Cookbooks often read better as literature than as technical lab manuals. That shouldn’t stop us from reading them, or from improvising our recipes.

We no longer learn to cook solely from generations-old oral traditions. Our recipes don’t tend to get handed down from village bakers, local brewers, or blood relatives. So, when the holidays hit, chances are we’ll head to the bookshelves for ways to make stuffing or cranberry sauce. This approach is not without its pitfalls. As John Thorne—the “outlaw cook” known for his renegade newsletter, Simple Cooking, which has developed a devoted cult following—wrote, “Cookbooks can be wonderfully entertaining and informative, but I don’t like bringing them to the stove with me.” The same could be said for laptops or iPhones.

Cookbooks, it seems, sometimes serve better as bedtime reading than they do as lab manuals for cookery. Adam Gopnik writes in this week’s New Yorker: “Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved.” After all, cooking well involves a knack that you can’t pick straight off the page.

So why not forget about following recipes altogether and watch the the Food Channel’s girl next door whipping up a luscious tomato salad. And then order take out? When blogger Jason Kottke discovered that the mouthwatering recipe for ramen in David Chang’s new cookbook required kombu and five pounds of pork bones, he said the book acted less like a cookbook and more like a Trojan horse for luring new customers into Chang’s restaurants.

Another problem with cookbooks is that following recipes to the letter inhibits the impromptu adaptive stuff that happens when you have to substitute, improvise, or fix your mistakes. The British food writer Nigel Slater compared recipes to wearing a straight jacket or compromisingly tight Spandex. Exacting recipes transform the engaging, romantic alchemy of cooking back into a laborious, anxiety-ridden chore.

There’s little doubt that certain recent cooking tomes of biblical proportion (some weighing in at up to 12 pounds) don’t really seem designed for kitchen instruction. They’re meant to tell stories, whether those stories are about perfecting techniques or about creating unreproducible seared duck breasts. Except for the exacting science of molecular gastronomy, which takes persnickety-ness to its furthest extreme with spheroid balls of solidified tea and freeze dried lobster tails, more cookbooks are shedding absolute, codified recipes in favor of instructions designed to inspire culinary improvisation.

Which brings us to one of the biggest recipe food fights in recent memory: The battle between Chris Kimball of Cook’s Illustrated, on one side—representing the professional tried-and-true, thoroughly tested recipe measured down to the last ounce, in one corner—and the online food wiki, Food52, on the other—representing the open-source, evolving, experimental recipes from any home tinkerer’s kitchen. Kimball has been criticized for dry, bloodless writing, whereas Food52 can come across as just another collection of half-baked recipes—a modern form of the community cookbooks put out by the Ladies Auxiliary. Next month, the two are hoping to stage a showdown that will settle which method makes the best recipes.

The primary point of their standoff may—like cookbooks themselves—be entertaining storytelling. Cooking ultimately comes down to the cook—not a recipe. Home cooks who can’t derive a good meal from a cooking magazine won’t do better using intuition alone—or a wiki model. But, hey, if there’s conflict and resolution, it’s a good recipe for a book, a home-for-the-holidays meal, or a protracted online food fight. I know I’ll be watching.

Can your food choices help make you more healthy?

Vietnamese pho is next to godliness. Fresh noodles, steaming amber beef broth, and herbs. The soup’s spices enhance and concentrate the flavor of beef. There’s magic in pho. But is there medicine in it, too?

Pho contains star anise. Star anise contains shikimic acid, the active ingredient in Tamiflu, one of only two antiviral drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating swine flu (H1N1) and avian flu (H5N1). During the 2005 avian flu scare, star anise supplies were nearly depleted and wholesale prices of the spice jumped a reported 40 percent. Earlier this year, China Daily reported that prices for star anise were on the rise again because of fears about swine flu.

A shortage of flu vaccines and Tamiflu this year has also led to a variety of health claims for products, which may or may not help, like swine-flu-fighting shampoo. The FDA recently released a long list of products with fraudulent flu-fighting claims, which included vitamins, enzymes, and herbal remedies.

Considering Tamiflu’s origins, it’s surprising that there haven’t been more claims of medicinal properties for foods, and that there’s no food on the FDA’s list. So far, the only statement about star anise’s purported benefits in warding off swine flu came from one Chinese health official, who said that Chinese Five Spice, which includes star anise, would “certainly be a good treatment for the flu,” and suggested people use it with pork dishes.

