Jonah Raskin

I think I must have heard the question, “White meat or dark meat?” thousands of times. After all, over the years I’ve sat down with family and friends to thousands of Thanksgiving dinners. The question I’ve rarely if ever heard on Thanksgiving Day and that I haven’t really pondered until…

No water = no food. No water + no food = no life. It’s that simple and yet human beings here and around the world have done nearly everything possible to pollute the world’s water supply and to treat it with contempt. We are water and we live on a…

  Here I am at AT&T Park on a Thursday afternoon for a baseball game between the San Francisco Giants and the San Diego Padres. I’m here with Diane and David Albracht from Sebastopol, who used to belong to Slow Food Russian River and who might be called foodies. They…

Once a year for the past five or six years I have visited French friends who live in Saint-Sulpice-sur-Tarn, a small village in the south of France that has several good bakeries and butcher shops. The first full day in the village I usually wander down to the boulangerie and…

At 31, Rachel Kohn Obut has farmed and gardened with passion ever since she graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio just over ten years ago. More recently and especially since 2011, she has learned heaps about the therapeutic properties of growing and harvesting vegetables, pulling weeds and planting seeds. As the…

As good as Sonoma restaurants can be, it’s probably fair to say that if you want the very best food and wine in this part of the world you won’t find it at any restaurant, at least not during normal business hours, though “best” is certainly subjective. The best tacos…

When a popular restaurant closes, albeit briefly, it seems to cause consternation whether in small villages such as Glen Ellen or big towns such as San Francisco. This winter when the small (just 42 seats)  the fig café closed its doors for renovations, foodies in and around Glen Ellen in rural…