Food, glorious, food. It's that time of year people: Bay Area Bites brings you the best in food news for 2010.

In this two-part package, we look at the national trends and topics that sizzled over the past 12 months and serve up some local flavor on the side.

Feel free to weigh in with your own edible highlights from the year that was. In no particular order:

1. Food Safety

From previous years we've learned that what we eat can make us sick (tainted peanut butter, beef gone bad, and salmonella-laced spinach ring any bells?).

This year's food alerts: A massive egg recall and lingering questions about health risks associated with Gulf seafood.

Thankfully, late in the year Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act to protect consumers from food products hiding harmful poisons or pathogens like E. coli and salmonella, a food policy coup that greatly strengthens the Food and Drug Administration's ability to keep unsafe food off supermarket shelves and restaurant plates by expanding the agency's recall abilities and access to records.

Local angle: Bay Area-based media consultant Naomi Starkman kept the spotlight on potentially dangerous foods for sale in reports on Civil Eats and Huffington Post, including a story about a Consumers' Report study that found packaged salad laden with fecal bacteria.

2. D.I.Y. Food

Age-old practices such as canning, jamming, foraging, fermenting, growing and gleaning are suddenly new (and cool) again. Chickens are the au courant backyard animal of choice. And classes in the Domestic Arts all the rage.

The New York Times Magazine traveled west to take pretty pictures of urban homesteaders from the Bay Area, The Washington Post chronicled the canning trend long strong here, and Vogue got down and dirty with city farmer Novella Carpenter, who donned a pink cardigan in a concession to fashion for a photo shoot with the stylish mag's scribe Hamish Bowles. (Carpenter seemed to pop up everywhere last year, including on KQED.)

Local angle: In addition to Novella Carpenter's Ghost Town Farm in Oakland, the Bay Area D.I.Y. brigade created a kind of cottage industry, hawking their homemade wares at venues like SF Underground Market (Underground Market on BAB) and East Bay Underground Market, as well as the Pop-Up General Store.

And they wrote about it too; notable D.I.Y. books this year included Rachel Saunders' tome The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook, Napa forager Connie Green's The Wild Table (featured on The California Report), and D.I.Y. Delicious by Vanessa Barrington. Online, San Francisco's Sean Timberlake launched Punk Domestics, a curated space for D.I.Y.-driven cyber self-publishers.

Classes in baking, brewing, beekeeping, bottling, animal husbandry and more were in high demand at venues like 18 Reasons, Urban Kitchen SF, the Institute of Urban Homesteading, and BioFuel Oasis, a worker-owned cooperative begun by Carpenter and friends.

3. Food Politics

In an era of identity politics and culture wars, food fights join the fray. What you eat (and what you choose not to consume) speaks volumes about your political persuasions. First Lady Michelle Obama, dubbed America's foodie-in-chief by The Atlantic, talked about ending obesity and increasing activity with her Let's Move initiative. She also championed growing food and farmers' markets -- and brought to her kitchen top chefs like Sam Kass. On the other hand, Rush Limbaugh mounted a modern-day Twinkie defense (this time citing the fact that a man lost weight on a diet consisting mostly of the infamous junk food as evidence that all nutrition science is bogus). Sarah Palin showed up at a Pennsylvania school bearing cookies and dished up s'mores at a diner in a calculated countermove to a Michelle Obama dessert comment. Professional rager Glenn Beck even weighed in. Sigh...

The task of putting the food wars in context fell to ex-Washington Post writer Jane Black, who has moved to Huntington, West Virginia with new husband editor Brent Cunningham to see what happens to the community's eating habits now that celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has skipped town.

Local angle: Taking the happy out of Happy Meals: Outgoing SF Mayor Gavin Newsom vetoed a Board of Supervisors ban on plastic toys in fast-food meals. But the supes struck back, ensuring that no child in the city will be tempted to eat junk food simply to get their hands on a cheap trinket that will likely break before you can say Big Mac.

