The closing of Gourmet has led to a number of articles noting the irony that the healthiest food magazine out there is the one that was bought by Gourmet’s owner two decades ago, promptly killed in part to help protect Gourmet, and then resurrected on a business model 180 degrees from Gourmet’s: Cook’s Illustrated. If Gourmet was the New Yorker of food, Cook’s Illustrated has long been the Chilton’s— a no-gloss how to guide low on romance, high on practicality. Their editorial approaches were manifestly opposite, but more significantly now, so were their business models: Gourmet existed to sell glossy ads to food companies wanting to reach old money, Cook’s Illustrated sells subscriptions directly to people who want solid information and will fork over their own money for it.

So you might expect Christopher Kimball, editor-publisher of CI, to make that point when asked why his magazine flourishes in the face of Gourmet’s demise. You might expect pretty much his whole life to be built on that difference, in fact. But you would be wrong. Kimball’s response, in a NY Times op-ed, basically is… “Gourmet would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for you pesky bloggers!” Not only did free writing on the internet hurt paid writing at Gourmet (that much seems true at least to a certain point), but in the process, Kimball claims, it killed a culture of quality food writing, only to replace it with democratized dumbth (as Steve Allen called it when he would rant about how pop culture had sunk since his day of… bringing Mexican dialect comedians to America).

This is an odd argument for Kimball of all people to be making, since his magazine is built on the assumption that you can democratize any dish by finding the optimum way to prepare it. But it gets even odder with an account of the history of food publishing that contradicts and refutes itself as he goes:

The precursor to Gourmet, and the first truly successful American food publication, was founded in the 1890s and titled The Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics. It eventually changed its name to American Cookery and then died in 1947, forced under, in part, by the founding of Gourmet… It was the end of domestic science and food economy and the beginning of the era of the gourmet

The end of domestic science… except for the literally thousands of practical recipes that continue to be published not only in the major women’s magazines that existed then (McCalls, Better Homes and Gardens, etc.) and have come into existence since (Martha Stewart, O, etc.) but in the many cooking magazines that have sprung up, everything from Cooking Light to Rachael Ray magazine. That is a home ec iceberg that has always been larger than the gourmet tip, if largely unnoticed by the food elite. But keep in mind that exaggerated report of a death when considering the other death Kimball is here to announce.

Next, he poses a scary question:

Now, 68 years after its founding, Gourmet has followed American Cookery… Is American magazine publishing on the verge of being devoured by the democratic economics of the Internet?

but then immediately demonstrates that it’s based on a false premise. He admires the vanished charms of an old school billionaire, Conde Nast’s S.I. Newhouse:

He poured his fortune into his magazine properties and his editors, even when the prospect of return seemed dim. His was a world of philanthropic publishing.

So did Gourmet never actually make money, even in the boom times recently ended? Was it basically The New Republic of food, a moneyloser supported by a rich guy in search of influence? That seems hard to credit, but it does suggest that its high-flying ways were especially vulnerable to any downturn. I’ve read that pages in Gourmet went for a base rate of $90,000, where Bon Appetit, which actually had a larger (if far less elite) subscriber base, charges about a third of that. Is it really any wonder that such a magazine would prove too rich for any advertiser’s blood in any economic downturn? (And will you really be surprised if, having cut Gourmet’s enormous overhead by shutting it down and clearing it out, Conde Nast revives the brand in a much more cost-effective guise?) It wouldn’t take bloggers to kill a magazine under circumstances like that.

The shuttering of Gourmet reminds us that in a click-or-die advertising marketplace, one ruled by a million instant pundits, where an anonymous Twitter comment might be seen to pack more resonance and useful content than an article that reflects a lifetime of experience, experts are not created from the top down but from the bottom up. They can no longer be coronated; their voices have to be deemed essential to the lives of their customers. That leaves, I think, little room for the thoughtful, considered editorial with which Gourmet delighted its readers for almost seven decades.

