Craft Beer Crushes Swill

Evidently, this Bud’s no longer for you. While national beer sales overall remained as sluggish as a hungover frat boy, barely growing 2 percent last year, the suds industry’s shining sector has been craft brew. Through the first half of this year, according to the Brewers Association, smaller-batch beer grew 11 percent, due to more new brands and more demand. That’s roughly the alcohol percentage of Southern Tier’s deliriously hoppy Un∗Earthly IPA. Domestic swill is losing out to the palate-challenging concoctions from breweries like Rogue, Dogfish Head, and Avery, just several of the 1,400-plus craft producers leading this good-taste revolution. Let’s fill our pint glasses with a potent 90 Minute IPA and pray for 1,400 more. —Joshua M. Bernstein

Bottled Water Dries Up

A few years ago, restaurants Poggio in Sausalito, California, and Incanto in San Francisco stopped serving bottled water, citing the waste inherent in bottling and shipping the stuff—particularly in a country blessed with perfectly drinkable local tap water. It didn’t exactly catch on. But when Chez Panisse did the same thing last year, the food world took notice: In 2007, serving bottled water became a grave ecological sin. A few restaurateurs complained that cutting out fancy water was like cutting out booze—its stratospheric markups can seriously boost a restaurant’s profit margin. But the anti–bottled water bandwagon has momentum. Even New York City is now promoting its “Cool. Healthy. Clean. … NYC Water.” Meanwhile the bottled-water industry continued to launch new designer brands like 420, and struck back with this hilarious story in which bottled-water “experts” and “consultants” said things like “Bottled water is the next wine” and “Water is an amazing thing. It will reach out and touch something.” —Nicholas Day

The Latin Liquor Frenzy

Over the last decade, the rum-based Mojito became the gateway drug to Latin liquors, and now America has moved on to the serious stuff. Last year, superpremium rums grew by about 24 percent according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. This year, a new mezcal plant was built in Mexico to meet the demand of a recent 79 percent growth in superpremium tequila. And easy-drinking crema tequilas, the Chilean/Peruvian grape brandy known as pisco, and all manner of sugarcane-based cachaças have been flowering on the shelves of bars such as Chicago’s Nacional 27, San Francisco’s Cantina, and Philadelphia’s newly opened Xochitl. The latter features plenty of artisanal tequilas, which can be ordered in flights or jarrito-style: served in carved cucumber cups with gazpacho-esque sangrita. We’ve come a long way from the body shot. —James Norton

Glam Tonic

It used to be that a good gin and tonic merely meant one made with premium liquor. Not anymore. This year, artisanal tonic waters from Fever-Tree, Stirrings, and Q Tonic debuted at upscale cocktail joints and BevMo! Highfalutin ingredients included triple-purified water, African marigolds, and organic agave. At the same time, DIY mixologists began making their own tonic water. Could Schweppes and Canada Dry be at risk of being eighty-sixed from the bar? —Michele Foley

Why Rye?

Ordering a Sazerac used to elicit blank stares from bartenders. But the rye-based drink became this year’s huckleberry cocktail, no bar complete without one. Rye, the original American whiskey distilled by George Washington himself, came back in style after decades of corn-based bourbon domination. Driven by an interest in artisanal ryes from brands like Anchor Brewing’s Old Potrero, Michter’s, and Black Maple Hill, bars began offering flights, tastings, and Manhattans and Old Fashioneds made the classic way, with rye, rather than bourbon. Cocktail bloggers suddenly had less reason to feel smarter than everyone else. —Lessley Anderson

Label Seduction

If a 2007 Cornell study is to be believed, your wine’s label may matter as much—if not more—than the contents of the bottle. Diners in an upscale Urbana, Illinois, restaurant were given a complimentary bottle of Cab Sauv with their meal. Those told they were getting North Dakota wine rated their meal as worse than their counterparts, who were told they were getting a California wine. They were also less likely to make return reservations, and rated their food as being less delicious. The “judge a book by its cover” effect was demonstrated among children this year, too. A Stanford study showed that kids will even down yucky stuff like carrots, apple juice, and milk if you put it in the sensually appealing packaging of their favorite eatery: McDonald’s. —James Norton

Dawn of the Vayniacs

Gary Vaynerchuk, impresario behind Wine Library TV, experiences wine with his entire face. Those elastic eyebrows, that stretchy mouth—viewers of his video blog not only hear his evocative, lengthy descriptions of the wine he’s tasting, but also experience the smells and flavors right along with his facial musculature. He’s built a passionate following (the “Vayniacs”) with his daily 20-minute forum complete with rambling digressions (often about sports) since launching the vlog in February 2006. The media caught up with his rabid fans this year, “discovering” Wine Library TV, and bringing Vaynerchuk into the media-expert fold. This spring, Vaynerchuk expanded into social networking (it’s all the rage, apparently), buying the wine-advice-sharing website Cork’d. And he decided that his opinions on wine weren’t the only thing of value: He started vlogging on issues like the Yankees and Microsoft. —Davina Baum

