese has elements that we would normally avoid eating. Why is it that we are drawn to savor carefully rotted milk?
Jody Adams, award-winning chef/owner of Rialto restaurant, and Donald Wiest, President of Boston Public Market, join moderator Annie B. Copps, senior food editor for Yankee Magazine, to screen the documentary film "Food, Inc." and explore how the food industry shapes our economy, our health, and our lives.
Lidia Bastianich, host of the *Lidia's Italy* television series and best-selling author discusses her latest cookbook, *Lidia Cooks from the Heart of Italy*.
Journalist Paula Butturini talks about her new memoir *Keeping the Feast: One Couple's Story of Love, Food, and Healing in Italy*. Paula and John met in Italy, fell in love, and four years later, married in Rome. But less than a month after the wedding, tragedy struck. They had transferred from their Italian paradise to Warsaw and while reporting on an uprising in Romania, John was shot and nearly killed by sniper fire. Although he recovered from his physical wounds in less than a year, the process of healing had just begun. Unable to regain his equilibrium, he sank into a deep sadness that reverberated throughout their relationship. It was the abrupt end of what they'd known together, and the beginning of a new phase of life neither had planned for. All of a sudden, Paula was forced to reexamine her marriage, her husband, and herself. Paula began to reconsider all of her previous assumptions about healing. She discovered that sometimes patience can be a vice, anger a virtue. That sometimes it is vital to make demands of the sick, that they show signs of getting better. And she rediscovered the importance of the most fundamental of human rituals: the daily sharing of food around the family table.
Chef-extraordinaire Chris Kimball and the cast of America's Test Kitchen discuss the new *The Complete America's Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook*. With the 2010 season, *America's Test Kitchen*, the beloved public television show, will have been on the air for 10 years, offering up fool-proof recipes, tips on what equipment and ingredients to buy, and solutions to the most vexing of kitchen-related mishaps. The cast looks back on the years so far with the entire cast, mentions a little about the upcoming season, and talks about the new definitive cookbook, featuring every recipe to have appeared on the show. *The Complete America's Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook* brings back all the great recipes from previous seasons, and gives an inside look at what we can look forward to in 2010. Recipes include Blueberry Muffins, Crisp Skinned Roast Chicken, Baked Ziti, Ciabatta, Roast Beef Tenderloin, Old-Fashioned Burgers, Grill Roasted Turkey Breast, Hearty Italian Meat Sauce, Mexican Pulled Pork, Fresh Berry Gratin, Super Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies, and many more.
AUDIO ONLY: Michael Pollan talks with Bethanne Patrick about his book, *In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto*.
Image: [Mercedes/Flickr](https://www.flickr.com/photos/lawrencefarmersmarket/2529145266)
Fellow Les Dames D'Escoffier members Gena Berry and Virginia Willis talk about Willis' book, *Bon Appétit, Y’all! Three Generations of Southern Cooking*. French-trained chef Willis shares her recipes and culinary tricks.
From the Upper East Side to the East Village, Manhattan seems to have infinite choices of where to eat. Edible Manhattan is a new quarterly magazine that investigates this diverse food culture--more investigative journalism than food porn, more historical profile than restaurant gossip. Luis Jaramillo, associate chair of The New School Writing Program, moderates a reading from the inaugural issue of the magazine. Participants include Brian Halweil, executive editor of Edible Manhattan and senior researcher and John Gardner Public Service Fellow at Worldwatch Institute; Gabrielle Langholtz, editor of Edible Brooklyn and Edible Manhattan, faculty in NYU's Food Studies program, and publicity manager for Greenmarket; and Michael Harlan Turkell, photo editor for Edible Manhattan. This event was held by The New School.
Fredrick Douglas Opie, associate professor of history and director of the African Diaspora Studies Program at Marist College, discusses his book, *Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America*. Opie’s culinary history is a portrait of the social and religious relationship between African Americans and their cuisine. It begins with the Atlantic slave trade and concludes with the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