It’s amazing that the world relies on an eight-pointed fruit, grown on evergreen shrubs chiefly in southern China, for fighting the flu. The tree is difficult to grow and fruits only after about six years. While the 2005 avian flu scare spurred research into alternative ways of producing shikimic acid (Tamiflu’s manufacturer, Roche, obtains some of the drug from a fermentation and extraction process using a genetically engineered E. coli bacteria), the cheapest method of production is still from star anise.

But before you run out to the Asian grocery for a bag of star anise or start slurping buckets of pho, remember: Creating lab-quality Tamiflu involves a number of unstable, potentially explosive chemicals. And a spokesperson for Roche told The New York Times that it takes 13 grams of star anise to produce 1.3 grams of shikimic acid, the amount required to treat one person. If you ate enough pho to get that much star anise at lunch, you would run the risk of water intoxication.

We’ve come to think of food and medicine as two separate categories. And sure, medicines are refined—and sometimes created from scratch—in the lab. But, while a bowl of pho might not inoculate you against swine flu, it can only help. Absinthe has been known to contain the star anise. Italian sambuca was originally an extract of the medicinal elderberry (the shrub’s Latin name is Sambucus). During the last scare, Korean scientists claimed that kim chi might ward off bird flu. Sure, there’s always snake oil on the market, but food and medicine are often made from the same stuff. And moreover, it’s always worth considering the placebo effect—believing in food, like pho, might help cure your ills.

If we don’t eat dogs, should we eat any meat? Should you care about the vegetarian author’s latest provocation? I do.

Almost everything intersects with animal agriculture. Almost everything we talk about and care about: whether it’s the environment; whether it’s what it means to be human; whether it’s how we treat people; how we treat animals; consumption; America’s place in the world.  Basically, animal agriculture is the most important example of each of these things and it’s not a part of any of these conversations. – Jonathan Safran Foer

Early in his new book, Eating Animals, Foer makes the case for eating dogs. While sleeping with your sister might be a taboo for good reason, man does not universally avoid platefuls of dog—although it’s clearly taboo in the United States. (Dog is one of the only animals Anthony Bourdain wouldn’t eat on his 2001 world television tour.) With 3 to 4 million dogs euthanized annually, why waste all that good dog meat? Foer has a suggestion, a sure-fire recipe from the Philippines: Kill the dog, marinate it, and fry the meat with onions and pineapple.

Foer knows how to create compelling stories. Like his two previous novels, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, he deploys humor—a smart, ironic shtick—to approach difficult subjects. A dead dog is no laughing matter, but his recipe makes us question a more generalized hunger for meat. His case for eating a dog simply raises the much larger questions he’s getting at. Just because we can eat meat, should we? And should we be eating animals if they’re capable of suffering and, despite this, we force them to live in nauseating, nightmarish factories?

Foer spent a year and a half earnestly traveling to many places that will sound familiar to readers of Michael Pollan or Saveur. He visits heritage chicken farmer Frank Resse, Niman Ranch founders Bill and Nicolette Niman, and free-range pig farmer Paul Willis. He sneaks on to a factory farm. He uses worker testimonies to recreate the macabre drama of the kill room floor and describes how pig runts are “thumped” to death. He writes that longline fishing kills millions of sea animals that are dumped into the ocean dead as bycatch. He finds that animals produce more waste than cities.

The book does not conclude with a simple seven-word diet mantra (a la Pollan’s eat food, mostly plants, not too much) that will echo around the blogosphere. It’s not that simple an argument. But let’s be clear, Eating Animals is not ambivalent, either. Foer knows that food and the meanings we give to food are messy and complicated. On page 13, he writes, “A straightforward case for vegetarianism is worth writing, but it’s not what I’ve written here.” The book is rather a perplexing, complicated set of provocations disguised as stories intended to raise more questions than answers.