One Mammal’s Poop Is Another’s Coffee

Despite complaints about its overinflated price, scarcity, and inconsistent quality, civet coffee and its beguiling fume continued to catch the noses of reporters and connoisseurs worldwide. Kopi luwak, the Indonesian name for the world’s most expensive coffee, has long fetched between $120 and $600 per pound thanks to its rarity and its chocolaty, earth-after-a-rain flavor. Once collected wholly in the wild, most kopi luwak now comes from civets living in the foliage of Indian and Indonesian coffee plantations. The critters gobble coffee cherries, and farmworkers wash and lightly roast the defecated beans to preserve their prized complexity. While critics pooh-pooh the brew as java jive, the excrementitious liquid still sells in Tokyo and New York for $50 a cup. Soy dung latte anyone? —Aaron Gilbreath

Love of the Flesh

Meaty meat for discerning meat-lovers—offal, charcuterie, pork belly, steaks—had another strong year in 2007. London’s Fergus Henderson’s newest offal missive, Beyond Nose to Tail, was published. In-house charcuterie programs at restaurants such as the reopening Pestalozzi Place (St. Louis), the newly meat-centric Earth & Ocean (Seattle), and the new Proof (DC) showed a meaty art form that’s as healthy as ever. Chris Cosentino, a San Francisco chef whose love of offal has led him to create dishes like blood gelato, got a star turn (albeit a losing one) on Iron Chef. Awareness of meat-oriented Community Supported Agriculture harvest co-ops grew: In Berkeley and Boston, among other places, members purchase shares in an animal that’s raised sustainably and slaughtered humanely, a commitment that’s more expensive, substantial, and rewarding than buying a few pounds of meat from a grocery store. And the journal Meatpaper launched, with arty, well-written features tapping into the zeitgeist. —Ella Lawrence

We’ll Just Share This

All who proclaimed the small plates trend dead, for shame! Restaurants are finding that the flexibility and informality of small nibble-centric bar menus appeal to younger diners, and new small plates places keep opening. At San Francisco’s Laïola, appetizers outnumber the main courses by a long shot. In New York, Bar Stuzzichini does it Italian style. And Minneapolis’s Obento-ya is popularizing tiny charcoal-grilled skewers called robata. Los Angeles chef Govind Armstrong has published a cookbook called Small Bites, Big Nights in keeping with the craze. “If I am given the chance to get a bunch of small things without having to commit, I am in heaven,” he told CHOW. “I cook the same way I like to eat. I end up spending more money, and trying more things, but I leave with more tastes and textures than ever before.” What’s good for the customer, therefore, is also good for the owner. —Ella Lawrence

Don’t Call Me Sweet

Just like rock-and-roll drummers desperate for the spotlight, pastry chefs have proven eager to break free of sugar’s shackles. The all-stars of NYC’s sweet scene—Sam Mason (Tailor), Pichet Ong (P∗Ong), Jehangir Mehta (Graffiti)—have expanded their repertoire to include the savory and opened their own restaurants. Critics’ responses and the Internet buzz have been middling, and the attention can be dangerous: Jordan Kahn resigned from the now-closed New York restaurant Varietal after a sound beating at the hands of Frank Bruni of the New York Times. But what do you expect when chefs create unusual dishes like tomato foam paired with warm peaches and ricotta purée? Will Goldfarb’s highly hyped Room 4 Dessert, rapturously praised in the New Yorker, shut its doors in the spring amid ownership and management squabbles breathlessly covered in blogs. Goldfarb claims he’s going to open an even bigger spot—in the meantime, he launched Picnick, a disastrous lunch kiosk in New York City’s Battery Park. Can’t anyone be content to simply bake a cake anymore? —Joshua M. Bernstein

Chang Dynasty

David Chang of NYC’s Momofuku Ssäm Bar, Momofuku Noodle Bar, and Momofuku Ko seems to have come out of nowhere. All at once he was named Chef of the Year by GQ, profiled by the New York Times, snagged a Beard Award as Rising Star Chef of the Year, and became the darling of food writers everywhere. We chalk it up to his maniacal love of pork—he was ahead of the curve on the pig mania that reached full flower this year. But it may also have something to do with the fact that he’s a nice guy: When CHOW asked Chang what he thought about all the publicity, he said he was trying not to “believe in the bullshit and turn into a big asshole.” —Aïda Mollenkamp

Magical Superfoods

As the finally-mellowing pomegranate craze has shown us, the path to salvation is paved with antioxidants. A raft of quasi-mystical, vaguely foreign-sounding “superfoods” vied to depose King Pom this year, among them goji berries, açaí berries, yerba mate, and white tea. They showed up in products ranging from cocktails to flavored tea bags, chocolate bars, and refreshing bottled beverages, accompanied by various health claims, some of which were actually documented. If flavor is a factor in these items’ popularity (and it’s not clear that it is), the chocolaty-tasting açaí berry gets CHOW’s vote. We like it Brazilian surfer style: the pulp mashed up and frozen as a sorbet, served with bananas and granola (in what’s known as an açaí bowl). —Lessley Anderson

