With more than one in every five people over the age of fourteen addicted, drug abuse has been called the most formidable health problem worldwide. If we are not victims ourselves, we all know someone struggling with the merciless compulsion to alter their experience by changing how their brain functions.Drawing on years of research--as well as personal experience as a recovered addict--researcher and professor Judy Grisel has reached a fundamental conclusion: for the addict, there will never be enough drugs. The brain's capacity to learn and adapt is seemingly infinite, allowing it to counteract any regular disruption, including that caused by drugs. What begins as a normal state punctuated by periods of being high transforms over time into a state of desperate craving that is only temporarily subdued by a fix, explaining why addicts are unable to live either with or without their drug. One by one, Grisel shows how different drugs act on the brain, the kind of experiential effects they generate, and the specific reasons why each is so hard to kick.Grisel's insights lead to a better understanding of the brain's critical contributions to addictive behavior, and will help inform a more rational, coherent, and compassionate response to the epidemic in our homes and communities.

    This breakthrough book reveals the diet, exercise, and lifestyle practices that make the Okinawans the healthiest and longest-lived population in the world. With an easy-to-follow Four-Week Turnaround Plan, nearly one hundred fast, delicious recipes, and a moderate exercise plan, The Okinawa Program can dramatically increase your chances for a long, healthy life

    Once again, editor Holly Hughes plumbs magazines, newspapers, newsletters, books, and websites for the year's finest culinary prose—“stories for connoisseurs, celebrations of the specialized, the odd, or simply the excellent” (Entertainment Weekly). Featuring essays and articles from established food writers and rising stars, as well as some literary surprises, Best Food Writing 2012 captures the trends, big stories, and new voices. From going hunting to going vegan, from soup-to-nuts or farm-to-table, there's something for every foodie in the newest edition of this acclaimed series.Previous contributors include: Brett Anderson, Dan Barber, Frank Bruni, John T. Edge, Jonathan Gold, Gabrielle Hamilton, Jessica B. Harris, Madhur Jaffrey, Francis Lam, David Leite, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, Molly O'Neill, Kevin Pang, Ruth Reichl, Alan Richman, Kim Severson, Jason Sheehan, Sam Sifton, John Thorne, and Calvin Trillin.

    Her story is raw like that first bite of wild onion, alive with startling imagery, and told with uncommon emotional power.Regan grew up the youngest of four headstrong girls on a small farm in Northwest Indiana. While gathering raspberries as a toddler, Regan preternaturally understood to pick just the ripe fruit and leave the rest for another day. In the family’s leaf-strewn fields, the orange flutes of chanterelles beckoned her while they eluded others.Regan has had this intense, almost otherworldly connection with food and the earth it comes from since her childhood, but connecting with people has always been more difficult. She was a little girl who longed to be a boy, gay in an intolerant community, an alcoholic before she turned twenty, and a woman in an industry dominated by men—she often felt she “wasn’t made for this world,” and as far as she could tell, the world tended to agree. But as she learned to cook in her childhood farmhouse, got her first restaurant job at age fifteen, taught herself cutting-edge cuisine while running a “new gatherer” underground supper club, and worked her way from front-of-house staff to running her own kitchen, Regan found that food could help her navigate the strangeness of the world around her.Regan cooks with instinct, memory, and an emotional connection to her ingredients that can’t be taught. Written from that same place of instinct and emotion, Burn the Place tells Regan’s story in raw and vivid prose and brings readers into a world—from the Indiana woods to elite Chicago kitchens—that is entirely original and unforgettable.

    Dividing his sensibilities between Epicureanism and ethics, Taras Grescoe set out on a nine-month, worldwide search for a delicious—and humane—plate of seafood. What he discovered shocked him. From North American Red Lobsters to fish farms and research centers in China, Bottomfeeder takes readers on an illuminating tour through the $55-billion-dollar-a-year seafood industry. Grescoe examines how out-of-control pollution, unregulated fishing practices, and climate change affect what ends up on our plate. More than a screed against a multibillion-dollar industry, however, this is also a balanced and practical guide to eating, as Grescoe explains to readers which fish are best for our environment, our seas, and our bodies. At once entertaining and illuminating, Bottomfeeder is a thoroughly enjoyable look at the world’s cuisines and an examination of the fishing and farming practices we too easily take for granted.

