Kitchen Confidential juggled with foodies’ fascinations in new and unusual ways, and since then reality television seems to be the appropriate new home for that side show.  Oddly, it began in 1999 with an article in the New Yorker. So it is only fitting that the magazine has been balancing those dynamics with the work of less celebrity-oriented writers ever since.  None better than Bill Buford, who gets out there, and in there, like a citizen scientist for the story (though he is not shy of carny, either). Here what catches my attention is the collaboration, but plenty on the ethos of an artisan, the farm as the garden of eden, and last but not least the role of food in heritage and heritage in food (click the image above to go to the article):

Two years ago, during the summer of 2011, Daniel Boulud, the New York-based French chef, told me he had been thinking about a project that we might do together. We were both in France at the time. I was living in Lyons—I had moved there in order to learn French cooking—and Boulud was visiting his family in Saint-Pierre-de-Chandieu, a nearby village on a wooded ridge in the open countryside. Continue reading →