Eat All About It

On the days you don’t see me on this page, here are a few other places I’ve been writing lately:

In the May issue of Cooking Light, I have an article on the national push to post calories and other nutritional information at chain restaurants. The most surprising part of researching this, for me, was the consensus that menu labels alone aren’t a magic bullet that will change what people order and eat. Seeing the amount of fat and calories and salt on the menu after a labeling law went into effect in Seattle certainly changed my dining habits – but then, I’m the one who hasn’t been able to enjoy an Entemann’s donut since similar laws for packaged food went into effect in 1990.

In the May isue of Sunset magazine, I take a look at the sensational Shigoku oysters making their way across Seattle menus, and sample some excellent brunch cocktails around town.

In the April issue of Veranda magazine, I was lucky enough to share the pleasures of Cafe Juanita with readers.

In the May issue of Mix magazine, I’ll be talking about good places to eat in my favorite Oregon coastal town.

You can frequently find me on Amazon.com’s Al Dente blog, where I recently wrote about a local branch of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, my response to the inevitable canning backlash, and David Lebovitz’s latest cookbook.

I occasionally write about food for Seattle’s Child magazine, including this interview with everyone’s favorite Hungry Monkey dad, Matthew Amster-Burton.  In the current issue, which isn’t yet online, I look at the new generation of home-delivered groceries, from Full Circle Farm’s vegetables to Trophy Cupcakes dropped off on your doorstep. (And yes, people have asked Trophy to send a driver to their home address ASAP delivering a single cupcake, and they have indeed fulfilled such orders, albeit at a price.)

And, since I tend to think about books when I’m not thinking about food, I regularly contribute to the Christian Science Monitor’s “Chapter & Verse” blog, and I write occasional book reviews for the Monitor. Here’s the latest.

Thanks for the chance to read and write and eat along with you. I hope to get to meet some of you in person at the International Association of Culinary Professionals conference in Portland this week — let me know if you’ll be there.

You might have met farmer Joel Salatin, “America’s most celebrated pioneer of chemical-free farming,” on the page through Michael Pollan. Now, you get a chance to meet him on the screen in the movie FRESH — or in person, when he appears at the University of Washington on Tuesday, April 20.

Organizers of a week full of events to celebrate the movie’s Seattle opening are kindly offering a pair of tickets to Salatin’s $25 Kane Hall appearances to our readers. The winner can choose between Tuesday’s 6 p.m. talk on “The Sheer Ecstasy of Being A Lunatic Farmer,” and the 8 p.m. talk titled “Can You Feed The World? Answering Elitism, Production, and Choice.”

(For a closer-up conversation, you could also attend a FRESH fundraiser at Emmer & Rye earlier in the day, with attendance limited to 25 people, but that one’s $125.)

Want to play? Leave a comment on this post, and be sure I have a way to contact you if you win. Time is short, so I’ll be randomly picking a winner from the comments at 9 p.m. PST Monday. If you have time to mull it over, I’m curious to know how you would answer the question posed in Salatin’s 8 p.m. talk. How do you answer charges of elitism about what you eat?

*Updated 4/19 to say that our random number generator picked Debra E. as our ticket winner! Debra, email me at rebekahdenn at gmail.com so I can arrange to get your tickets to you! Thank you for playing, and we do have discount tickets available for other readers — the organizers will give you 20 percent off the list price by using the code “FRESHpromo” on Brown Paper Tickets.