4. School Food

For the majority of schoolchildren around the country school lunch sucks. Big time.

But change is coming. This year, Jamie Oliver brought his Food Revolution to the States, an anonymous teacher chronicled what she ate every day in her school cafeteria in her blog Fed Up With Lunch, and President Obama signed into law the much-anticipated Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010. The legislation bans some junk food, and gives a small, though historically significant, six-cent increase per child per lunch (the first such boost in the reimbursement rate in 30 years), and there may be more lunch money tucked inside the bill to boot.

Local angle: Veteran school food reformer Alice Waters claimed victory for her Edible Schoolyard model following the results of a study on Berkeley's School Lunch Initiative from University of California at Berkeley researchers.

5. Street Food

Fueled by Twitter feeds, gourmet grub on the go continued to attract a growing following around the country as food trucks hit the streets in increasingly more legitimate ways, boasting inspired names and bright colors, to wit The Best Wurst in Austin, Big Gay Ice Cream Truck in New York City, and Chairman Bao in San Francisco.

Food trucks went a step further in size, too, with the introduction of bustaurants, stripped former public transit buses reconfigured as a mobile kitchen, and, in some cases, even offering eat-in seating. In L.A. the double decker Worldfare dished up ethnic eats, while closer to home Le Truc in San Francisco served up gastro-pub fare, and Diamond Lil debuted to a small crowd and a camera crew.

Los Angeles officials announced it may regulate mobile carts, a move that could see other cities follow suit.

Local angle: With mild-mannered accountant Matt Cohen at the helm, the mobile food fest Off the Grid launched in Fort Mason and sprouted several neighborhood locations, including Golden Gate Park, McCoppin Hub, Civic Center, and UN Plaza. Officials in San Francisco passed reforms making it easier and cheaper for mobile vendors to serve street eats, while in the East Bay the city of Emeryville saw pushback from local brick-and-mortar businesses and Berkeley residents bemoaned missing out on most of the mobile food fun (for now).

Check BAB tomorrow for the rest of the best of 2010 food news.

"Kids, Cooking, and Health" panelists Laura Sampson, Diana Johnson, and Elaine Wu

"Oh, it smells so good up there!" said the concierge manning the front desk at San Francisco's InterContinental Hotel on Friday, glancing longingly up the stairs to where the 2nd annual BlogHer Food Conference was in full caffeinated swing. "I saw Nutella, and chocolate, and someone making some kind of melted-cheese thing..."

The 3rd floor did smell enticingly delicious, probably to the distraction of all of the other meetings happening in the adjacent rooms.

Surely emissaries from the nearby Oral Therapies conference were longing to sneak past their sugar-free snacks and mint-flavored flossers to browse the packed sponsors' tables crowding the ballroom foyer, stuffing their pockets with Scharffenberger contraband and downing cappuccinos steamed on a shiny silver Pasquini machine ("For Music, Puccini; For Art, Bernini; For Espresso, Pasquini"). Who could concentrate on cavities in the face of dozens of baguette slices smeared with Nutella and topped with raspberries?

Indeed, Nutella crostini were just one of the many tasty, chocolate-covered ways to get distracted on the way to panel discussions like "Professionalizing Your Photography," "Be Your Own Food Network," "Blogger Ethics," and "Kids, Cooking, and Health." For the sponsors--like Seattle's Best Coffee, Kraft, Nutella, Nature's Path Organic, and Athenos, to name just a few--it was a dream opportunity to get their products into the happily chatting mouths of a few hundred women (and a handful of men) who write about food for fun.

So, a nutritionist pushed Nutella as part of a healthy breakfast for kids, because, of course, the only way to get whole-grain toast into your kid is to goop it with sugary, cocoa-flavored palm-oil-and-hazelnut goo.

Over in the corner, the smiley team from Kraft touted the virtues of their soon-to-launch Cooking Creme, tubs of flavored, cream-cheese-based stuff that might, just might, puncture the hegemony of cream-of-mushroom soup in the cutthroat chicken-casserole arena.