    But calls for a “food revolution” come most often from a region where the temperature rarely varies more than a few degrees. In the national conversation about developing a sustainable and equitable food tradition, the huge portion of our population who live where the soil freezes hard for months of the year feel like they're left out in the cold.In Winter’s Kitchen reveals how a food movement with deep roots in the Heartland—our first food co-ops, most productive farmland, and the most storied agricultural scientists hail from the region—isn't only thriving, it's presenting solutions that could feed a country, rather than just a smattering of neighborhoods and restaurants. Using the story of one thanksgiving meal, Dooley discovers that a locally-sourced winter diet is more than a possibility: it can be delicious.

    But all of the recipes in Dining In have one thing in common: they make even the most oven-phobic or restaurant-crazed person want to stay home and cook. They prove that casual doesn't have to mean boring, simple doesn't have to be uninspired, and that more steps or ingredients don't always translate to a better plate of food.Vegetable-forward but with an affinity for a mean steak and a deep regard for fresh fish, Dining In is all about building flavor and saving time. Alison's ingenuity seduces seasoned cooks, while her warm, edgy writing makes these recipes practical and approachable enough for the novice. With 125 recipes for effortlessly chic dishes that are full of quick-trick techniques (think slathering roast chicken in anchovy butter, roasting citrus to ramp up the flavor, and keeping boiled potatoes in the fridge for instant crispy smashed potatoes), she proves that dining in brings you just as much joy as eating out.

    An illuminating, beguiling tour of the morals and manners of our present food manias, in search of eating's deeper truths, asking "Where do we go from here?"Never before have so many North Americans cared so much about food. But much of our attention to it tends towards grim calculation (what protein is best? how much?); social preening ("I can always score the last reservation at xxxxx"); or graphic machismo ("watch me eat this now"). Gopnik shows we are not the first food fetishists but we are losing sight of a timeless truth, "the table comes first": what goes on around the table matters as much to life as what we put on the table: families come together (or break apart) over the table, conversations across the simplest or grandest board can change the world, pain and romance unfold around it—all this is more essential to our lives than the provenance of any zucchini or the road it travelled to reach us. Whatever dilemmas we may face as omnivores, how not what we eat ultimately defines our society.Gathering people and places drawn from a quarter century's reporting in North America and France, The Table Comes First marks the beginning a new conversation about the way we eat now.

    Mark Bitterman is a man truly possessed by salt. As “selmelier” at The Meadow, the internationally recognized artisan-product boutique, Bitterman explains the promise and allure of salt to thousands of visitors from across the country who flock to his showstopping collection. “Salt can be a revelation,” he urges, “no food is more potent, more nutritionally essential, more universal, or more ancient. No other food displays salt’s crystalline beauty, is as varied, or as storied.” In Salted, Bitterman traces the mineral’s history, from humankind’s first salty bite to its use in modern industry to the resurgent interest in artisan salts. Featuring more than 50 recipes that showcase this versatile and marvelous ingredient, Salted also includes a field guide to artisan salts profiling 80 varieties and exploring their dazzling characters, unique stories, production methods, and uses in cooking; plus a quick-reference guide covering over 150 salts. Salting is one of the more ingrained habits in cooking, and according to Bitterman, all habits need to be questioned. He challenges you to think creatively about salting, promising that by understanding and mastering the principles behind it—and becoming familiar with the primary types of artisanal salts available—you will be better equipped to get the best results for your individual cooking style and personal taste. Whether he’s detailing the glistening staccato crunch of fleur de sel harvested from millennia-old Celtic saltmaking settlements in France or the brooding sizzle of forgotten rock salts transported by the Tauregs across the Sahara, Bitterman’s mission is to encourage us to explore the dazzling world of salt beyond the iodized curtain.Winner – 2011 James Beard Cookbook Award – Reference & Scholarship Category

    While much of this is invisible, what we do know is that food is beginning to look and taste the same, whether you’re strolling through a San Francisco farmers market, at a Midwestern potluck—or a McDonald’s in India. Ninety-five percent of the world’s calories now come from only 30 species, and a closer look at America’s cornucopia of grocery store options reveals that our foods are primarily made up of corn, wheat, rice, palm oil and soybeans. The diversity of our food supply is dwindling.Part journey to six continents in pursuit of delicious and endangered tastes, part investigation of the loss of biodiversity from soil to plate, Bread, Wine, Chocolate tells the story of what we are losing, how we are losing it, and the inspiring people and places that are sustaining the foods we love—celebrating the fact that the solutions to the loss of agrobiodiversity aren’t difficult; they’re delicious.Join award-winning journalist Simran Sethi as she travels from wild coffee forests in Ethiopia to cocoa plantations of Ecuador, from the brewery to the bakery and the temple, to meet scientists, farmers, chefs, wine makers, beer brewers, coffee roasters and chocolate connoisseurs to discuss the reasons for this loss and learn what it means to experience food in a whole new way, tasting foods more deeply through each one of our senses in order to savor—and save—the foods we love.