I find this too incoherent to entirely follow (and it goes on for another couple of grafs, without getting clearer) but to the extent I see arguments here, they seem mostly backwards. Articles in magazines may be written by experts, but they’re more often written by freelancers who’ve interviewed experts on the phone, and often in the process simplify and dumb down and just plain screw the expert’s insights up; the internet has brought us the voices of ten million non-experts, it’s true, but one thing it’s also done is cut out that middleman freelancer and given experts a way to talk to us directly. At the same time, by removing another mediator— the editor— the vast variety available online gives us the ability to find for ourselves the voice we trust most on a subject.

Okay, so at its best, Reichl finding and editing Laurie Colwin, say, you have that vaunted magazine experience of the editor shaping the reader’s experience. But 95% of magazine writing isn’t about that, it’s about 5 Hot Tips for the subject of the minute that every other magazine is about this minute. In a bulletpointed, tip-driven freelance market, the reason so many writers blog is because it is their chance to write the thoughtful, considered piece, and not just 7 Great Cheeses To Pair With Giving Him the Best Sex He’s Ever Had.

But Kimball’s committed to the cult of the expert and the editors who love them, so he ends it with an analogy that he thinks closes the sale, but actually sends him down in flames:

Julia Child, one of my Boston neighbors, epitomized this old-school notion of apprenticeship… Her first question upon meeting a young chef was always, “And where did you train, dear?”

That’s right, Julia Child, who wanted us all to cook French at home, is trotted out as the advocate of only eating from certified chefs. If anyone stood for the idea that self-education was possible, it was Child— true, she might have expected expertise in a high-priced restaurant, we all would, but it was an expertise that she herself did not really have (yes, she attended Cordon Bleu, but a housewife going to cooking classes hardly constituted an “old-school notion of apprenticeship” in the feudal kitchens of 1950s France) and plainly did not consider it essential to the act of writing about food. Child may not have thought much of the best-known blog specifically about her, but I very much doubt that if she were alive now, she would so presumptively dismiss, as Kimball does, the explosion of interest in and, yes, expertise shown about food on the internet today.

The biggest “premiere” I ever had for one of my videos was when I showed Raccoon Stories to a dozen guests at one of my Southern parties.  Monday night, the venue was a little bigger than that:

But let me back up.  So as you could either tell or guess from my last two, fish-oriented videos, A Better Fish and In the Land of Whitefish, my involvement with fish came about, first, because Carl Galvan of Supreme Lobster invited me to poke around their place, and second, because during the making of the first one, he said “Hey, you wanna go on a whitefish boat?” and set it up for me to go out with one of their suppliers, Susie Q Fish Co.

Supreme is certainly the biggest company I’ve dealt with in any of these, many times larger than La Quercia, for instance, and initially I wondered if there might be some hesitation or sensitivity about a guy running around with a camera in their company.  I wondered, in fact, if they’d demand some sort of editorial control.  (Which on a formal level I wouldn’t agree to, though I’d certainly listen to any comments, just as I gave La Quercia an opportunity to watch the final cut and tell me if there was anything proprietary they didn’t want shown, which as it turned out there wasn’t.)

But his bosses trusted Carl and he trusted me not to do some kind of hatchet job, and I think I honestly portrayed what they are— a big, efficient and busy company where sustainability is on their radar, and they’re moving things in that direction where they can, but change doesn’t happen overnight either, and so much of it depends on the consciousness of their customers and their customers’ customers as well.  That’s a realistic picture of how progress happens, each piece in the supply chain— fishermen, brokers like Cleanfish, distributors like Supreme, restaurants like Vie and Chaise Lounge, diners like me— helping nudge the others along, making it economically possible to do what’s better.  That’s especially why I was so happy to be able to include Cleanfish, who are really committed to market rather than governmental solutions, protecting non-sustainable fish by driving the market toward other more sustainable fish; and I think it’s obvious that their commitment has had a pretty rapid and direct ripple effect through to distributors and then to chefs and diners (as shown in my Reader piece on their Nunavut arctic char).

