2008's best food writing will make you hungry

If you can read a recipe by Chez Panisse's Alice Waters without a twinge of hunger, you have a stronger stomach than me. Like a trip to the grocery store, the recipe section of "The Best Food Writing 2008" should not be undertaken on an empty stomach. The 400-page anthology, now on shelves, includes plenty of other writing: on cloned cows, food in post-Katrina New Orleans, local restaurateurs, sublime burgers and other food trends.

The best of the trend pieces is "Miles to Go Before I Eat" by Mark C. Anderson. He tried to stick to a strict "localvore" regimen, eating only foods from a 150-mile radius of his Monterey County home. Despite the buzz "eating local" has gotten, it's monumentally impractical; even with Northern California's agricultural bounty, it meant going without any flour-based products, paying $60 for local olive oil, handing over persimmons that grew just out of range, and, most painfully, not using Tapatio. Really, how could we live in a world like that? I'd have to move.

Anderson's piece appeared in the Monterey County Weekly, and that's just the beginning of the diversity of sources. There are stories from all over, from local papers and websites, as well as the places you'd expect -- Gourmet, Food & Wine, The New York Times, The New Yorker.

Some of these stories can make you burn with a need to taste what they're writing about. Calvin Trillin's "Three Chopsticks" from The New Yorker convinced me I must get to Singapore and stay until I eat everything, and that I have to leave right now. Writing for Food & Wine, Thomas O. Ryder put several Louisiana restaurants on the roster for my next roadtrip in "Cajun Country by Car."

Others are simply glorious exercises in vicarious eating. Do I want to watch a whole pig be barbecued, sliced and served? Maybe not, but I'm glad Elaine T. Cicora did for Cleveland Scene ("Shakin' the Bacon Tree"). I might never go to Alinea and eat one of its inventive, multi-course meals, but Jess Thompson did, and she took notes ("Waiterly Conduct") for her blog Hogwash.

Momofuku Ssäm Bar makes two appearances, in an endearing profile of its chef, David Chang, by Larissa MacFarquahr ("Chef on the Edge" for The New Yorker) and for its notorious pork butt in Frank Bruni's "Fat, Glorious Fat, Moves to the Center of the Plate," in the New York Times. The restaurant has certainly made an impression since opening in 2006; only one other appears twice -- New Orleans' Mandina, which has been owned by the Mandina family for more than a century.

Wired may have a future as a food magazine. Ben Paynter's "The Other Other White Meat," about cloned cows and pigs and their role in our food chain, is not just intelligent and measured, but also good investigative journalism. He eats a steak from a clone and gets a farmer to reveal that you might have eaten one too.

Foodies will no doubt be familiar with some of the pieces here, but because editor Holly Hughes has tapped such a broad range of sources, there will be some new, appetizing discoveries. And that's what good food writing is all about. 

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo of ramen at Momofuku in New York by misocrazy via Flickr