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.)