Anyway, after they saw the first one and felt it was a good picture of their operation (even if it did reveal that their sales reps sometimes use bad words!), they had the idea of planning an event to raise awareness of the quality and versatility of Great Lakes fish and sustainability more generally, built around a screening of the first video and the (at that point, unfinished) one about whitefish.  And, well it was quite an event— they got the Shedd on board as a venue (and it doesn’t get much snazzier than that):

and Paul Virant of Vie and Troy Graves of Eve, plus the Shedd’s own in house team, cooking with fresh and smoked whitefish and smelts, alongside Goose Island beer.  The invite list included over 200 chefs and media folks, and I talked to many of them, Paul and Troy of course, Jean Joho, Todd Stein, Cary Taylor, Radhika Desai, etc., though they were just as many I missed (I never did catch Geno Bahena, who was there with the madonna of moles, Clementina Flores; or Michael McDonald of One Sixty Blue, Bruno Abate of Follia/Tocco, etc.).

I think that one’s going to be an ad for Goose Island, or maybe Colt .45 Malt Liquor.  (Photos, by the way, are by Supreme’s Reed Shallenberger if they’re any good, and were taken with my camera if they’re not.)  Here’s Carl working on the playlist for the party at the Shedd’s loading dock:

The food really showed the versatility that Great Lakes fish can have, with the biggest eyeopener being Troy’s surprisingly flavorful whitefish cake, which didn’t miss crab a bit.  Here’s Paul bringing in some escabeche:

After about an hour of mingling (and me running around checking on the AV) we gathered in one of the  exhibit rooms as a repurposed screening room.  The president of Supreme and a couple of folks from the Shedd talked about the fish biz and how Shedd works to promote sustainability (including as a big buyer of seafood for its own animals to eat), and then, this guy got up there:

Since I try not to yak-yak in my movies, I tried not to do so before them for too long, either.

Paul Virant, Mike Sheerin (Blackbird) and Jean Joho watching the videos.  I have to say, it was a real gift to finally get to see some of my work with an audience, like a real movie, not just because of the ego boost (though that was certainly gratifying) but also because, I think I know where the laughs are, where the “Hmm, never thought about that”s are, and so on, but you don’t really know until you can hear and feel a whole audience reacting.  It was really great to hear that everybody else found Robert Schuffler as delightful a character as I did, or roared at why lawyer fish are called that.

Afterwards Carl, who had really made everything possible, was thanked by his boss for his dedication and passion to the business of selling fish, and got a big round of applause, well-deserved, for making the event happen.  I really hope that some of our city’s best chefs came away thinking of new ways to make use of Great Lakes fish, and sustainable fish generally, in a way that’s better for the oceans and lakes and for all of us.

…she’d have earned her money this week. Big thanks to two local publications which gave big shoutouts to Sky Full of Bacon this week. The first being Mike Doyle on his blog about Chicago blogs, Chicagosphere, at the Trib’s Chicago Now:

Chicago’s best multimedia food blog is Michael Gebert’s Sky Full of Bacon and I’m late to the party in saying so. His long-form video podcasts and essays tell the interesting stories behind the food that hits Chicago tables–and the people committed to getting it there. Foodies with attention spans will go away hungry for more.

There’s more, go read it. Then today Tasting Table, a daily email thing devoted to cool food stuff, praised SFOB in today’s Chicago edition:

Tired of TV’s penchant for glossy studio kitchen shots? Then the Sky Full of Bacon videos will be like manna from gritty, real-life food heaven.

Thanks to them both, and if you’re new here and found your way here from one of them, the easiest way to see the videos is to click Video Podcasts under Categories at right.

I have a piece about Nunavut Arctic Char at the Reader’s blog here, complete with an outtake from the current Sky Full of Bacon video podcast, A Better Fish.  Check it out, it’s the story of why a certain fish suddenly turned up on menus all over town (and all over the internet).

Speaking of podcasts, while I was in Wyoming saying nasty things about Julia Child, the La Quercia podcast passed 2000 views at Vimeo to become the third-most-watched to date, which is cool, to me anyway (hey, I like to know that it’s not all downhill from somewhere).