Chipotle Is the New Vanilla

What’s next, chipotle-scented body lotion? Mojito dental floss? Fed in part by a booming urban Latino population, once-exotic flavors like “Mojito,” chipotle, and guajillo chiles have gone thoroughly mainstream and begun appearing in all sorts of unexpected places. Take Orbit Mint Mojito chewing gum and the Wienerschnitzel chain’s new chipotle hot dog, both launched this year. And don’t forget $12 bottles of Mojito grill sauce and dozens of chipotle-flavored mustards, salad dressings, and potato chips. We may not have achieved ethnic harmony in America, but we’ve certainly got well-integrated grocery stores. —Emily Matchar

Miniburgers Slide On

2007 wasn’t the year the tiny hamburgers known as sliders burst upon the national scene—we have the White Castle chain to thank for that. But this was certainly the year they mounted a credible threat of long-term occupation. They dominated coast to coast but concentrated on the sprawling New York City metro area. A meatball slider from self-described “bohemian country club” the Little Owl graced the cover of Bon Appétit in September. A new Pop Burger slider restaurant opened up at West 58th Street and Fifth Avenue in October. Newsday ran a bunker-buster story on sliders detailing their surging popularity, including showing up at the wedding reception of an NYC billionaire. And White Castle stubbornly refuses to go out of business. —James Norton

Absinthe Not Cool Anymore

The favorite booze of pseudointellectuals, Burning Man participants, and those who like to wear crushed velvet became officially uncool this year when it was legalized by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. Banned since 1912, the spirit can now be imported to the United States as well as distilled here, as long as the word absinthe is not printed too prominently on the bottle and the drink contains fewer than 10 parts per million of the substance thujone (so, effectively, none). Derived from the plant wormwood, thujone allegedly contains psychoactive substances whose effects have been described by believers as being similar to THC’s in cannabis, and as hokum by others. Its presence in absinthe was often disputed as the reason van Gogh cut off his own ear and other artists at the fin de siècle lost it. But even if it is mind-altering, the quantities contained in most commercially available modern-day absinthe probably aren’t enough to make a difference. Care for a totally legal, unpsychedelic, vile-tasting herbal liqueur anyone? —Lessley Anderson

Last Call for Michael Jackson

Whiskey and beer lost a globetrotting advocate this year with the death of English writer Michael Jackson, the “Beer Hunter.” His 1977 book The World Guide to Beer was pivotal in establishing the modern theory of beer style—in brief, how you can sort a lager from an ale, a dark ale from a brown ale, and so on. Jackson was also instrumental in showing American drinkers that there is more to beer than Miller and Budweiser. Three decades after he began publishing deeply informed beer criticism and reporting in numerous books and journals such as the Independent and the Observer, specialty brewing is accelerating in the United States and around the world, giving mainstream American lagers some serious competition. A particular champion of Belgian beers, Jackson was able to take pride in a surge of Belgian-style tipples being made everywhere from Oregon to Quebec to England. —James Norton

Ramen King R.I.P.

Momofuku Ando—better known as the inventor of instant ramen and the patron saint of hungry college students—passed away last January at the age of 96 due to heart failure. Ando, who founded Nissin Foods in 1948, invented the just-add-water fried and dried noodle goodness in 1958 after witnessing the food shortages of postwar Japan. He’s quoted as saying, “Peace will come to the world when the people have enough to eat.” Ando worked on several versions of the classic meal before arriving at the successful Chikin Ramen. His boil-and-eat marvel reached universal notoriety (and great heights) in July 2005, when astronaut Soichi Noguchi ate it on the space shuttle Discovery. Thirty-four monks presided over Ando’s funeral at Osaka’s Kyocera Dome baseball stadium, and 6,500 people showed up to pay their respects. —Michele Foley

Rahodeb Caught Red-Handed

It’s hard not to love Whole Foods on first glance, with its rows of artisanal cheeses, pretty produce, and marbled steaks. But the chain has begun amassing critics amid tales of union-busting, the squeezing of small farmers, and “Whole Paycheck” prices fueling huge profit margins. Then in July, CEO John Mackey injected major weirdness into the company’s image, acknowledging he had posted messages about Whole Foods on a financial message board for years under the name Rahodeb. Some posts were downright creepy, such as the crypto-self-adulatory defense against criticism of his grooming habits: “I like Mackey’s haircut. I think he looks cute!” Other posts reeked of predatory capitalism, not out of character for a man who once vowed to destroy the CEO of Wild Oats. Whole Foods bought Wild Oats in August, by the way, then announced it was closing a number of the newly acquired stores. Good for Rahodeb—bad for consumers. Was this the year Whole Foods jumped the shark? —Alexander Lane

The Manchurian Can of Food

Cheap Chinese food comes at a price, for both pets and people. Earlier this year, chow for Fido was found to contain Chinese wheat gluten contaminated with melamine, a chemical used to make plastics and fertilizer, and ultimately was linked to 14 animal deaths in the United States. More than 150 brands of pet food were recalled, and human food from China had problems of its own. The U.S. later banned five types of Chinese fish and shrimp, citing tainted animal feed. Even nonfood items, such as Chinese cough syrup and toothpaste, were allegedly spiked with an antifreeze ingredient. The scares prompted California-based grocer Trader Joe’s to announce it will phase out single-ingredient foods from China by 2008. Meanwhile, many consumers opted to make their own dog food. —Jessica Su

