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  • Elena Rivellino and Dennis Stein

    Art: Nat Damm Elena Rivellino and Dennis Stein Owners, Sea Rocket Bistro San Diego, Calif. At their Sea Rocket Bistro in San Diego, Elena Rivellino, 36, and Dennis Stein, 34, combine two of our favorite restaurant trends: budget-priced organic/local/gourmet and a devotion to sustainable seafood. They source their food exclusively from Southern California and Baja fisherpeople […]

  • Benjamin Shute and Miriam Latzer

    Art: Nat Damm Benjamin Shute and Miriam Latzer Farmers, Hearty Roots Community Farm Tivoli, N.Y. In a shallow 2008 New York Times style-section article, Benjamin Shute was portrayed as a hipster farmer. But growing food is no trendy pastime for him and his business partner, Miriam Latzer, 35. Since 2004, they’ve run Hearty Roots Community Farm, […]

  • John and Julie Stehling

    Art: Nat Damm John and Julie Stehling Owners, Early Girl Eatery Asheville, N.C. In 2001, John and Julie Stehling, now 42 and 39, had a radical idea: Let’s start a restaurant that sources as much as possible from its foodshed, and let’s serve simple, diner-style fare at accessible prices. At that time, most local-minded restaurants […]

  • Time for the public to reinvest in food-system infrastructure

    Want farmers market food to expand beynd niche status? We need to invest in infrastructure. Photo: Natalie Maynor, Flickr Creative CommonsWhen The New York Times invited me to participate in a “Room for Debate” forum on the infrastructure problem in agriculture, I wrote a 1400-word treatise (a Tolstoyan length in online-debate terms), before slashing it […]

  • What a D.C. private school can teach us about public-school lunches

    Meal time at the Washington Jesuit Academy. Photo: Ed Brukse This is the third of three articles detailing how food made from scratch using local ingredients is served to students at the Washington Jesuit Academy in Northeast Washington, D.C. The first is here; the second here:  Prior to hiring Fresh Start Catering a year ago to […]

  • With a bit more cash and lots of ingenuity, school lunches could be much better

    Chef Allison Sosna: doing it right for the kids. This is the second of three articles detailing how food made from scratch using local ingredients is served to students at the Washington Jesuit Academy in Northeast Washington, D.C. The first is here. Allison Sosna is a young chef who fell in love with local produce. She remembers […]

  • In praise of the sandwich-shop trend

    Simply delicious: the sandwich trend takes flight at Butcher in New Orleans.Photo courtesy Jason Perlow, via Flickr. In the late 1990s, if you wanted to go out for a skillfully cooked meal made from top-quality local/organic ingredients, you pretty much had to find to a cutting-edge white-tablecloth restaurant: say, Berkeley’s Chez Panisse or Manhattan’s Savoy. […]

  • In a D.C. school, the simple power of a good breakfast

    This is the first of three articles on how food made from scratch using local ingredients is served to the students and staff at Washington Jesuit Academy, a free-tuition private school for at-risk kids. Duane Drake, head chef at Washington Jesuit Academy. Chef Duane Drake lines a dozen pie shells on sheet pans and begins […]

  • The NYT highlights a key food-system gap: infrastucture

    When you’ve been in the trenches writing about a problem for a while, it’s good to see it finally getting traction in media and policy circles. That’s why I was thrilled to see Sunday’s New York Times piece on how a shortage of infrastructure is hampering the growth of local and regional food production. If […]