Also, one of those blogs that cleverly asks the right questions to lure other writers into writing the blog for them asked me an irresistible question; here’s my answer.

When I first saw that Michael Pollan had written a ten-zillion-page opus on the state of cooking, eating, the Food Network, Julie and Julia, and other such weighty topics, my first thought was that this was way, way too much to read onscreen; Pollan has written a piece about how our lives are too busy for cooking, at a length that our lives are too busy to read.

My second thought was, I’m about to spend ten zillion hours in the car going to and from Wyoming, so I’ll print it out.

And so I wound up reading a foodie manifesto during perhaps the least foodie week of my year, in the least foodie place I can remember going to in just about my entire life. I mean, Wyoming is a marvelous and beguiling place to visit in many ways, a state where they bother to put up population signs for towns with two-digit populations (if only someone in Emblem had died right before they put the sign up, I might have seen a one-digit one) and then follow it with a sign announcing the local cattle rustling heritage museum (every town seems to have a museum of something that happened between 1870 and 1900).

But as far as food culture goes… in terms of restaurants, it’s pretty much, where do you want to eat a preformed hamburger patty and frozen fries today? Apart from a smattering of Mexican and Chinese (no part of America is bereft of those), that’s pretty much it; when a shopkeeper in Cody asked my wife where she was from, the name “Chicago” immediately prompted a five-minute lament on the state of what little Italian food there is in Wyoming, which basically concluded with the axiom that Italian food gets steadily worse from the Rockies on. (To judge by the Jersey-in-1957-amber menu of the place down the street from him, he knows whereof he speaks.)

This made Wyoming an interesting context for considering Pollan’s points, which are roughly these: We may celebrate Julia Child as the progenitor of food TV and our foodie culture, but actually our modern food TV is her antithesis, great at encouraging us to watch more and more hyped up food-sports shows, but largely discouraging our own venturing into the kitchen to do anything more than assemble processed junk a la Sandra Lee—and her advertisers. We have the food TV we have because it suits the world of processed foods we live in, where no one has time to really cook and the habit itself is rapidly being lost.

As a market researcher sums it up (in the best quote in the piece), “A hundred years ago, chicken for dinner meant going out and catching, killing, plucking and gutting a chicken. Do you know anybody who still does that? It would be considered crazy! Well, that’s exactly how cooking will seem to your grandchildren: something people used to do when they had no other choice. Get over it.”

So cooking has become a niche pastime, like quilting or radio controlled aircraft. Yet niches can occupy pretty big territory sometimes, and after a week in Wyoming I came away convinced that they can even cover entire states.

It’s not that processed foods weren’t all over Wyoming— in restaurants, as I said. But restaurants are scarce enough outside major tourist stops that it’s clear this is one state where people don’t eat out every night. Meanwhile, go into a grocery store and, sure, amid the frozen dinners and Lunchables and Kleenex-brand sandwich bread, there’s a surprising amount of natural, organic and just old-fashioned real stuff being sold even in very small towns. (A lot more than I’d bet you could find in towns five times as large in Illinois.) Somebody in Wyoming is certainly cooking better than you can eat out in all but the largest and wealthiest tourist-oriented towns like Jackson.

And the proof of that for me was certainly that several of my better meals were in little cafes which seemed to be no more than an extension of the proprietor’s home— not that they were objectively great, but that they were usually the most real, the least prefab, the ones that seemed the most rooted in a local housewifely sense of how to make things as opposed to drones following the instructions on the Sysco box.

In short, Wyoming seems to be one of the last outposts of the old food culture— before the processing that Pollan decries, but also, before the heroine whose legacy he celebrates.  Maybe those two events are not as opposed as we assume.

*  *  *

The standard narrative, which Pollan seems to assent to, casts Julia Child as the great liberator of the American home cook— even as American cooking began declining right as she appeared on the scene.