Stormy Waters for NOLA’s New Eateries

While Big Easy standards like Antoine’s staggered back to life, more recently opened New Orleans restaurants didn’t fare well in the city’s depressed conditions. According to a Times-Picayune story on the trend, a number of high-profile debuts (such as the critically hailed Alberta) have struggled, while others (such as Ristorante Civello, Jackson, and Longbranch) closed this year. Restaurants, of course, are just a small part of the overall New Orleans picture, but they’re barometers for a city’s (or a neighborhood’s) health. And if that’s the case, the current NOLA prognosis is mixed at best. —James Norton

Beauty and the Damned

Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi and Salman Rushdie met at the launch of Tina Brown’s short-lived Talk magazine and wed in 2004. At the time, the 56-year-old Rushdie described the 32-year-old Lakshmi as “a mirthful person.” She later described him as “the most sedentary person I know.” Their split in July of this year was not so much news as fodder for reality-show blogs and schadenfreude for many. Two weeks before they announced their divorce, Rushdie was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. Sir Salman may not end up with the girl, but he’ll get to watch her on Top Chef Season 4: Chicago. —Meredith Arthur

Rachael Ray’s Husband Is Weird

John Cusimano, the lawyer and wannabe rock star who married Food Network duchess Rachael Ray in September 2005, got some unwanted attention this year, after the National Enquirer printed a story in November 2006 that said Cusimano paid a woman named Jeaninne Walz to spit on him and rub her feet in his face. The piling on continued throughout 2007, though Ray denied rumors of a split. —Meredith Arthur

Cable Car to the Afterlife

San Franciscans—and anyone who loves “The San Francisco Treat”—had a melancholy moment in October when they heard about the death of Rice-A-Roni creator Vincent DeDomenico. He who shepherded the rice-macaroni blend to wild popularity in the 1960s and beyond lived until he was 92, working happily right up until the end. DeDomenico also built and ran the Napa Valley Wine Train, a gourmet rail excursion through one of California’s most popular tourist destinations (though not recommended by CHOW). And lest we forget, DeDomenico also left behind one hell of an irritatingly catchy cable-car-bell-based commercial jingle. —James Norton

Irritating New Word Alert

The annoyingly precious term locavore beat out the likes of cougar and MRAP vehicle to become the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2007 Word of the Year. Coined by a group of San Franciscans who made a pact to eat foods produced only within a 100-mile radius, the idea inspired national minimovements, books, and, inevitably, backlash. CHOW editors believe that locavore’s inclusion in what’s been dubbed the “gold standard of American dictionaries” eliminates the future need for air quotes. —Lessley Anderson

We’re Into Grass

Since World War II, American cattle have been raised primarily on grain in industrial feedlots. Their soft texture and unbeefy flavor are what consumers have grown to love, or at least understand. But a variety of factors—health, environment, snob appeal, and good old-fashioned taste—have created a demand for grass-fed cattle; more than 1,000 ranchers have taken their livestock back to the pastures in the last few years. Meanwhile the official definition of grass-fed came under fire this year. In 2006, the USDA drafted some controversial standards that allow for confined (not pasture-raised) animals. In response, this year the American Grassfed Association announced that it will launch its own, stricter certification program. And overseas—particularly in Asian markets—grass-fed beef from New Zealand and elsewhere is sought after as an alternative to U.S. meat, which is viewed as unsafe because of mad cow disease. —Elizabeth Gillian

Go Fish

In the past, we were told not to eat wild salmon because it was nearly extinct. This year, however, campaigns instructed the opposite, with slogans like “Vote with Your Fork,” to drive up demand for (and thereby save) wild salmon. Alice Waters of Chez Panisse and Greg Higgins of Higgins Restaurant in Portland, Oregon, led the fight to save the Klamath, Snake, and Columbia rivers’ populations. They’re backing the proposed Salmon Economic Analysis and Planning Act (SEAPA), which would produce reams of new data about the fish and its habitat, thereby laying the groundwork for future campaigns and protective legislation. The fight may have caught fire in 2007, but it will inevitably roll on for years to come—look for conflict between salmon supporters and the operators of grain barges on the Snake River in 2008. —Elizabeth Gillian

I’m Sooooooo Totally Green

The buzzwords of the food industry in 2007 were local, sustainable, and organic. Naturally, all are fairly fuzzy and open to interpretation, but that didn’t dissuade business folk or consumers, all of whom were questing for some combination of a more marketable, more delicious, more conscience-soothing way to eat. The back-to-the-earth vibe manifested itself in restaurants like Picnick in New York, the sustaina-poseur Abode in Santa Monica, and Red Stag Supperclub in Minneapolis; and in grocery stores (Wal-Mart’s new emphasis on organic food; “natural” products like Quaker’s Simple Harvest hot cereal). The boom shows no sign of abating: Market data indicate U.S. sales of organic foods rose 22 percent in 2006. And forecasting predicts still more growth. But the question remains: Is there any way to set tough-and-clear standards that will turn mere words into labels that consumers can trust? —James Norton

Vegansexuals Say, “It’s Meat or Me!”

