It Ain't All Chez Panisse

To fill you in a little on my relationship with food, I thought I'd switch things up and post about some of the things I actually don't like to eat. Sadly, this is a category into which most of my meals fall.

The reason I'm so enchanted with good food is that, given the amount I travel, I rarely get it. I come to nice meals not from a place of comfort and stability, but from depravity and misery. I come crawling.

For every slowly simmered crockpot stew I write about, there's a whole lot of cold, plain oatmeal eaten on my lap at an airport, with chopsticks. And that's a good day.

I see a world on fire, and I see food as a way to still see the good in it. Additionally, I see responsible, ethical, sustainable food as a way to, in part, save ourselves from ourselves, as the Lakota holy man Lame Deer once said. Every morning, when my NYTimes homepage comes up, I look with horror at the news of the day. Afghanistan, Iraq, Tibet, Darfur, New Orleans - you name it.

Then I see a ray of light: the food section.