True, she gave status to the act of cooking at a crucial moment for American women— but look at how she did it: by encouraging us to abandon American cookery for French technique. Far from championing American cooking (like her fellow West Coasters James Beard or Alice Waters), by the time she really turned to her life’s work she was a classic eastern establishment WASP trying to lead the masses toward European tastes and sophistication.

And to be honest, can you really say she succeeded? She tried to teach us French; we all learned Italian instead. Part of the reason Julie Powell’s blog project was such a novelty is precisely because so many people own Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking… and so few ever crack it open now.

What’s more, to the extent she has had an influence, hers was a pivotal step in turning cooking from something you did well for the sake of others at your table, to something you do for self-expression.  And the problem with turning cooking into a Me Decade pursuit, like jogging or meditation, is that it’s no longer necessary— it’s just something to be done when you feel like it.

It’s telling that the only woman in 21st century America who actually cooks every night is doing it for her blog, not her husband— and that she’s therefore remarkable enough to warrant a movie about her strange lifestyle.  Child set out to teach America how to cook a better cuisine, but on a certain level the message America took away was that its native cookery was inferior—and thus not worth the effort being put into it. Or the effort it would take to pass it to the next generation.

Partly as a result, preparing food became a self-conscious act, and American cookery ceased being our indigenous cuisine and became just one more concept. It’s easier to accept the artifice in processed foods when it’s all an act anyway; in a true beef culture, Wyoming hamburger stands would pride themselves on handformed fresh beef as a matter of principle. But when hamburger stands are about fitting the concept of a hamburger stand, all that matters is that you carry off the concept convincingly. If the meat’s a little worse, play the oldies a little louder; it will average out.

Now, I don’t mean to lay every box of T.G.I. Friday’s Frozen Jalapeno Cheese Poppers at Child’s feet. Obviously the main reason Americans stopped cooking is because both sexes are working now, and working more, and the time just isn’t there. But that lifestyle change also owes something to the feminist movement telling housewives to throw off their chains and find their real meaning at a desk rather than a stove.  The chain of American cooking passed from mother to daughter broke in the 1960s, and if the most influential food personality of the decade didn’t have something to do with it, who did?

Ironically, it’s precisely the meaninglessness of her boring desk job that drives Julie Powell to find meaning by taking up cooking, discovering in it all the things that corporate bureaucracy lacks— tactile pleasures, finality followed by a fresh start the next day, instant feedback, real appreciation.  She turns to Julia Child to help rescue her from a less satisfying life without realizing the irony that Child is part of how she got stuck there in the first place.

I have actually been gone for the last week— posts scheduled to pop up in my absence— and so remote (as you’ll soon learn) that I didn’t have any Internet since last Monday. But a quick word to alert you that there’s a very nice plug on today’s Worldview on WBEZ, or so David Hammond claims (he’ll be on, talking fish). More soon…

Update: here’s the Worldview piece. Not sure if it promo’d my podcast or not.

One of the amusingly fluky things that happened right after I started doing all this was that I got caught in an internet-wide sweep of freelance writers by Maxim magazine, looking for people to nominate things for the 2008 Maxim Food Awards. I suggested 14 possible candidates, of which they used precisely one (Khan BBQ). Whether or not I made good money at this depends on whether you judge it by the dollars per word published (pretty damn nice) or the hours spent generating the other 13 unused ideas (suddenly not so hot).

They asked again in 2009, and I offered suggestions in two categories they said they were looking for. One was, “Places you should eat before you die,” which I took to mean extraordinary culinary experiences. The other was, “Places to eat before they die,” which means places full of history and culture and flavor. I suggested five of each. Their cover touts 77 total. They used… zero of mine. (Actually at least one is mentioned in the magazine; some guy named Achatz writes about Schwa.)

Since they’re not using them, I thought you might be interested to see what I submitted. If you want, you can compare to what they actually published, and see if you think they really did give their readers the hyper-edgy, super-authentic culinary insight promised.