As if finding a mate weren’t hard enough already, some radical vegans are apparently limiting their dalliances to other non-animal-product eaters. Though the lifestyle has been around for a while, this was the year the media latched onto the term vegansexual. Named by a New Zealand researcher, these extreme eaters won’t play tonsil hockey with carnivores, whom they consider walking graveyards. “I would not want to be intimate with someone whose body is literally made up from the bodies of others who have died for their sustenance,” said one New Zealand practitioner. This, of course, led to the question of whether or not it is OK for vegans to breast-feed their babies or to have sex at all, what with all the swapping of bodily fluids. Cue spit or swallow jokes, if you must. Everyone laughs now (and vegans are used to being the butt of “loony liberal” jokes), but a few years down the line “Vegansexual” will probably be a category on Match.com. —Emily Matchar

Much Ado About Liver

Skewered by the media and animal rights activists as the worst thing since the Black Plague, foie gras started to stick up for itself a bit. Food ethicist and best-selling author Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) last year wrote a scorching essay in the New York Times pointing out that compared to the nightmarish environments of chicken and pork factory farms, foie gras farms are downright ducky. That said, celebrity chef and restaurant magnate Wolfgang Puck issued a ban on serving the stuff in his restaurants this year, telling the Washington Post that it was a question of foie gras being too rich and too tired, not too cruel. Earlier in the year, Chicago restaurateurs made a clever end run around their city’s ban, giving it away for “free,” and thereby circumventing the law as it was written. Meanwhile in Britain, the city council of Bolton took a symbolic stand against goose liver, prohibiting its serving at council events. The foie gras kerfluffles are sure to continue; it’s unlikely that news about anything this controversial and delicious will fade anytime soon. —James Norton

Chickens Behind Bars

Victory finally came for the Humane Society of the United States when Burger King, Wolfgang Puck, and Ben & Jerry’s all agreed to switch from battery-cage-grown chickens to fowl that’ve been allowed to spread their wings and lie in (more) peace. Cage-free is nice and all, but apparently chickens like it even more when they get to wander freely about a pasture, plucking worms and bathing in dust. (Note that this doesn’t mean free-range, which isn’t clearly defined enough to enforce humane conditions.) Getting companies to upgrade again to pasture-raised, however, is going to mean convincing consumers that $6 for a dozen eggs is worth that much more happiness in a bird’s life. —Davina Baum

Bestill My Beating Frog Heart

The popularity of Anthony Bourdain’s envelope-pushing TV show No Reservations led to a weird-world-eats programming boomlet. On the Travel Channel: Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, a shock-focused visual gross-out that manages to be both playful investigation and rubbernecker’s delight. We saw Zimmern down poultry embryos, beating frog’s hearts, and pulp-eating mangrove ribbon worms. The Food Network answered back with Have Fork, Will Travel, a sappy knockoff hosted by comedian and Three Sheets star Zane Lamprey, though Lamprey lacks Zimmern’s genuine curiosity and Bourdain’s cool intelligence. Even the National Geographic Channel got in on it, with a special “Gross Food” Halloween episode of Taboo. What’s next, Cooking with Cannibals? —Aaron Gilbreath

Eat, Drink, Watch, Listen

Ethical eating and continued curiosity about the behind-the-scenes drama of commercial kitchens set the stage for this year’s crop of culinary cinema. Catherine Zeta-Jones spent time in the back of the house to prep for her starring role as a head chef in No Reservations, a remake of the German film Mostly Martha. Food for thought came in the form of King Corn, a documentary exposing the dark side of America’s largest crop. Adrienne Shelly’s Waitress spun a tale about a poor waitress trapped in an unhappy marriage. And Disney’s Pixar-produced Ratatouille was a national crowd-pleaser, except perhaps in New York City where the premise of vermin invading a restaurant hit a little too close to home. —Laura Neilson

From the Yuppie Archives

Arugula and crème fraîche were considered exotic ingredients when Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso first published The Silver Palate Cookbook in 1982. They filled it with recipes they were using in their take-away shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Dishes like blueberry soup, tarragon chicken salad, and pesto were a hit, and got millions interested in the gourmet movement bubbling up in restaurants and shops across the country. In April, Workman Publishing reissued the cookbook, adding color photos (some not so appetizing) and about a dozen new recipes. While it still contains a few relics from the post-nouvelle past (blueberry mayonnaise), Silver Palate continues to be as useful as it was 25 years ago. —Kate Ramos

Simple Cooking, Complicated Grocery Shopping

Activist-chef Alice Waters produced a new cookbook in October. The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution makes a big deal out of where you get your ingredients (the opening pages list nine commandments according to Waters, including that you should shop at farmers’ markets and make sure your food is local and sustainable). Many of the recipes are uncharacteristically plain (bye-bye loquat sauce, hello boiled rice), suggesting that people should spend more time shopping than cooking. Waters did both with New York Times writer Kim Severson to publicize the book’s launch, revealing over lunch that she was single, and longing for “a good pal to be in the world with.” Food may be simple. Life is not. —Kate Ramos

