CLR 100, Levine, Allegheny: Databases, Books & Websites

The business of food covers the complexity of the production and consumption of food, in a variety of social and cultural contexts. Topics include the growth of organics and local farm movements, which have provided Americans with an alternative food chain to the big food business industry. Readers will enjoy reports on the development of food and media, covering some of the most popular chefs and shows on television, beginning with the celebrity of Julia Child.

Chefs have become figures of heightened interest in our culture over the past decade. We look at chefs as stars and to restaurants as their stage. The twenty-seven fascinating individuals who tell their stories in this book bring us into their world and reveal how their early years, their beliefs, and their passion for quality have helped them become modern culinary legends.

The processes of change in systems of production, commercialization, and consumption of food, as well as the problems and nutritional habits analyzed here, develop within the framework of the technological and socio-productive transformations experienced in many parts of the world as a consequence of the transition from traditional rural societies to the predominantly urban and industrial societies of our time.

With more than 100 color photographs by Micheal McLaughlin

In the winter of 1996, Michael Ruhlman donned hounds-tooth-check pants and a chef's jacket and entered the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, to learn the art of cooking. His vivid and energetic record of that experience, The Making of a Chef, takes us to the heart of this food-knowledge mecca. Here we meet a coterie of talented chefs, an astonishing and driven breed. Ruhlman learns fundamental skills and information about the behavior of food that make cooking anything possible.

Although she would later singlehandedly create a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, Julia Child was not always a master chef. Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the USIS, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever with her newfound passion for cooking and teaching.