Foer’s doubts about staunch vegetarianism arise from the richness of eating like an omnivore—eating sushi, steak, and fried chicken. While Foer can see the appeal of free-range and humanely slaughtered beef, ethical meat only reaches a narrow demographic (a population about the size of New York City). And ultimately, he finds that eating any meat requires a kind of forgetting about animal suffering that he can’t seem to shake. Foer also recognizes the powerful significance of food fellowship, sharing memories of his grandmother’s chicken or his family’s gefilte fish. When he refuses to eat even a thin slice of humane ham, he’s aware that his gesture implies a larger refusal—as if he’s rejecting friendship and everything he’s just heard about ethical pork.

But Foer does not want to close himself off to anyone. Listening to others is what makes his writing exceptional. He’s a vegetarian who can listen to and understand the arguments made by selective omnivores. He listens to a factory farmer. He listens to PETA activists, a vegetarian who works on a beef cattle ranch, and a vegan who builds slaughterhouses.

In the last 20 years, there have been dozens of books exposing the dark side of meat—Eric Schossler’s Fast Food Nation, Jeremy Rifkin’s Beyond Beef, Gail Eisnitz’s Slaughterhouse, or Betty Fussell’s Raising Steaks. Eating Animals follows suit. It shows what is so disgusting about meat and doesn’t really serve up much in the way of alluring alternatives. (The book’s only recipe is the one above, dog.) But, in the end, that’s not why we’re at Foer’s dinner party. You should read it for his acute ability to simultaneously entertain and provoke. And unlike its more polemical forebears, the stories will should reach farther into our minds and stomachs. Be prepared to upset both.

“I DO” illustration from the book, by Tom Manning.

We throw away enough food to feed the entire world. A new book tries to find a solution.

When it comes to food, Americans are the undisputed champions of one thing: trash. We waste food in volumes that it defies the imagination. New York City alone has an annual surplus of about 50 million pounds of food. Ten years ago, the United States Department of Agriculture estimated that more than 96 billion pounds of edible food went to waste. And, according to anthropologist Tim Jones, the United States throws away just about half of the food it produces.

There’s probably enough wasted food in the United States and Europe to feed the world’s hungry three times over. And in just one year the United States may even produce enough food waste to feed all of Europe. While food recovery programs, gleaners, and freegans may be reducing the food waste stream, vegan Dumpster-divers are not exactly feeding the world’s hungry.

Ultimately, we need a systemic fix, which is why you should read British activist Tristram Stuart’s new book, Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal. Waste issues a call to stop the wanton waste of food—not just at supermarkets, but also at homes and farms. Stuart argues that food waste contributes to environmental degradation, global warming, soil erosion, habitat destruction, and starvation.

In Waste, we hear of carrots thrown out for being slightly crooked; edible fish dumped, dead, back into the ocean; and farmers, who must, by contractual obligation, eradicate healthy crops. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported this year, a heightened awareness about E. coli has led to crop destruction in the name of increased food safety.

Although Stuart, who has also written a history of vegetarianism, does not advocate for an outright moratorium on eating meat, he argues that only 13 percent of the calories fed to meat cattle are actually consumed by beef eaters, especially when offal and other scraps are discarded.

Waste is not exactly The Jungle of modern food trash. Upton Sinclair had intended to use the meatpacking industry as a backdrop for his fictitious narrative of wage-laboring immigrants; Stuart aims his extensively-researched book squarely at the guts. Like Elizabeth Royte’s entertaining Garbage Land, Stuart’s book serves as another stinging indictment of consumer culture. The scale of our trash problem demands change. And simply growing more food is not the answer. What’s lacking is a clear, viable solution for equitable food distribution.

Stuart also suggests that consumers can learn to love leftovers a little more, start composting, and begin cooking with offal. Additional food pantries should be built, municipal anaerobic digesters could break down more waste, and hefty tax should be levied on trash collection, he says.

Waste remains a compelling moral crisis. With the right tools, Stuart says that we can create opportunities to feed the hungry and to generate methane for fuel. And, as much as I enjoy finding something for nothing—some recent finds included dumpstered chocolate, baguettes, or lemon juice—these are mere drops in the bucket compared to the world’s vast sea of edible detritus. Let’s hope Stuart’s message doesn’t get lost in the trash heap. It’s something we need to hear.

Are probiotics a prescription for glorious guts or just a gimmick?

