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June 9, 2012 It's a good time to be a craft brewer, as Americans are thirsty for full-flavored and local beers. But when small breweries grow, they can also risk losing some of the "craftiness" their fans love. And when they expand, many brewers have to rewrite their recipes — starting with the water.

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June 8, 2012 Southern food and culture expert John T. Edge sees the food truck craze as a great democratic portrait of America. His new cookbook highlights some of the most creative and cheap food cooked in trucks these days.

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June 1, 2012 A Boston chef and a composer recently experimented with opera to help create a new language to describe food and explore the intricate relationship between the two. In this case, pass the asparagus. Next time, it might be squash.

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May 24, 2012 In tough economic times, people almost never cut out comfort foods like chocolate. But sometimes, when you just can't get the foods you love, deprivation can lead to a new food invention, like Estonia's faux chocolate bar, the Kama bar.

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May 21, 2012 Boiling maple sap down to maple syrup isn't going away anytime soon, but it's getting some new competition from the humble birch. The tapping of the birch trees is a spring tradition in Latvia, but it's starting to catch on elsewhere.

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May 15, 2012 VPRBoiling down the last of the season maple sap and brewing a strong dark beer to share in the summer was a common tradition on Vermont farms a couple of generations ago. The practice had all but died out but is being revived now, thanks to a handful of local brewers.

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May 10, 2012 Thomas Jefferson's garden was a vast, beautiful science experiment involving over 300 varieties of 90 different plants. And no gardening detail was too small for Jefferson to note in the gardening journal he kept for nearly 60 years.

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April 6, 2012 A long-standing myth holds that Catholics eat fish on Fridays because of a secret pact a medieval pope made to sell more fish. That's just a fish tale. The real story behind fish Fridays is much better.

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February 19, 2012 Dining was a very, very big deal in Edwardian England — and the food, it turns out, was pretty sophisticated. So why was British food derided as boring, tasteless fare for much of the 20th century? Here's the story.

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January 1, 2012 NWNewsNative American tribes in Eastern Oregon recently marked kimtee inmewit, a ceremony that welcomes the sacred new foods of the new year. The tribes see these foods not just as nourishment, but as a connection to ancestors.

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January 1, 2012 On New Year's Day some 200 years ago, Haiti gained its independence from France. Each Jan. 1, Haitians commemorate the event by eating soup joumou — a dish their former French rulers considered too good for them. The soup is so beloved that it can land some in the hospital.

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December 24, 2011 Latin America has hundreds of interpretations of this Christmas Eve treat – tamales vary not just by country but often by region. So whose version is best? That's a question likely to elicit a fiercely partisan response.

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November 9, 2011 Once intellectuals get rolling down the food aisle, who knows where they'll end up. One just ended up in a really dark corner. Here's his latest contribution to our understanding of the subject — a journal article analyzing the "foodways" of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series.

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October 13, 2011 I was at a complete loss. American mothers and their children could apparently turn out edible artworks by the dozen and here I was, failing at the first attempt to help my daughter feel at home in our new country.

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September 30, 2011 Festivals, beer, recipes and pie

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