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Category: Travel
Read These Now
ELV note: Merci beaucoup to Patricia Thacker (Food Gal #1 and The Official Ex-Wife of ELV) for sending us this article. Continue after the jump for the complete list of James Beard Foundation Media & Book Award Winners, or, as we call it around the ELV household, Passover.
Check out some of the year’s most important stories written about food, all in the running for this week’s Beard Awards.The James Beard Foundation hosts its prestigious award ceremony at Lincoln Center in New York City on May 3. Much like James Beard, the man himself—a quintessential American cook who loved to eat—the Oscars of the food world tends to favor upscale dining in big city places. While the foundation could make a bold statement by highlighting more cooks who are making a difference by making dinner, in at least one category, it’s shown it is willing to award a combination of food and social change—a viable and visible countercuisine.
Beard was a “patron saint of culinary values,” according to food writer David Kamp, and as more reviewers move away from being mere culinary mentors towards acting as consumer advocates, one of the James Beard Award’s categories—for food journalism—shows just how contemporaries are serving up social values through food.
Here are eight of nominees worth reading:
“In Through the Back Door” in The Oxford American
John T. Edge consistently writes about Southern food with a scholarly flourish. He doesn’t celebrate virtuous eaters and hipster farmers; instead, he writes about how food can bridge fractured race and class relations, in this case, with greasy, hickoried pork-shoulder sandwiches known as barbecue. (ELV note: we have eaten at Craig’s Barbecue in De Valls Bluff, Arkansas (twice with Food Gal #1) and it’s one of many reasons we are such barbecue snobs when it comes what passes for such in these here parts.)
ELV Taking Break – The Food World Mourns
To all our devoted readers, foodies, fans, acolytes, adversaries and occasional commenters:
For the next week to ten days, ELV will have precious little time to eat and post about his experiences amongst the restaurants of Las Vegas because:
1) He has to earn a living, has worked all weekend on a particularly nasty bit of bad faith litigation against State Farm Insurance Company, and will be tied up in deposition for the next two days;
2) On Wednesday, the Food Network is flying him to Los Angeles for a taping;
3) On Thursday, his chosen profession as a lawyer-at-law calls him once again into a courtroom for a nasty little landlord/tenant kerfuffle (involving, of all things, a restaurant);
4) Friday, he leaves for a few days in the Big Apple where he’ll be attending the James Beard Awards next Monday night (expect a lot of Facebook-ing and Twitter-ing on this, though);
5) He returns to Vegas, hungover and happily exhausted next Tuesday night, just in time for the start of Vegas Uncork’d (ditto).
6) He’ll probably rest his liver for a day or so before eating and drinking himself silly again for the four days of Uncork’d events.
So the posts will be few and far between for the forseeable future.
But if you can’t live without your daily dose of ELV, follow us on Facebook and/or Twitter.
Where, we assure you, ELV will continue impart the erudition, information, infuriating opinions and sophomoric humor for which he is known, to obsessive and interested foodies everywhere. (Expect the tasty snaps to be of much lower quality, however.)
Bon appetit to all, and see you at Uncork’d!