Until his death in 1916 at the unremarkable age of 71, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian scientist Ilya Metchnikoff promoted a theory for prolonging human life. His recipe for longevity was simple: yogurt. Metchnikoff thought that the consumption of the bacterial cultures enabled Bulgarian peasants to live for an average of 87 years and he sought to bring its transformative qualities to the West.

A half decade later, in 1977, Dannon made a TV commercial for its yogurt repeating a similar claims, only this time it was Soviet Georgians who prolonged their lives by eating spoonfuls of creamy, fermented milk. Many of these longevity claims have been refuted, but yogurt companies continue to market the bacteria that break down lactose and turn liquid milk into lumpy yogurt—like Streptococcus and Lactobaccilus—as beneficial.

These probiotics, they say, can regulate digestive health, lower cholesterol, strengthen bones, and make you and your stomach happier. Consumers are encouraged to imagine good, little critters colonizing their stomachs. The stuff is allegedly so good, in fact, that yogurt containers seem like a better fit in the medicine closet—alongside Nexium, Prilosec, and Protonix—because of their medical-sounding prospects of transforming your digestive tract.

We’ve been introducing bacteria into our stomachs for millennia—not to mention the some 50 trillion microbial cells and thousands of species of microflora in the gut already—but many of the scientific-sounding claims surrounding probiotic bacteria have nothing to do with the actual science itself. While some recent studies have suggested that Lactobacillus bacteria aid in digestion and play a role in our body’s immune defenses, many of the contemporary claims seem almost as exaggerated as Metchnikoff’s longevity theory.

As the list of digestive ills that probitoics can allegedly cure expands, so do the number of probiotic drinks, cereals, and shakes. Now, there’s probiotic dog food, probiotic ice cream, and probiotic treatments for farm-raised salmon. The only problem: Some so-called probiotic bacteria don’t contain strains medically recognized as beneficial. As one expert told Tara Pope Parker, “To say a product contains Lactobacillus is like saying you’re bringing George Clooney to a party. It may be the actor, or it may be an 85-year-old guy from Atlanta who just happens to be named George Clooney.”

And even when products do contain beneficial bacteria, the bacteria are sometimes dead. This is especially true when they’re frozen in “probiotic” ice cream.

The lack of regulatory oversight about these kinds of nutritionistic health claims in the United States has led to litigation. As Marion Nestle pointed out on The Atlantic Online, lawyers won a large class-action settlement against Dannon in September for claims that Activia regulated digestion and stimulated the immune system. While food companies worked to get an approval from the European Standards Agency, the agency rejected all “probiotic” strains of bacteria under consideration last week.

For now, no bacterial strain has proven to be the all-purpose boost, the key to the fountain of youth, a hundred years of yogurt solitude. Don’t let that stop you from enjoying the mouth-tingling taste of bacteria-laden foods like fermented yogurt, kim chi, or Lambic beer.

Photo by Jeff Potter.

In an interview with me in Maine Magazine, Ames says:

If fish can reproduce, then we’re going to have 10 times the fish we have now. It becomes kind of like watching a popcorn popper with the lid off. Here you have this little inner area that all of a sudden is blowing fish all over the place. It’s producing the way that it used to historically. The question in the end is, Do we know it’s going to do that? No. But we do know that if you allow fish to reproduce, if you allow them to grow to adult sizes, then there’s a very good chance that you’ll have more fish. Here is a way that we can improve the system for the fish and the fishermen.

Ames didn’t come up with the model from years in the lab. He worked for years as a fisherman and a lobsterman. And his proposed model for collaborative area management is based on what he calls “the the biggest, most sustainable, most profitable fishery in New England”: Maine’s lobster industry.

Read more about Maine’s lobster industry in this guest post from Mark Bowen of OrganicNation.tv.

Photo by Nathan Eldridge.

Ten more great, food-focused items.

In the midst of the GOOD 100, I’ve come up with an additional list of 10 people, projects, and ideas that are making a difference when it comes to food. Let me know what you think.

1: Sustainable sushi

Environmental regulators can’t keep pace with our voracious appetite for wild fish, and consumer changes can only take reforms so far. But a compelling new way to change fishing practices may be coming from behind the sushi bar. Casson Trenor has been advocating for honest, eco-friendly options and U.S. chefs are beginning to follow the lead of places like the U.K. chain Moshi Moshi by implementing a traceable, net-to-knife takes on the classics.