* * *

Places to eat at before you die:

1) Schwa, Chicago

Like an indie band that refuses to sell out to a big label, Schwa serves some of the most fearsomely accomplished haute cuisine in Chicago from a fixed-up storefront where the cooks not only serve as waitstaff but the chef himself answers the phone (when you can get through). Also like an indie band, they broke up in a drug-fueled haze once, but back together and apparently cleaned up, they’re dishing up their greatest hits like the blatantly sexual quail egg ravioli alongside new material like pad thai made with velvety slivers of jellyfish.

2) Hot Doug’s, Chicago

There are ten million average hot dog stands in Chicago and then there is one and only one Hot Doug’s, the “encased-meat emporium” where whatever sausage Doug Sohn can get his hands is done up however he feels like it. The standard Vienna Beef char dog stands side by side with the likes of wild boar, alligator and elk sausage topped with truffle creme fraiche, bleu cheese, or even foie gras– Doug was the only actual perp busted under Chicago’s short-lived foie gras ban. Some are great, others not so great, but it’s always worth checking to see what he’s concocted this week (and you can always fall back on the thuringer with caramelized onion and brown mustard, which cognoscenti know is one of the best things to eat in Chicago).

3) Apple fritter at Old-Fashioned Donuts, Chicago

A hundred blocks south of the Michigan Avenue tourists see, in the black Roseland neighborhood, a donut shop that looks like nothing turns out catcher’s-mitt-sized fritters so unspeakably indulgent, so addictive in their perfect fried sugariness, that they can only be the product of the same CIA plot that created crack cocaine.

4) Cemitas Atomica at Cemitas Puebla, Chicago

Mexican sandwiches are mostly gutbombs, and God knows the fact that this one contains ham, pork, AND fried breaded steak suggests that the name Atomica was chosen with its fallout in mind. But El Dios is in the details and the specially baked cemitas roll, the Pueblan cheese imported by the owners from their hometown, the hand-roasted chipotle, the schmear of avocado and the medicinal hint of the papalo herb make this one a superbly balanced sandwich that will light your lunch up without a prolonged half-life.

5) Arnold’s, Nashville

Southern “meat and threes” cafeterias are often more about meat and dessert than the soggy vegetables served alongside. But the meats at Arnold’s, even the ham and the garlic-studded roast beef, take second place to the Bordeaux-like profundity of the pot likker in which the turnip greens stew, which proves that vegetables can be great art.

Places to eat at before THEY die:

1) Burt’s Place, Morton Grove, Illinois

Imagine a pizza place tucked on a side street in an obscure suburb, which nevertheless is so busy that you have to call ahead to reserve your dough and find out what time you’ll be expected to be there. Oh and by the way, the phone number is unlisted. But Burt’s isn’t some insane too-hip-for-you joint, it’s just that Burt has started and sold half a dozen pizza places, and now he’s 70+, and in his place he does it his way, and if you don’t like it, or if he gets any more customers, he may just up and retire. The reward for doing it his way, besides basking in his stoner-grandpa presence, is an impeccably balanced and brightly-flavored pan pizza, not thin but not the phone-book-thick deep dish you find all over Chicago either.

2) Klas, Cicero, Illinois

Al Capone’s name is to Chicago joints what “George Washington Slept Here” used to be to New England country inns. And most of the time, well, the connection is probably exaggerated at best. One of the few surviving places that really can claim a Capone connection is this Czech cuckoo-clock of a restaurant in what was long a Mob-run suburb, though the decor suggests Castle Dracula as much as Roaring Twenties. All the same, go upstairs and you can still see the back room where Al would play gin rummy with owner Adolph Klas while “hostesses” entertained the boys in the private alcoves.

3) Hollyhock Hill, Indianapolis

“Like eating at Grandma’s” is not necessarily the compliment that people think it is. But this place, which started in the 1920s as a country inn and is now well within the suburbs of Indy, shows just what simple but spot-on cooking chops midwestern grandmas had back in the 20s– perfectly crisp and golden pan-fried chicken, flaky hot rolls, iceberg lettuce with old school vinegary-sweet dressing, and ice cream with your choice of toppings to end every meal. There’s no irony to the retro here, just pure rib-sticking midwestern hospitality.