    The Julie/Julia Project. In the early days of food blogs, these were the pioneers whose warmth and recipes turned their creators’ kitchens into beloved web destinations. Luisa Weiss was working in New York when she decided to cook her way through her massive recipe collection. The Wednesday Chef, the cooking blog she launched to document her adventures, charmed readers around the world. But Luisa never stopped longing to return to her childhood home in Berlin. A food memoir with recipes, My Berlin Kitchen deliciously chronicles how she finally took the plunge and went across the ocean in search of happiness—only to find love waiting where she least expected it.

    It’s a life of pancakes that remind you of blueberry pie, eating onion dip with your glam squad, banana bread that breaks the internet, and a little something called Pad Thai Carbonara. After two years of parenthood, falling in love with different flavors, and relearning the healing power of comfort food, this book is like Chrissy’s new edible diary: recipes for quick-as-a-snap meals; recipes for lighter, brighter, healthier-ish living; and recipes that, well, are gonna put you to bed, holding your belly. And it will have you hungry for more.

    Our television screens and newspapers are filled with celebrity chefs, whose authority and ambition range from the small scale (what we should have for supper) to large-scale public schemes designed to improve our communal eating habits.When did the basic human imperative to feed ourselves mutate into such a multitude of anxieties about provenance, ethics, health, lifestyle, and class status? Since when did the likes of Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson gain the power to transform our kitchens and dining tables into places where we expect to be spiritually sustained? And why do we take seriously the often mindless prattle of food writers and purveyors?In this masterful polemic, Steven Poole argues that we’re trying to fill more than just our bellies when we pick up our knives and forks, and that we might be a lot happier if we realised that sometimes we should throw away the colour supplements and open a tin of beans.

    Wrapped, rolled, or filled; steamed, fried, or baked–Asian dumplings are also surprisingly easy to prepare, as Andrea Nguyen demonstrates in Asian Dumplings. Nguyen is a celebrated food writer and teacher with a unique ability to interpret authentic Asian cooking styles for a Western audience. Her crystal-clear recipes for more than 75 of Asia’s most popular savory and sweet parcels, pockets, packages, and pastries range from Lumpia (the addictive fried spring rolls from the Philippines) to Shanghai Soup Dumplings (delicate thin-skinned dumplings filled with hot broth and succulent pork) to Gulab Jamun (India’s rich, syrupy sweets). Organized according to type (wheat pastas, skins, buns, and pastries; translucent wheat and tapioca preparations; rice dumplings; legumes and tubers; sweet dumplings), Asian Dumplings encompasses Eastern, Southeastern, and Southern Asia, with recipes from China, Japan, Korea, Nepal, Tibet, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Throughout, Nguyen shares the best techniques for shaping, filling, cooking, and serving each kind of dumpling. And she makes it easy to incorporate dumplings into a contemporary lifestyle by giving a thorough introduction to essential equipment and ingredients and offering make-ahead and storage guidance, time-saving shortcuts that still yield delectable results, and tips on planning a dumpling dinner party. More than 40 line drawings illustrate the finer points of shaping many kinds of dumplings, including gyōza/pot stickers, wontons, and samosas. Dozens of mouth-watering color photographs round out Asian Dumplings, making it the most definitive, inviting, inspiring book of its kind.

    Shuttling between continents as a child, she lived a life of dislocation that would become habit as an adult, never quite at home in the world. And yet, through all her travels, her favorite food remained the simple rice she first ate sitting on the cool floor of her grandmother’s kitchen in South India.Poignant and surprising, Love, Loss, and What We Ate is Lakshmi’s extraordinary account of her journey from that humble kitchen, ruled by ferocious and unforgettable women, to the judges’ table of Top Chef and beyond. It chronicles the fierce devotion of the remarkable people who shaped her along the way, from her headstrong mother who flouted conservative Indian convention to make a life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfather—a brilliant engineer with an irrepressible sweet tooth—to the man seemingly wrong for her in every way who proved to be her truest ally. A memoir rich with sensual prose and punctuated with evocative recipes, it is alive with the scents, tastes, and textures of a life that spans complex geographies both internal and external.Love, Loss, and What We Ate is an intimate and unexpected story of food and family—both the ones we are born to and the ones we create—and their enduring legacies.