Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Hey, Come Try This Organic Corn Dog

USDA-organic-seal_fe

We're fickle about what we eat. Whether our proscriptions are religious (no alcohol, no pork), dietary (no gluten, no dairy), ideological (no cages, no cruelty), environmental (no pesticides, no GMOs) or simply faddish (no carbs, no sugar), we know just what we want when we walk into Price Chopper. Still, that doesn’t necessarily mean we know what we’re eating. New research from Cornell suggests that a “health halo” exists around organic products, including chips, cookies, and yogurt, which leads consumers to consistently underestimate their caloric content and overestimate ... Read More

Some Thoughts on Julia Child And a Picture of Her Favorite Taqueria

La Super-Rica Taqueria

The market for tributes to Julia Child is a crowded one, but on the 100th anniversary of her birth, here's mine: My interest in cooking began, more or less, with a second-hand copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking that I picked up at a used bookstore in a sun-bleached strip mall near my home in Orlando, Florida in about 1995. Like any suburban high school kid who fancies himself an aesthete, I spent a lot of time grasping at marks of sophistication in those days. My idea of refinement came to include, among other things: reading the first chapters of several Faulkner novels, ... Read More