Food News Feed

The Web isn't lacking for food blogs, but none has the scope of Josh Friedland's The Food Section. Friedland started the pioneering site in 2003 to track "all the news that's fit to eat," linking to magazines, newspapers, Web sites and other blogs in 60 categories like gadgets, trends and news. Friedland works full-time as director of communications at a New York City hospital yet finds 20 hours a week to update the blog, where he also posts musings on recipes he's tried and chronicles his latest culinary adventures. The site's Moveable Feast links to food news in cities around the globe like Saigon and Florence.

At around 2:00 pm yesterday, I needed a meal that balanced high-quality protein, complex carbohydrates, and fresh vegetables. I had just returned to the farm after spending the weekend at Community Food Security Coalition conference in Atlanta. Intellectually and spiritually, the conference provided rich sustenance. Culinarily, though--save for one pretty good dinner of barbecued ribs and collard greens--it amounted to a disaster...

Lynne takes us behind the scenes - into balsamic attics and kitchens of legendary country restaurants. She takes us to a town where people still set a place at table for the composer Verdi and his music spills out into the street...

In Japan, eating a U.S. steak in a white tablecloth restaurant is a dining experience, an occasion, a touch of class. In the future, Japanese diners will be served by U.S. beef sommeliers, graduates of a program funded by the United Soybean Board, which began this week in Tokyo with a class of 70.

Cooking Light was anointed the "most notable launch of the past two decades" by MIN and Dr. Samir Husni during a sold-out awards event today at the Waldorf-Astoria honoring the top 22 consumer magazines launches of the past 20 years.

What gives? How did Kobe beef become so ubiquitous? Well, the short answer is: because it's not really Kobe beef. Today, what is commonly called Kobe beef is really all-American - it comes from American-grown cattle that are crosses of traditional U.S. breeds such as Black Angus and bulls brought from Japan before 2002, when the Department of Agriculture outlawed the importation of Japanese beef, after several incidents of mad cow disease there.

In university laboratories and corporate research centers, food scientists are closing in on the holy grail of applied food technology: meat substitutes that look, taste and chew like the real thing. The first of these "third generation" meat analogs -- Morningstar Farms Steak Strips and Chik'n Strips -- has just arrived in some local supermarkets, and other brands are on the way.