Rock Out with Your Chopping Block Out

Artists, chefs, and marketing hacks alike attempted to capitalize on the foodie zeitgeist through a crop of projects whose subject was the improbable intersection of food and rock music. Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos put out an elegant collection of road-food essays, Anthony Bourdain hosted the Queens of the Stone Age on No Reservations, and Grinder blogger Kara Zuaro published I Like Food, Food Tastes Good, a collection of recipes contributed from all corners of the indie and alt-rock world. Oh, and Sam Mason of New York’s Tailor restaurant has been hosting a somewhat dubious online show called Dinner with the Band. It’s billed as a pairing of so-called “intellectual food”—does his chicken parmigiana actually qualify?—with indie-credible touring bands. If next year takes the trend to its natural mass-market conclusion, keep your eyes out for Rachael Ray and Britney Spears teaming up for the Damaged Goods Tour. —James Norton

Virtual Dinner Party

Banking on the idea that there are gamers out there dying to duke it out with a virtual whisk, a batch of cooking games hit the market this year. In March, Nintendo introduced Cooking Mama Cook Off for its newly launched Wii system. Using the batonlike remote as a universal utensil, players can chop, grate, slice, and stir their way to victory in a series of timed challenges. Throwing successful dinner parties on your hand-held DS will boost your social standing—in your second life, at least—while Master Chef offers a more educational gaming experience for the young domestic diva: It’s driven by cooking quizzes and the elements of various world cuisines. Still, tapping buttons only takes you so far in the real world—like dialing for takeout. —Laura Neilson

Restaurant Critic Exposed!

On April 16, Jonathan Gold became the first food writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. As the restaurant critic for LA Weekly, the sometimes awkward former music writer (dubbed Nervous Cuz by Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre) has reviewed everything from hole-in-the-wall noodle shops to grocery stores for his weekly column, Counter Intelligence. His unique approach and willingness to eat just about anything earned him the prize for what the Pulitzer organization calls his “zestful” writing. His victory was not without personal cost, of course; he proudly told the New York Times that he has had “dozens” of bouts of food poisoning. “When they listed the 400 restaurants in L. A. that had failed inspection, I realized that I had been to 110 of them.” —Kate Ramos

Bruni Hits a Nerve

After New York Times restaurant reviewer Frank Bruni slagged Kobe Club, its owner, Jeffrey Chodorow, went ballistic, taking out a full-page ad in the paper in which he denounced the critic as a poseur. Bruni had panned the pricey steakhouse, whose ceiling is decorated with samurai swords pointing at diners’ heads, as “scary indeed.” Chodorow, a financier with a string of restaurants and a criminal record (fraud), whined that “I and my staff worked extremely hard” on the restaurant, and dissed Bruni as having “no background” in food. Adding insult to injury (and more grist for Gawker), Bruni reviewed the Penthouse Executive Club’s steakhouse shortly thereafter, awarding the strip club’s eats one star to Kobe’s zero. —Lessley Anderson

Britain Unloves the Naked Chef

Backlash against British TV chef and healthy-food advocate Jamie Oliver reached a fever pitch in 2007, as a so-called meltdown of Britain’s school meals service occurred in reaction to Oliver’s outrageously nutritious lunches. Oliver—called a tosser, a wanker, and much worse by his critics—has insisted that fine-tuning of the program and the slow adaptation of children’s palates will eventually bring kids ’round to a healthier sort of school lunch. And if the schools stick to the program, not only will Turkey Twizzlers and chips be kept out of lunchrooms; junk food will be curbed from school vending machines. An even tougher set of healthy eating standards will be applied to primary-school meals in the UK in September 2008, and to secondary-school meals in September 2009. Can Oliver and healthy-food advocates continue standing tall against the Turkey Twizzler brigade? Stay tuned. —James Norton

Shut Up and Give Me an Imported Chocolate Bar!

Yeah, we’ve read the glowing memoirs about the 100-mile diet. We’ve rhapsodized over the taste of ripe locally grown tomatoes. And you know what? Sometimes we still just want to eat strawberries in January. As the locavore trend continues to grab headlines, some people are beginning to moan about the elitism of it all. New York magazine’s Adam Platt considered life without Tuscan truffles or Nebraska prime rib in a rant against foodie correctness and decided to stick his head in a box of Cheese Nips. In a New York Times op-ed, James McWilliams suggested that locally grown foods can sometimes have an even bigger carbon footprint than imported ones, prompting an impassioned defense over at environmentally minded Grist. The rest of the world continued to calmly slice Guatemalan bananas onto its oatmeal. —Emily Matchar

Cork Pops Back

It’s been a bumpy couple of years for cork, that venerable old-timey wine-stopper. Screw tops began gaining traction as respectable bottle closures, moving up from Mad Dog 20/20 to (relatively) fine wine. Cork came to be seen as the chupacabra of wine country, ravaging fine vintages by “corking” them with TCA, thereby transforming royal grape juice into nasty plonk. But in 2007, environmentalists became unlikely allies of the cork industry, arguing that cork is a sustainable choice. By buying wine sealed the old-fashioned way, consumers actually nurture and protect old cork forests by ensuring their protection and ongoing replenishment. —James Norton

