Your favorite Santa Barbara spot prawn dish, like Michael Cimarusti's signature salt-roasted ones at his Melrose Avenue restaurant Providence, may be a thing of the past if the most extreme versions of the South Coast Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) proposals pass......
"Where's the crab guy? That seems to be the question on the minds of a lot of Hollywood Farmers' Market patrons who, in just a few months, have come to count on Santa Barbara's John Wilson for fresh yellow and red rock crab, line-caught halibut and snapper and, occasionally, ridgeback......
These days it seems like no matter where you live in Southern California, there's a farmers' market or two nearby offering fresh, locally grown fruits and veggies. Yet while farmers' markets in Los Angeles have a long history, (Third and Fairfax passed the 75 year mark earlier this summer) the......
Americans are fat, and they are getting fatter. A recent study by the Urban Institute and the University of Virginia says that unless consumption patterns change, 40 percent of the country's population will be overweight or obese by 2015. Even here in the Golden State, where body image is so......
On August 7th, some of the country's largest food processors, including Mars, Hershey's, General Mills and Kraft, sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack stating that the country was on the verge of a massive sugar shortage and that, without raising the quotas on the amount of tariff-free sugar......
Say the word "malnutrition" and the image that comes to mind is probably the shirtless 3rd World child with a bulging belly and large, sad eyes that you've seen for years on TV. But the plump-cheeked American kid may be suffering from malnutrition too--though perhaps not from lack of food......
As you probably know by now, last week, after a long political stalemate, the Governor finally signed a new California budget, but not before slashing another $489 million to create what we home budgeters might call "a cushion." Along with more cuts to K-12 and higher education, child welfare services......
When Santa Barbara lobster fisherman Sam Shrout received a letter from the California Department of Fish and Game last month saying that they were going to start enforcing a 33-year-old law regulating the escape ports for short lobsters on his traps, he was noticeably angry. So angry he took to......
Ah, government bureaucracy. Since the discovery in the mid-1980s that table eggs contaminated with the bacteria Salmonella Enteritidis were making thousands of people sick, food regulators and lawmakers have been quibbling over how to address the problem. On July 9, they finally did something about it......
We may not have figured out what to call the current economic crisis yet, but we all know how it feels: homes in foreclosure, insurmountable credit card debt, job insecurity and an unemployment rate that reached 9.5% in June. Our financial woes are the dead weight of a system gone amuck, and they don't just effect discretionary spending; these days, people find themselves cutting deeply into that most basic of needs--food.
