To be honest, I don’t know what that means. I mean, I know the difference between a pot of rice that I like eating and a pot that’s gluey, but there aren’t a whole lot of points between the two. And yet here is a man whose claim to fame among master chefs is that he makes rice better than the rest of them, and to accept that is to accept that there is a level of cooking that most of us will never comprehend. At some point, cooking is not a matter of skill; it’s a matter of understanding, of learning to see the differences between one perfectly good pot of rice and another, of the minute details in something that, for most anyone else, is pure pearly blandness. Truly great cooking is, in this way, first an act of learning to see, and then a striving to do. This is why, among chefs, the truism is that simple food is hard.

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We became cooks without realizing it. My brother says it happened for him one night when my mother baked him brownies to mollify an especially heartbreaking moment in adolescence. He wrote me about them recently. They were “rich, dense with a double dose of chocolate in chips and batter; a single bite causing the following series of reactions: eyes widening, slight, blush-inducing moans beginning, a smile developing, finishing with the inevitable, ‘Oh my god.’” He is that dramatic about all food.

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It was early spring and it was a dish very much of the moment, the bird served with wilted ramps, spring onions, pearl onions and a sauce of cream infused with onions. A few baby spring turnips. All things with bite, mellowed by youth and cooking. As I ate, I thought, "What makes duck more delicious than onions?" And also this: "In a few weeks, when spring is gone, this dish won't be here anymore."

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He was a raffish blond who resembled a perpetually hung-over cross between Daniel Craig and Julian Assange. He spoke with a nearly incomprehensible French accent, which only added to his mystique. Women flung themselves at him, and he flung himself back at them with equal enthusiasm.

And he was the chef who hired me for my first and only full-time cooking job, in the pastry kitchen of an impossibly snooty beach resort in California. There, he showed me a strategy for making biscotti -- twice-baked Italian cookies -- that I'll never forget.

I have no idea why Claude chose to hire me. Perhaps nobody else applied for the job. Or maybe nobody else applied who could pass the hotel's strict background checks and drug tests. In any case, he was the only chef among dozens I contacted who was willing to take a chance on a freshly minted culinary school graduate who was 1) nearing middle age and 2) whose most recent job title was "Teaching Postdoctoral Fellow."

But that wasn't the only reason I was lucky to be hired. Claude had worked under several three-star Michelin chefs and had won numerous awards for his desserts. This was precisely the kind of chef I dreamed of working with. Someone who was serious about pastry. Someone who could teach me everything.

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As Severson writes, "a small but influential band of cooks says both their chin-dripping, carbohydrate-heavy food and the accessible, feel-good mood in their dining rooms are influenced by the kind of herb that can get people arrested." Among the examples of this haute pothead cuisine are Roy Choi's Kogi taco trucks (which fuse Mexican and Korean food), New York's Momofuku Milk Bar (which serves things like "cereal milk" soft serve), Roberta's in Brooklyn (with its breakfast burrito pizza) and Animal in L.A. (which serves an upscale version of French Canadian poutine, composed of French fries, cheddar and gravy).

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Either way, it's the sort of burger Spike Mendelsohn says is needed to fuel the people behind the world's largest news organization, and what he set out to create when asked to develop a hamburger inspired by The Associated Press.

Because, er. nothing says great burger like wall-to-wall coverage of war, politics and upset celebrities, right?

Despite the (lack of?) inspiration he was handed, true to his burger master cred -- his Washington burger joint, Good Stuff Eatery, has become a hotspot for the likes of first lady Michelle Obama -- Mendelsohn came up with a winner.

"For the people that never stop," Mendelsohn said of his 24/7 burger, the first in AP's weekly series -- 20 Burgers of Summer, a celebration of the delicious diversity of the great American hamburger.

"Whether you're embedded with troops in Iraq, photographing the animals of Africa or live from the White House, here's the burger that will keep you going any time of day," said Mendelsohn, whose ode to burgers, "The Good Stuff Cookbook," is out later this month.