Farmers’ Markets Not Fun Anymore

Farmers’ markets! Fresh air! Organic produce! Lovable, overall-clad country folk coming to the city to share their wholesome food with you, the sophisticated yet soulful urbanite! For a while the markets seemed to be on an unstoppable march to world domination, but 2007 may be remembered as the year when the craze for farmers selling directly to consumers began to hit its logical plateau. San Francisco, long on the cutting edge of the phenomenon with roughly one market per four square miles, experienced a lurching halt in the action as vendors started pulling out, citing oversaturation. While the craze continues to spread (registration required) elsewhere, it may only be a matter of time before other urban areas find themselves with too many outlets and insufficient vendors. Not that a glut of fresh food options is such a bad thing for consumers, of course. —James Norton

Chef Ramsay Spears Own Rep

At this point any 12-year-old can probably do a passable Gordon Ramsay imitation: Adopt a British accent and start swearing like a pirate with Tourette’s. But though the controversial chef’s overexposure has both good and bad implications for his career, a spearfishing incident earlier this year may have done some real damage. In brief: Self-described “fucking action man” Ramsay did not, in fact, catch a sea bass off the Devon coast during the filming of his show The F Word. Someone else did. And he claimed credit. Whether the debut of his new American program, Kitchen Nightmares, will overshadow the incident—either damning or laughably minor, depending upon your point of view—remains to be seen. —James Norton

Slow Food Fight

In San Francisco to promote his new book, Slow Food Nation, Italian Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini quickly found himself eating his words and canceling a planned speaking engagement. A passage in the book slams the upscale indoor Ferry Plaza Farmers Market as an “exclusive place” where farmers—whom he portrays as well-off ex–Silicon Valley types—sell produce at “boutique-y” prices to “actresses” who flaunt their produce “like jewels, status symbols.” Bristling, farmers and market management scratched Petrini’s scheduled book-signing and instead had it out with him at an emergency meeting called to restore a working relationship between the Slow Food king and Bay Area organic-farming royalty. Petrini—who kind of stood his ground at the meeting, accusing farmers of overreacting—issued an apology letter. It blamed poor translation for the passage’s petty tone, but acknowledged that “the elitism argument against organic and artisanal foods” is an inherent contradiction in the slow food movement. Moral of the story: Organic dirt is just as costly as conventional gossip. —Melissa Wagenberg Lasher

Not Literal Dirt, Right?

There are some things you just don’t do unless you want to cause trouble—like, for example, taking meat away from a hungry lion. Chef Daniel Patterson and food scientist Harold McGee did the oenological equivalent when they wrote “Talk Dirt to Me” for the New York Times last May. The duo debated the definition of the sacred wine word terroir, saying that it doesn’t mean a wine should taste like the rocks of the place where it was grown. To many who view terroir as an all-encompassing term describing the environmental circumstances in which a wine is grown (and not that wine grown in limestone should taste limestone-y), the article raised an issue of semantics. But a look at the Chowhound boards reveals just how tangled up some are over the use of the t-word. Whether you agree or not with Patterson and McGee’s take on the matter, their article is an entertaining read that got us all talking about myth versus reality when it comes to the sometimes elusive and daunting topic of wine. —Aïda Mollenkamp

India’s a Classy Drunk

India has long consumed more whiskey than any other country in the world, but that has generally meant cheap brands from the India-based United Breweries Group (UB Group), which has a near choke hold on the nation’s alcohol market. But lately, the growing Indian middle class has begun to thirst for wine and fine spirits. Wine clubs have sprung up around the country, and high-end restaurants like Bangalore’s Olive Beach have started holding wine tastings to teach the moneyed classes the difference between a Cabernet Sauvignon and a Sauvignon Blanc. And in July, the government slashed high tariffs on wine and spirit imports, paving the way for a rush of competing Australian Shirazes and Napa Valley Cabernets. Not to be outdone, the UB Group expanded into fancier quaffs, purchasing Scotch distiller Whyte & Mackay and announcing it would soon release a line of wines aimed at the newly chic called Zinzi. Meanwhile, a larger chunk of the population simply hoped to have clean drinking water one day. —Lessley Anderson

Starbucks Hits a Mc–Land Mine

The mocha Frappuccino’s reign of frothy supremacy is crashing like a deprived caffeine junkie. In the last fiscal year, Starbucks’s stock dropped 23 percent, mainly due to the coffee maker’s tactics of plopping cookie-cutter stores on every corner—14,396, at last count. Compounding the java vendor’s tribulations, a Consumer Reports taste test ranked McDonald’s Premium coffee ahead of Starbucks’s, citing lower cost and better flavor than the Seattle company’s bitter, wallet-emptying brew. Meanwhile, McDonald’s took a page from its upscale competitor, opening a new line of McCafé restaurants. They use real plates and stainless steel silverware, are furnished with leather chairs and comfy couches, and sell gourmet lattes and cappuccinos alongside frosting-topped cake with the chain’s usual legendary efficiency. Up next: the Big Mac–and-Americano Value Meal. —Joshua M. Bernstein

