Farm Aid Sets The Stage In Central Pennsyvlania

Map of Pennsylvania highlighting Dauphin County (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For just over a quarter-century, Farm Aid has used pop music to try to help fix some of the problems in American agriculture: the disappearance of family farms, the corporatization of food, and the widening gap between producers and consumers.

The nonprofit organization will bring its annual fundraising concert to Hersheypark Stadium on Saturday, Sept. 22, to once again share its message in a very public way. Performers will include founders Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp and Neil Young, as well as Dave Matthews, Animal Liberation Orchestra, Kenny Chesney, Jack Johnson, Pegi Young & the Survivors, and Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real.

The show came to Pittsburgh in 2002, and organizers say they are excited to be bringing it back to Pennsylvania.

“We looked at Hershey before,” said Carolyn Mugar, Farm Aid’s executive director. “It’s right in the middle of some the best farm country in the region, and the size is perfect. We’re going to change out all the concessions to be homegrown and regional, and it is really going to feel like the venue is ours that day.”

Read more: http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/735399_Farm-Aid-sets-the-stage-in-central-Pennsyvlania.html#ixzz26jwvan7p

In Copenhagen, Noma Restaurant Offers Food For Thought

Few consider the faith of the food writer. And this is probably a good thing. I won’t say that to worship food and drink is to pray to a false god. But even with all the high-minded talk of farm-to-table or Slow Food movements, of molecular gastronomy or urban gardening, of locavorism or fruitarianism or whatever-the-latest-ism, in my experience it rarely leads one down the shining path of enlightenment.

Or at least that’s what I believed until this past spring, when I spent one of the most glorious weeks of my life eating my way through Copenhagen, capped off by a 25-course, five-hour lunch at Noma, considered by many to be the best — and most thought-provoking — restaurant in the world.

“Some people see going to Noma as a religious experience,” said Michael Bom Frøst, a food scientist and director of the nonprofit Nordic Food Lab, which was established by Noma’s owners. This was several days before my own meal at Noma, and we stood in the lab’s shiny test kitchen, inside a houseboat moored across the canal from Noma. The brilliant Nordic sun shone in the bluest Nordic sky as we ate a pink ice cream made from seaweed and looked across the cold water toward Copenhagen’s center.

Copenhagen has become the epicenter of the “new Nordic” cuisine, which has supplanted Spain’s formerly avant-garde molecular gastronomy as the latest, buzzy Big Idea in international cuisine.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/food-for-thought/2012/09/10/66300e1e-ed3a-11e1-b09d-07d971dee30a_story.html