Welcome to the Artful Table

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An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

My guess is that Bill Buford started this journey, as chronicled in Heat, as a better than average home cook. By the end of the book he has transcended into a level of culinary knowledge and skill that most of us can only hope to attain.

Working a prep cook in Mario Batali’s Babo kitchen, Buford is doing research for a simple article. He soon becomes seduced by the kitchen and works his way to the line as a quite competent cook. Next he embarks on a trip to Italy to learn about pasta and finds that the methods and techniques he is learning have descended from mother to daughter for hundreds of years. His final pilgrimage is to Tuscany to learn from Dario the Butcher. He learns much more than how to cut meat. He comes to understand the soul of that particular place and how the food traditions are interwoven with the generations of people that have come before.

The book builds slowly from the everyday duties in one of America’s best Italian kitchens through the Italian countryside to an emotional crescendo as he reaches the epiphany of this understanding of place.

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Author Michael Pollan returns with his new book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. This book follows The Omnivore’s Dilemma and attempts to answer the question ‘OK, now what should I eat?’. Pollan’s simple answer: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
For some, this simple statement will seem obvious. But for most, it is an attack on the typical American diet. A few more of his simple rules: Avoid any processed food with a health claim. And don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
Pollan, without being condescending, exposes many flaws in nutritional “science” of the last thirty years. This book is a combination of common sense and a result of Michael Pollan’s many years of research and experience. And guides the reader in making better decisions about what to eat.

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Author Michael Pollan takes us through 4 different meals from field to table. The first meal is from the typical industrial farming model where we learn that corn is contained in over one quarter of the products in the supermarket. The second meal points out the flaws in “big organic”. The third is sourced from locally grown and produced food. He hunts and forages for the fourth meal.

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This book features essays written by Carlo Petrini, Michael Pollan, Jamey Lionette, Prince Charles and Vandana Shiva.