Portland Conference Preview: IACP Visits City Hall

Culinary Professionals Visit City Hall from Mayor Sam Adams on Vimeo.

Left to right: Nate Tilden (Clyde Common Restaurant), IACP Portland Host City Committee Chair Mike Thelin (Bolt Services, LLC), IACP President Scott Givot (Gala & Co.), and Portland Mayor Sam Adams at City Hall in July.

A Bitter Reality for Locavores

“Local food’’ is all the rage, touted by adherents as offering better food, an environmentally responsible lifestyle, and self-sufficient communities. The first of those claims is sometimes true. Local tomatoes and corn may well taste better than those from afar. Beyond that, though, the local food movement is an affectation based on bad logic and bad economics, one that, widely adopted, would actually harm the environment and potentially impoverish millions. Particularly here in New England, it would also turn mealtimes into dull, pallid affairs. Read more at The Boston Globe.

Unusual Cookery Books

The Guardian's Word of Mouth Blog explains how unusual cookery books can be a recipe for mild obsession. WoMer and Taste of London festival fringe tweeter Catherine Phipps, aka Catily, talks shop with the experts. What's her greatest pleasure when it comes to cookery books and food writing? Read More

The History of Appalachian Cooking

Although Mark Sohn began to garden at the age of 5 and his love of food would later blossom in Paris, he's been particularly fond of Appalachian cooking for the last three decades.
"It became big for me because I thought that the food was particularly good," he said.
Sohn, a professor of educational psychology at Pikeville College in Kentucky, is also a foods author, columnist and cooking teacher.
During Sunday's West Virginia Humanities Council Little Lecture at the MacFarland-Hubbard House, Sohn shared some recipes and the history of Appalachian cooking with the audience.
Sohn began talking about prehistoric Appalachian natives who dined on mastodon and giant tortoise. Thousands of years later their successors favored whitetail deer, turkey, acorns, black walnuts and other delicacies as glaciers receded from present day Ohio.
About 1,000 years ago, corn and beans became a dominant food staple in Appalachia, Sohn said shortly before he offered up a recipe for succotash. Read more from The Charleston Gazette.

High Rise Farms

The Pyramid Farm may be one way to address the needs of a swelling population on a planet with finite farmland, according to designers Dickson Despommier at New York's Columbia University and Eric Ellingsen of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Design teams around the world have been rolling out concepts for futuristic skyscrapers that house farms instead of—or in addition to—people as a means of feeding city dwellers with locally-grown crops. Read more at National Geographic.