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Colicchio, whose numerous restaurants include Craft, Craftsteak and the recently opened Colicchio & Sons in New York, was named outstanding chef during an awards ceremony that is considered the Oscars of the food world. It's an honor for which he'd been a finalist seven other times since 2002, the same year the organization named Craft the nation's best new restaurant.

Though Colicchio drew many accolades early in his career, he rose to prominence in 1994 when he and partner Danny Meyer opened Gramercy Tavern, which earned Colicchio three stars from The New York Times and several Beard awards, including best chef in New York City in 2000 and outstanding restaurant service in 2001.

Colicchio's cookbook, "Think Like a Chef," earned him a Beard cookbook award in 2001. More recently, he's become known for his role as the lead judge on the Bravo television series, "Top Chef."

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"When I think of Boston, I think of angry drivers and angrier sports fans," I said. I'm from New York. I can't help it.

"OK, well, I've got my work cut out for me," Chuck said.

But who knew the spuckie's biggest challenge to iconic status would not be coming from provincial rubes like myself, but from his own kitchen? Because despite the excellence of the spuckie, its path to dominance is thwarted by the utter amazingness of Chuck's roast beef sandwich.

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I recall this every once in a while because the irony of that moment is never lost. Not last weekend, when I held his son for the first time. Not when there was a minor imbroglio among our friends over who would be asked to stand up at his wedding. Not when we decided to drop everything in our lives and go to culinary school together. Not when, just a couple of years after I called him an alterna-teen, we became best friends in the kitchen of the college house we shared with 8 other people.

I'd graduated early, and when my housemates were heading off to class, I'd stumble down to our cracked linoleum kitchen straight from bed, a head full of things I saw on the Food Network the night before, and start chopping peppers and onions for a sauce at 9 am. Sometimes I would remember to brush my teeth and shower before cooking, but mostly it was me in my bedhead and the stove -- I was just learning to cook after a lifetime of enthusiastic eating, and the thrill of actually making food -- good food -- powered me through weeks and months and stacks of filthy dishes.

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Assistant White House Chef Sam Kass, an old friend of President Barack Obama's who oversees the garden, says labeling the crops "organic" isn't the point, even though the White House only uses natural, not synthetic, fertilizers and pesticides.

"To come out and say (organic) is the one and only way, which is how this would be interpreted, doesn't make any sense," Kass said Monday as he walked among the garden's newly planted broccoli, rhubarb, carrots and spinach. "This is not about getting into all that. This is about kids."

Still, it has become a curiosity around the world and part of first lady Michelle Obama's pitch for healthy eating. She is clearly proud of it and she is asked about the garden everywhere she goes, her aides say. Embassies and organizations often call the White House with questions about how they can replicate it.

The kids to whom Kass refers are from local schools and are sometimes invited to the White House to help plant and harvest vegetables as part of Mrs. Obama's campaign to stem childhood obesity. Kass says they often say they don't like certain vegetables -- peas, lettuce, spinach -- until they eat the fresh veggies they harvested from the garden.

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But then Bourdain dropped a wisecrack that irked more than amused. "Barbecue: It's like chocolate for men," he quipped, introducing a segment about some succulent, slow-roasted meats.

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Eddy Leroux is a French chef of the first order, commander of the kitchen at the four-star Daniel, but right now, he's struggling with a radish. As I look over the room of Western chefs practicing a cutting technique just taught to them by the sushi master Toshio Suzuki, it's Leroux I notice first -- his slicked-back hair trembling at the ends, his face flushing with color and beads of sweat gathering on his forehead.

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So when a chef in Canada got canned last week for speaking a little too frankly to a journalist about life in his kitchen, Tim Hayward speculated in the Guardian that the chef may have just been trying to join Bourdain's party: "By telling the gritty truth like 'chef' [Gordon] Ramsay does it, surely he should have expected admiration, kudos and unlimited girls ..." But for the chef's sake, I hope not. Because that ship has sailed -- a culture drowning, ironically, in the very waves of celebrity Bourdain helped to create.

