Years ago, when I had a laundry product client, I wanted to do a PR campaign to promote using cloth diapers just one day a week to minimize disposables in the landfill. Thank heavens we didn’t try it. Who would give up a convenient behavior — using disposable diapers — for such an inconvenient option? It would take a lot more green commitment than could be inspired by a PR program to effect that revolution.

Until recently, the same was true of another convenient behavior, eating out. With foodservice sales increasing year upon year, family cooks were ready to hang up the apron. But not so fast. Home cooking is back with a vengence. With the economy in a tailspin, more consumers are going home to the range.

And that’s not likely to change anytime soon. Despite good news about the second-largest harvest of American corn, ever, and projections of record-breaking harvests of wheat and oilseeds from the world’s farmers this year, The Wall Street Journal reports that bumper crops will not offset increasing world demand. [more…]

I am a constant reader, with ecclectic tastes. On my nightstand you might find a British murder mystery, military history (Civil War or World War II), political biography, contemporary fiction, or a literary classic (anything I never got around to reading in English Lit or any leftover paperbacks from my sons’ English classes).

Right now, I’m reading The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, A Memoir, by Bill Bryson, a hilarious look back at growing up in the 1950s in Des Moines, Iowa.

Bryson takes us back to American food tastes then:

“Like most people in Iowa in the 1950s, we were more cautious eaters in our house. On the rare occasions when we were presented with food with which we were not comfortable or familiar — on planes or trains or when invited to a meal cooked by someone who was not herself from Iowa — we tended to tilt it up carefully with a knife and examine it from every angle as if determining whether it might need to be defused. Once on a trip to San Francisco, my father was taken by friends to a Chinese restaurant and he described it afterward in the somber tones of someone recounting a near-death experience.” [more…]