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.…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

Although many reports about Gulf of Maine fish stocks—cod, haddock, cusk, flounder, and grey sole—are not optimistic, Ted Ames, a scientist and 2005 MacArthur “genius,” believes that a management system protecting juvenile fish and spawning grounds can turn around the traditional New England fishery.

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…

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…

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…

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…

Douglas Gayeton creates detailed photo collages annotated with round, hand-drawn letters that tell stories about the landscape and the people of Pistoia, Italy. These so-called “flat films” depict cheese-makers, butchers, and cooks who practice the Slow Food philosophy.

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…