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And when denied the food they were used to, many stopped buying the school lunch.

The survey at Central City Elementary in Huntington also found children drank less milk after Oliver removed the sugary chocolate and strawberry bottles.

But there is a bright spot in the data from the West Virginia University Health Research Center: More than six in 10 kids said they'd learned to try new foods.

ABC chose to have the show in Huntington after a 2008 Associated Press story dubbed the five-county metropolitan area the nation's unhealthiest.

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Ferran Adria will begin teaching in the fall at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in Cambridge, Mass. His general education science course will use cooking to introduce students to soft matter physics, which involves the study of suspensions and gels.

Adria has helped bring Spanish cuisine to the world's foodies and is known for deconstructing food and putting it back together in unconventional ways.

The Harvard course also will feature lectures by researchers and celebrity chefs, including New York's Wylie Dufresne (doo-FRAYN') and Jose Andres, whose eatery in Washington helped popularize the Spanish bar food known as tapas in the United States.

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Farr is the star of San Francisco's 4505 Meats, "Home of Revival Butchery," and he is taking his gospel to the barroom. He is one of a handful of young practitioners across the country who are staging bacchanalian "butcher parties," where they bring whole carcasses -- from rabbits to steer -- to bars, hang them up, take them apart, and cook them while wide-eyed partyers wash down the resultant meaty snacks with cocktails and beer. The resurgence of artisan butchery is supposed to be about respect for traditional craft, an emphasis on ethical, sustainable meat eating, and a renewed awareness of where our meat really comes from. Do blood-and-booze-soaked butcher parties cheapen these ideals?

Farr doesn't think so. "It's very educational," he says. "You get to see the whole animal, it gets processed in front of you, and then you eat it. And at the same time you get to have martinis or beer. It's just a good time all around."

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Originally published in Gourmet, August 2009

Behind me came the clack of the oven latch, a rush of scorching air, and then the rolling grumble of metal track as Si-fu hauled out 80 sizzling pounds of hot pig swinging from a hook. He twirled it around like a dance partner, eyeing its skin carefully for bubbles threatening to form. I looked hard. I couldn't see what he was searching for, but I knew they had to be found: If they appear early in the roasting, they will puff, burst, and burn. He tapped the skin with carpenter's nails, piercing it just enough to release pressure but not enough to let the juices escape. He threw arcs of salt as if casting rice at newlyweds and sent the pig back into the oven.

As I broke down barbecued ducks, smelling richly of fat and five-spice, Si-fu concentrated on the nearly inaudible crackle coming from the oven, waiting for the pitch that would tell him it was time to take another look. I heard the clack of the latch again, the grumbling of the rail, the tack-tack-tack of nails, the scratch of steel wool scraping at too-dark skin, the rustle of a basting brush. Over and over I would hear these sounds when he worked the pig, for hours at a time, breathing in thick heat.

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When I fell into this thing, this cosa nostra of cuisine, it was by accident. I had a background in fine art, and I was seduced by the creative process of cooking and the satisfaction of making things with my hands. Fifteen years later, I've been a baker, a line cook, a sous chef, now a pastry chef, and I can't imagine doing anything else. But back then, I never planned to make a career out of it, and the "foodie" culture we know today was still in its infancy. Back then, people still craved what came out of kitchens more than access into them.

Now, fueled by cooking shows and the Web, we have a culture of cuisine-as-entertainment. We're barraged by food porn, coffee-table cookbooks, and gritty tell-alls of the professional kitchen. Customers are constantly looking for what's new, the next big thing. As a professional, I've seen this culture make certain cooks hungry for stardom, hoping to be on TV shows and in magazines. But I've also seen that interest in cuisine shrink the world, making exotic ingredients more accessible, and push us to keep discovering new flavors and learning new techniques. It's a truly exciting time to be a chef, but it's always taken certain kinds of personalities to excel in cuisine, to have that geeky kind of masochism that drives us to aspire, impossibly, to perfection in both art and athleticism.

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