ENLIGHTENED DIET: What The Best Organic Chefs Do Online

While most contemporary food movements embrace a return to more sustainable methods of farming and simple, authentic food-preparation practices, many of today’s best professional chefs are adept at navigating the high-tech world of food websites. We asked a few for their favorites:

Ann Gentry
Gentry has spent 25 years raising the standards of vegetarian cooking. A vegan chef, owner of the Real Food Daily restaurants in Southern California and author of an accompanying cookbook, she regularly visits:
Wellness Information: veria.com
Food News: sustainablefoodnews.com

Stu Stein
The Pacific Northwest’s Stu Stein, author of The Sustainable Kitchen, is inexorably drawn to small-scale agriculture initiatives, local economies, and regional food supplies that benefit both growers and consumers. It’s no surprise that his Web activity centers around:
Sustainability: sustainabletable.org
News: sustainableindustries.com

Nora Pouillon
Pouillon, chef and owner of Restaurant Nora, the nation’s first certified organic restaurant, relies on the newsletters from:
Food News: slowfood.com
Organic Trade: ota.com
Nutrition: environmentalnutrition.com
News about Women’s Health: health.harvard.edu/newsletters/Harvard_Womens_Health_Watch.htm

Jessica Prentice
Finally, it’s great to hear from an expert on the lunar cycles of the agrarian year. In her acclaimed book, Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection, Jessica Prentice asks readers to center their diets around what’s available locally. In other words, be more connected to the seasons and your region and also strive to be more sensitive to your body, because there is a reason that certain foods taste better at certain times of the year. Prentice, who teaches workshops to help people develop practical skills as well as to inspire them to cook, recently created a local foods wheel for the San Francisco area and is working on wheels for other regions. She writes her own New Moon newsletter (see WiseFoodWays.com) and finds the Internet most useful for researching recipes. She loves the following two sites:
Gourmet News: epicurious.com
Recipes: recipezaar.com

Not surprisingly, the four luminaries also made a point of listing their favorite books and authors. Prentice called Madhur Jaffrey, author of World Vegetarian, her favorite author and included Ayurveda: A Life of Balance by Maya Tiwari on her most-loved list, along with Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions. Pouillon is currently reading Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products by Mark Schapiro, and she recently finished Our Stolen Future by Theo Colborn. Pouillon, Gentry, and Stein all mentioned the award-winning The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan.

Matt Sutherland