Tag: Joan Gussow

What Are the World’s Greatest Chefs Talking About? Seeds.

For more than a decade Dan Barber has been among the most influential chefs working at the intersection of ecology and gastronomy. Last Monday, with a veritable United Nations Security Council of the world’s top chefs as his allies, he exhorted cooks to think not just about how and where their food is grown, but about what forces are influencing the very DNA of our ingredients.

Happy Ducks, Obsolete Root Cellars, and Other Signs of the Warmest January on Record

I’ve been thumbing through the short, final chapters of Joan Gussow’s most recent book, Growing, Older. They’re humorous even if the themes include dying, lifelong regrets, sea level rise and climate change. The later geological preoccupations are shared by both of us—we both garden in floodprone areas—and the balmy, 60-degree afternoons this past weekend reminded me that the future-oriented predictions of climate scientists seem more and more to have arrived in the here and now. (And, my colleagues at Edible Brooklyn tell me, the annual winter festival at Prospect Park was just cancelled, due to weather too warm to make snow.)

July-August 2011

In May, my colleagues and I attended the James Beard Foundation’s journalism awards banquet, and…