It would seem to be nothing less than dereliction of duty for an Italian-American food writer to have never been to the Italian food mecca that is Arthur Avenue, but it does on occasion happen. This oversight is even more glaring given that said food writer is half Calabrese and had never set foot in the Calabria Pork Store. more ›

READING: Get a drink at the Half King tonight in some good company - Anthony Bourdain will be there with Bill Buford, to celebrate Buford's new book, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras more ›

October 14: Union Square Chocolate Lover’s Walking Tour more ›

- NY Mag contemplates an NYC without trans-fats. So very sad. more ›

The City's Greenmarkets turn 30 this week. They've become such an integral part of our culinary landscape, with 45 locations across all five boroughs, that it's hard to imagine that there was a time we didn't have ready access to ramps, heirloom tomatoes, and locally grown berries (and neither did our chefs). According to New York Mag, the Greenmarkets were set up as a way to preserve farmland by lowering the costs involved in wholesaling; by removing the middleman and selling directly to consumers, farmers made more money. And boy, did they make money. As one farmer notes, “Rosemary put my kids in college.” Raisfeld and Patronite go on to profile five Greenmarket purveyors, including the Violet Hill Farm, which provided the pig that Bill Buford took home from the market strapped to his Vespa as described in his book, Heat, to Stokes Farm, which has been a fixture at the Greenmarket since day one. more ›

Bill Buford, having moved on from Mario Batali, visits Will Goldfarb at Room 4 Dessert to learn more about the wild and wacky world of pastry chefs in the New Yorker. more ›

Tickets into the (Bill) Buford/(Mario) Batali panel moderated by (Anthony) Bourdain at the New York Public Library on 42nd were scarce, and the room reflected it as it was packed to the walls last night. Luckily it seemed like many of the walk-ins waiting ouside were able to slide into the room just before introductions. more ›

A week's vacation at the beach is the perfect time to catch up on your summer reading list. At the top of ours was Heat : An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford. We had read an excerpt from a recent New Yorker in which the author recounted some time with a master Tuscan butcher, then came back to New York, acquired a whole pig (which he lugged home from the greenmarket strapped to his Vespa), and butchered it in his apartment, and knew that the book would be an ideal vacation read. In the book Buford, a staff writer for the New Yorker, describes with great detail his time in the kitchen at Mario Batali's Babbo from his first days, spent dicing carrots into perfect cubes, to the nights he is allowed to work the pasta station, one of the restaurant's most difficult. His stint at Babbo was part of an ongoing quest to learn about Italian cooking to a degree of depth that could only come with years of work, travel, sweat, and time learning from masters around the world. more ›

- Have an idea about food products and an inclination to team up with the agrifood world? Well then, here is a contest just for you. more ›

Returning to the Greenmarket this week Gothamist found a market in flux, yet bustling at the same time. Saturday it was still ramps and the very first of the asparagus, but we are crawling into the beginning of the prime season which begins in a few weeks as a market full of asparagus and green garlic will rapidly give way to peas, baby carrots, a myriad of leafy greens, further followed by all of summers bounty. more ›

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