4) Calumet Fisheries, Chicago

When steel mills dotted the south side of Chicago, every bend in the river had a shrimp joint to serve working men a fried lunch that went well with a beer or three. The mills are gone and so are most of the fish shacks, but one of the few survivors sits in the shadow of the bridge the Blues Brothers jumped, frying shrimp and smelts and best of all, smoking chubs and other fish in its riverside smokehouse.

5) Taylor Cafe, Taylor, Texas

When Bobby Mueller of the legendary Louie Mueller’s passed away last year, it made his rival in this tiny town with more great barbecue joints than people, Vencil Mares, that much more of a living legend. At 83, Vencil still wrestles his briskets into his smoker himself, though most of his day is spent holding court in his bar/cafe, telling anybody who stops by about the cottonpickers’ brawls he used to break up with his fists or how he integrated his place by taking out one of the two jukeboxes and forcing blacks and whites to listen to each others’ music. The barbecue’s pretty darn good, but an afternoon listening to Vencil’s stories as the trains go by is the real treat.

Michael Ruhlman had a heartfelt post the other day about taking his 10-year-old son to see Food Inc. You should read the whole thing; go there, I’ll be here when you’re done.

Okay, so as it happens I read that right as we were in the middle of the Lake County Fair, where my 10-year-old son Myles was showing his lamb Arachnophobia (they took second in the weight class). And I thought as a result of raising his own lamb Myles had a pretty different perspective from the average kid about his food, or even the above-average kid who’s just been to see Food Inc. So I asked him on camera if he had anything to say to Michael Ruhlman’s son about that experience. Here’s Myles on raising a 4-H lamb (this was shot on my little point and shoot camera, so it’s not as big and fancy as a Sky Full of Bacon video):

My 10-Year-Old Talks About Raising His 4-H Lamb from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

Trailer for Sky Full of Bacon 12: In the Land of Whitefish from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

So I’m hard at work on the next video (and the next one, whatever it will be!) but in the meantime, here’s a taste of it— and some exciting news.  Because the next one focuses on whitefish and other Great Lakes region fishes, Supreme Lobster is throwing a party at the Shedd Aquarium to help encourage chefs to work with these local, sustainable seafood choices.  The video will premiere there, and a number of top Chicago chefs will be involved providing dishes to try involving these fish (some of whom will also be swimming in the Shedd’s own tanks nearby!)

The event is for chefs and the press, so I don’t have any advice for those who can’t qualify but wish they could attend.  But at least you’ll get to see the video right after that in the usual places. Big thanks to Carl Galvan and Supreme Lobster for setting this exciting event up.

Also, watch the Reader’s food blog in the next week or so for a piece by me relating to some of this fish stuff.

Assorted thanks re the most recent podcast, including the lovely Helen of Grub Street (formerly Menu Pages), who also linked my Pierogi Fest post, Chuck Sudo of Chicagoist whose guanciale will soon be tasted and reported on, podcast star Carl Galvan who tweeted it far and wide, assorted Local Beet-ians who posted and tweeted and then inspired this celebrity chef re-tweet, Art of Pleasant House for ranking me with good things to eat, Fruitslinger slinging some link jam, and Serious Eats for these kind words:

Fish is complicated. You can have this one, but not this, and eating that Chilean seabass, oh dear, that might give you awful karma forever. In this beginning of a two-part series on fish, the always enlightening podcast Sky Full of Bacon visits Supreme Lobster, one of the country’s largest fish distributors. SFOB producer-writer-editor Michael Gebert goes behind-the-scenes to understand how the company moves thousands of pounds of fresh fish a week. He talks to sales rep Carl Galvan, who’s so passionate about selling the good stuff, he keeps his chef clients updated on Twitter (@chicagofishdude).

So much of the seafood discussion is difficult for consumers to navigate but this 22-minute video offers a clear perspective on what happy seafood is out there.