The Slow Food USA Blog

Summer Reading

One of the great advents of the past few years has been “The Food Issue.”  I’ve really enjoyed seeing magazines like The Nation, The New York Times, Yes magazine, Mother Jones, and The New Yorker devote an entire issue to stories around food. The Atlantic Monthly upped the ante by creating an entire website for food stories.  I mean, it’s a pretty lefty bunch, but I guess that’s not a huge surprise.

Now we’ve got Slate’s food issue, with a few choice nuggets including Tom Laskawy’s piece on how Mother Nature’s gonna bite big Ag in the butt, and a review of Mark Kurlansky’s new book

The Food of a Younger Land, about America Eats, the 1930s Federal Writers Project, and how it created a new genre: food writing.  Reading this piece, I thought—this would be a great partner book for Jane and Michael Stern’s new book 500 Things to Eat Before They’re Gone

!  Turns out the folks at the San Francisco Chronicle are more clever than I and they had the Sterns review the book just last week. They had issues with it—mostly that they are more hopeful than Kurlansky about the state of American food. 

No doubt the Sterns will be roadtripping this summer.  I hope I get to roadtrip too, but I’ll also be reading—probably their book, probably Kurlansky’s.  What will you be reading this summer?