2: Tony Geraci

Geraci is the Baltimore City Public Schools’s director of food and nutrition, which might not sound like a glamorous or influential position. But Geraci has made it both by serving locally-grown meals from Maryland farms three days a week. For low-income students in Baltimore—some who only get meals from public school—that can mean a lot. The next step for Geraci and other school lunch reformers: more hot lunches made from scratch.

3: Eat like it’s 1930

From Mark Kurlansky’s The Food of a Younger Land to pre-industrial pig dinners, eating historically accurate cuisine has never been so cool. This year, the International Association of Culinary Professionals introduced a cookbook category for food history. While Jello, a newfangled staple of the Depression, does not have the same cachet as marrow bones and head cheese—it’s about time for a return of regional specialties and nose-to-tail cooking.

4: Barry Estabrook

Estabrook wrote about underpaid tomato pickers for now-shuttered Gourmet magazine. Although Gourmet has been criticized for its tone of exclusivity and foodie elitism, Estabrook was one contributing editor whose insights stretched far beyond the wondrous smell of mushrooms or the delightful views of farms to a starker, more realistic portrait of our food: one showing a need for meaningful political reform.

5: Mobile chicken processors

Now that chickens are the new swimming pool (they’re in every backyard), suburban farmers have a problem: the shortage of small, federally inspected slaughterhouses. “There’s a lot of back-of-the-barn processing; people who do their turkeys all hush-hush,” says Jennifer Hashley, of Pete and Jen’s Backyard Birds in Massachusetts. “But as regulations get tougher, I think that’s going to get more difficult.” Hashley and others in Vermont, Maine, and Washington have been exploring another (legal) option: a roving slaughterhouse mounted on the back of a tractor-trailor.

6: Moonshine

Forget microbrewed beers and backwoods copper stills. From rotovaps to reflux stills, today’s unlicensed distillers are often techie, DIY-ers experimenting in apartments and garages. What’s not to like about a little homemade firewater?

7: Nicolette Hahn Niman

Besides being the activist author of The Righteous Porkchop, Niman is a pioneer in raising Boer meat goats. Despite goat meat’s bad rap, she says that the animal might offer more protein from less grass, part of her argument that sustainable meat can exist in healthy ecosystems where plants and animals function together.

 8: Stop counting

The human body is more than a caloric intake machine. Despite efforts to have mandatory calorie labeling on menus, numbers don’t necessarily add up. As Jessica Mudry writes in Measured Meals, the USDA’s prescriptive “healthy diet” uses quantitative terms and scientific sounding numbers that often obscure what healthy diets are really about: geography, tradition, pleasure, and, most of all, taste.

9: Trayless dining

Take plastic and metal trays away from campus dining halls, and waste haulers end up taking away less garbage because they load up with less food. Besides cutting waste, this saves food service providers money. The idea has caught on, although there’s no word yet on whether trayless dining can hold the dreaded Freshman 15 at bay.

10: Eat heirlooms

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault launched an ambitious, high-profile rescue program for the world’s seeds to be housed in a bunker, but to really save plants, we have to eat them. Slow Food’s RAFT is one project that promotes heirloom foods that are worth cooking. After recently tasting a Winekist, a rare pink-fleshed apple from Maine that tastes like a strawberry, I’m convinced these heirlooms are indeed worth saving—and worth being used by more chefs.

A new group of foodies are sharing what they eat—obsessively, and online.

In the post-climactic moments of a foodgasm, some of us, euphoric and unable to concentrate, with blood rushing to the stomach, prefer relaxed conversation with friends, a little after-dinner pillow talk. I sometimes head to the liquor cabinet for a bitter, digestive nip of Fernet Branca. Now, there’s a growing group of the food obsessed that can’t even wait for dinner to end to reach for the iPhone, the laptop, or the digital camera.

Whether these obsessive gastro-diarists are effective writers reaching out to hungry readers at the web’s virtual dinner party or a wave of self-aggrandizing foodiots is part of a larger debate over the value of social media. The importance of traditional media sources has been eroded, in part for failing to live up to an illusory set of standards, like reviewers who were comped trips for Robert Parker’s famous wine newsletter. Combine that with online communities that offer places to find more perspectives and more opinions for free, and you have the beginning of a revolution. But detractors of the online “cult of the amateur,” like Andrew Keen, point out that the democratization of the media has led to more superficial observations than thoughtful, considerate opinions.

