Tuesday, May 24

 
Worth Visiting: A Brief History of Food

Here's a handy place to go when you need to get your mitts on some fast food trivia, history and interesting or odd bits. (Just the thing we specialize in.) It's the Web site of Clifford A. Wright, expert in apparently a whole bunch of things according to his publishing history, mainly Mediterranean food, foreign affairs and child-raising.

The site is comprehensive if slightly pedantic -- just the kind of approach you can expect when really, really brainy people latch onto a new passion -- but that's not an insult. If we had to choose, we'd pick pedantic over flip any day -- PBS over Food Network, Clifford over Rachel Ray and anybody over Nigella Lawson.

Wright's latest book is "Some Like It Hot: Spicy Favorites from the World's Hot Zones." He also wrote "Little Foods of the Mediterranean," "Cucina Rapido" and "Cucina Paradiso" among others. Earlier in his career, he specialized in hot-button Middle East issues. So, he's exchanged one kind of hot zone for another.

Wright's site also has an especially useful list of foodie links. It has the usual suspects (the About.com food site, Chowhound, Food Reference Site, Soupsong), but its true value is in its concentration on non-Western foods, foodways, countries and cuisine styles (Palestinian, Turkish, Libyan, North African) ancient cuisines, etc.

(Thanks to LII -- Librarians' Index to the Internet for this tip.)
posted by Unknown 10:30 AM