A Stretch of the Definition

Last May the USDA gave 38 ingredients entry into what some would like to keep an exclusive club: the order of the organic seal. The USDA would allow these 38 ingredients—even if they themselves are not organic, such as conventionally farmed hops grown with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers—to be used in certified organic products. Tens of thousands of emails and letters poured in opposing the department’s actions, and groups like the Organic Consumers Association drew up a petition detailing why some of these ingredients (casings from factory farmed animals’ intestines, for instance) are a far cry from seal-worthy. The approval appears to have been largely in response to pressure from pork and food processors (casings) and Anheuser-Busch (hops)—although the beer-maker has subsequently pledged to use only organic hops in its organic line. Whether an organic seal will make more people want to drink beer from Anheuser-Busch remains to be seen. —Eric Slatkin

Culture Clash

Pinkberry resurrected frozen yogurt, opening 17 shops in its native Los Angeles area and 4 in New York City this year. On any given day, each location served more than 1,500 customers, including some who hopped back in line after finishing their cups. Fans acted like they hadn’t seen frozen yogurt before, and in a way, they hadn’t. The 1980s version masqueraded as healthy ice cream, and it later lost out to new formulations of reduced-fat ice cream. This time, unflavored, naturally tart yogurt became popular at Pinkberry and its competitors: Berri Good, Kiwiberri, Snowberry, and Roseberry. Detractors cried, “Stinkberry!” Pinkberry was sued for not even being yogurt, because it allegedly contains no live yogurt cultures, and Red Mango in Korea said that Pinkberry copied its concept. The accusations didn’t slow Pinkberry down: The company planned to expand to Las Vegas and London, and Starbucks founder Howard Schultz’s venture capital firm plunked down a $27.5 million investment. —Jessica Su

Yummy Crisco Chocolate

In October 2006, the Chocolate Manufacturers Association and other trade groups petitioned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to modernize food labeling standards. Hidden beneath regulations for chunky-style tomatoes and macaroni was an innocuous-sounding proposal to “use a vegetable fat in place of another vegetable fat named in the standard (e.g., cacao fat).” Theoretically, manufacturers could add Crisco to chocolate and still call it chocolate. About 1,500 people wrote letters and signed petitions effectively saying, “Don’t mess with our chocolate!” The FDA is reviewing the matter, but at least Mars vowed to accept no cocoa butter substitutes. A bittersweet ending. —Jessica Su

Eat a Fry, Go to Jail

Big Brother wasn’t content to merely watch you this year; he also offered suggestions about how you can enjoy a healthier diet. In Philly and New York, he tried to label your menus. In LA, he wanted to keep big bad fast food out of your neighborhood. And all over the place, he either proposed banning the commercial use of trans fats or succeeded. Across the pond, a future king indulged imperial fantasies about crushing his populist rival, Mayor McCheese. Whether all this is the dawning of a new fascist police state or the wise use of collective resources to save lives largely depends upon the bill in question … and how you happen to feel about the rich, silken taste sensation of Crisco. —James Norton

Recipe for a Lawsuit

Chefs are always copping each other’s styles, borrowing techniques and even entire dishes to spawn culinary movements. But Rebecca Charles, owner of NYC’s Pearl Oyster Bar, decided her former sous-chef Ed McFarland had gone too far when he allegedly took not only her mom’s Caesar salad recipe to his new seafood joint, but also Pearl’s entire design, down to the seat cushions. She retaliated with a lawsuit last June, which if decided in her favor could open the door for future intellectual-property-theft complaints against restaurants. Like Homaro Cantu’s trademarked edible menus, Charles’s case signals just how serious a business food has become. —Lessley Anderson

Nothing at the Labor Market

It’s now a sad rite of the harvest season: the newspaper stories about farmers who complain that their crops are going unpicked because of a shortage of workers. But amid this year’s high-volume debate over immigration—illegals are said to make up 50 to 75 percent of all farmworkers—increased raids and stepped-up border patrols made the labor market even tighter. In response, a few California farmers moved their whole operations across the border to Mexico. After immigration reform was tabled, the Bush administration quietly began loosening the rules to make it easier for potential farmworkers to get visas. But an unlikely alliance between unions and agribusiness pushed the AgJOBS bill, which would allow illegal immigrants to work legally and later apply for residency. —Nicholas Day

Oh Yeah, That Farm Bill

This was supposed to be the year that the American people rose up and took over the Farm Bill. That’s the agricultural omnibus bill whose structure and subsidies have been blamed for almost everything that’s bad—obesity, factory farming, cereal straws—about the way we grow and guzzle food in America. Newly conscientious eaters rebranded the legislation the Food and Farm Bill, and both big and small media spoke up with the same message: The system’s done broke. But when the legislation passed the House in July, it largely preserved the cornfed status quo. Little more was expected from the Senate version. In the New York Times, Michael Pollan, who’d written in the spring that this year’s bill might at long last be different, conceded that it was looking like a bill “in the traditional let-them-eat-high-fructose-corn-syrup mold.” But in mid-November, when a couple of promising reform amendments came up for debate in the Senate, the whole bill went off the procedural rails. It finally passed the Senate in December, but President Bush has threatened to veto it. Oh well, it was a nice idea. —Nicholas Day