The latest incarnation: the foodiots.

Here they come, the distinct subspecies of food zealot that cannot enjoy culinary coitus uninteruptus, the plugged-in foodie who absolutely must blog, tweet, or photograph meals—even the most mundane breakfast bun. And they’re taking over, at least according to Joe Pompeo, who wrote in last week’s New York Observer: “New Yorkers’ water-cooler chitchat has changed. They used to talk about sex and politics and TV shows. Now they can’t stop yapping about what they’re shoving down their pie holes.”

Grub Street’s Daniel Maurer argues that the rise of the foodiot coincides with aggressive, viral restaurant marketing that focuses on the latest and greatest stunts—possibly in place of good food. “As the food blogosphere and food television expand, food becomes more and more about sensationalism and gimmickry, and it has become more and more acceptable to praise something just because it’s wacky or indulgent, not because it’s artful.”

We’re constantly bombarded by short, senseless food stories—everything from cat food commercials to the latest news about Monsanto—unreeling in real time. It’s true that we need solid criticism—whether that’s Alan Richman, Tyler Cowen, or Adam Roberts—to elevate the discourse, cut through the hype, and find the good food. But online chatter doesn’t have to be equivalent to low-brow idiocy, and to assume that all non-professionals reviewers are “foodiots” seems elitist, missing the potential of dedicated online reviewers or crowdsourcing recipe sites like Food52.

Either way, as the critic Gale Greene wrote on her Twitter feed, “Let’s hope—foodiots or not—that when we look up from the plate, we have something else to talk about, even obsess over.” My suggestion: Smart critics, no matter how many characters they use.

The can-volution takes canning out of the factory and puts putting-up food back on the table.

Canned foods were born in the early 1800s when a confectioner named Nicholas Appert invented a method for preserving food in airtight containers for the French army. From there, canned foods went on to become a safe, reliable staple of the workingman’s lunch and a source of pride for frugal homemakers. Canned food also became a symbol of modern industrialized society—as if the food itself were produced mechanically. Cans of green beans, Campbell’s soup, or fruit medley represent the promise (easy-to-use, pre-cooked food all year-round!) and the perils (bland, salty, overcooked food all year-round!) of modern culture.

While having canned beans available year-round—and, indeed, the can itself—is the result of a huge industrial effort (as James Parker recently wrote in a spirited defense of canned foods), a cottage industry of do-it-yourself community canners has cropped up again. Sales of canning supplies are reportedly up 30 percent this year, fed in part by an interest in local foods, awareness about contaminated processed foods, and a slumping economy. DIY home canning has also drawn inspiration from a generation of designers and tinkerers dedicated to customizing off-the-shelf products—computers, bicycles, food—that were once thought of as sterile, efficient exemplars of industrial product design.

Although producing canned food yourself may not be as cheap as buying the mass-produced version, it allows you to save your own seasonal foods, customize recipes, and enjoy your tomatoes with the knowledge that they weren’t picked by an enslaved Immokalee worker.

One enthusiastic cheerleader of canning’s new wave has been Kim O’Donnel, a Seattle writer who launched Canning Across America this summer. “I got inspired by Yes We Can in the Bay Area and I kept thinking about Hands Across America, where people would simultaneously hold events around this idea of putting up food,” O’Donnel says. “I threw an idea out on Twitter. I have not seen anything like the response I got in a long time and it was because of twenty-first century technology. We’re using social media to talk about a way of preserving food that dates back to Napoleonic era.”

Back in 1810, Appert thought that driving the air out of containers prevented spoilage, although canning actually works by combining that sealing action with heat. The heat sterilizes the contents. But beware: it also tends to turn softer vegetables, like beans, to pulp.

Because modern home canning is a relatively easy process, it doesn’t require any prerequisites in the kitchen. At its simplest, canning requires only glass jars, lids, and a lot of boiling water. Usually, the jars and the food are heated. Then, acid or sugar is added. The food is put in jars which are boiled in hot water. As they cool, they make a “pop” and seal shut. The most accessible recipes, even from the culinary innovators like David Chang of Momofuku, tend to be for similar fare: high-acid foods, like vinegary pickles, or tomatoes.

For the first timers, it’s really important to follow a recipe. Putting Food By is a canner’s best friend. Neophytes might also want to follow someone who’s done it before. Which is part of the impetus behind community canning projects: learning from others. Yes, We Can’s Anya Fernald said it best when she wrote, “Like everything that’s hot, sticky, exhausting, and a little risky, [canning is] way more fun with friends.”

As much as I enjoy canning pickled beets, whole tomatoes, or crabapple jelly myself, there’s always something new to learn. “It’s a way to get people together for two or three hours,” O’Donnel says. “Not only sharing the work load, but catching up and getting to know each other. Those things have been highly underrated. Canning is one way back.”

Top Photo by Peter Smith. Bottom Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Gayeton hasn’t always focused on traditional, analog culture—in 2007, he created the machinima (a movie filmed in a virtual world) documentary, Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator: A Second Life Odyssey—but it’s certainly his bread and butter. He started the project in Italy while he was working for an online PBS series called “My Shoes Are Caked with Mud,” which won a Webby in 2004. His book on traditional ways of life in Italy, SLOW: Life in a Tuscan Town, comes out next week.

I chatted with Gayeton about his background in food, about going slow, and how he’s applied what he learned from Italian grandmothers, butchers, and foragers.

GOOD: How did you end up in Italy?

DOUGLAS GAYETON: I was working in Paris and I didn’t really want to buy a place there. I bought a place in Pistoia, which is between Florence and Lucca, at the end of 1990s. But it wasn’t really part of a grand scheme to work on a book.

G: Were you into food and cooking at the time?

DG: I really wasn’t. I didn’t know how to cook. I appreciated good food, but I couldn’t tell the difference between Burrata or mozzerella cheese; I kind of knew what ricotta was. These are things that any Italian would know. The last five minutes of any news program in Italy is dedicated to food. Because the ingredients they use are so limited—they’re known as the materia prima [the basics]—everyone makes the same cuisine. It’s a very traditional country.

G: So was your introduction to the country your introduction to Slow Food?

DG: I was eating at a restaurant near my apartment and after the meal, I went into kitchen and I said to the chef, “Everything was very good. I wish I could cook like this.” And he said, “Come back tomorrow morning.” So, the next morning at eight o’clock, I met him at a café and we went to a butcher. We went to buy all these vegetables. Then, I found myself working for six months at his restaurant. At the time, PBS asked about doing a piece on Slow Food, which was going to be a documentary with a bunch of talking heads. The people in my town, they all lived philosophy of Slow Food, but they didn’t even know what Slow Food was. I tried to capture that.

G: It seems like these images took a lot of time.

DG: All the words were written by hand. If you look closely, there are many, many lines to each letter. It could take two, three months. All puns aside, it was a slow process.

G: The images are a mix of analog and digital. It’s almost like David Hockney meets Artusi.

DG: I never really thought of it as a cookbook—as a book about food or a book of recipes. I was really just trying to document something. Food just plays a big part.

G: One of your first images, Le Sei Donne Di Rolando (pictured above), shows six woman sitting around a table. How did you construct the image?

DG: It was the first one that I did where figured how to get all the pieces together with people in them. I had never tried to create a moment out of many moments. To me, creating the image was a distillation of so many things I’d seen in classic Italian paintings—the palm with stigmata, the idea of rays of light—which permeate so much pre-Renaissance Italian art. I gravitated to these narrative tools in painting. I shot during the course of the meal, so there are plates from first course, the second course, and dessert there. That, more than anything, showed passage of time. The idea of introducing time to photography really interests me.

G: Has this changed your life?

DG: My wife and I moved to Petaluma. My wife started Laloo’s, a goat milk ice cream company. We basically took a lot of these principles—of food production, of Slow Food—and applied them towards making something. We have goat and chickens and horses and lots of vegetable gardens.

G: Could it be a primer for someone who doesn’t live in the Tuscan farmland—to be more like them?

DG: The book is a primer. Plain and simple. Slow is the story of someone who goes from knowing nothing about Italian culture, Slow Food, or even cooking to by the end of the book owning a farm.