And a brassy, pink-jacketed chef in an Underwriters' Laboratories apron handed out purple-and-magenta corn chips dolloped with guacamole, warning of the dangers lurking in kitchen appliances. "Immersion blenders!" she intoned. "People forget to unplug them when they put them in the sink. I got a call from one woman, she cut up her fingers and had to go to the hospital!"

But away from the salty, crunchy, creme-rinsed enticements of the demos-and-samples room, a whole lot of discussions were going on. Already, this year's BlogHer Food Conference, a targeted spin-off that grew out of the much larger annual BlogHer Conference, had swelled to 2 days of panels, interviews, parties, and food tours.

Last year, said BlogHer co-founder Elisa Camahort Page, attendees spent the one-day event in the hotel, talking about food & cooking but not getting out to see what San Francisco had to offer. This year, since half the attendees come from outside the state, Page and her staff decided to show off a little, adding a 2 hour excursion to the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market and the Ferry Building on Saturday and a seminar on Urban Farming with Novella Carpenter and Sunset Magazine's food editor Margo True.

Page hoped that the conference's four tracks of panels, tracked into Values, Visual, Vocation, or Voice would mean something for everyone, newbies and SEO-savvy pros alike. But of course, the real value lay in the face-to-face time between women in the community, creating a place for gluten-free girls (not to mention gluten-free moms & gluten-free teens) and kim-chee kitchens to come together. (In fact, if there was one takeaway trend from this year's conference, it would be the rapid mushrooming of gluten-free and celiac-themed blogs and products.)

"It's like summer camp here," said Tara Austen Weaver, as clusters of her cross-country blogging buddies came up for hugs. It was also a chance to grab tips and swap cards with stars of the food blogosphere like Ree Drummond, Jaden Hair, David Leite--people who'd made it beyond the what-I-made-for-dinner online world, who'd broken into the larger public consciousness by scoring those still-coveted old-media contracts for cookbooks or television appearances.

The Voice panels, with topics like "Storytelling" and "Writing Tips: The Basic Tools in Any Writer's Gear Bag" could have been taken from any writers' workshop, save for the power strips lined up on every table and the clickety tap-tapping of laptops and handhelds making a crickety background to the panelists' conversation.

Discussion swirled around the room: about what comes first, the writing or the photographs; finding tricks for fighting off writers' block, and again and again, how to discover and burnish your own unique, pick-it-out-without-a-byline personal voice. One woman worried that when she was writing at her most true and enthusiastic best, her grammar and spelling sometimes went by the wayside.

Longtime political writer turned hunting-and-fishing blogger Hank Shaw's advice? It's okay to use slang and non-traditional grammar, if you know the rules you're breaking, and only if it's true to how you really speak. Readers will know when you're faking it, and they won't hang around.

Once you've found your voice, then do what every freshman-creative-writing class teacher would tell you: condense your prose, use vivid verbs, write fast and loose on that first draft. Don't judge your writing to begin with, just dump it all out onto the page, even the terrible cliches. "Cliches work for a reason, they're mental mnemonics," said Shaw. "But then go through and change each one of those cliches to make it yours."

Read your work out loud, urged Cheryl Sternman Rule, because what's beautiful in your head can be "incredibly clunky" on the page. And, with more and more people reading blogs on hand-held devices, think twice before pounding out more than a monitor-screen's worth of prose.

"I spend more time writing my opening sentences than the whole rest of the piece," said S.J. Sebellin-Ross. "If they're good, everything else just flows." And then there's brevity, still the soul of wit. "Say what you want to say, and then stop."

Or, as Rebecca Crump quipped, "I like to hit it and quit it." Crump also likes to think about the personality of food, anthropomorphizing a peach cobbler, say, into a "naughty dessert that spanks you without using a switch."

Dominique Crenn

Over a Kraft-sponsored lunch in the Grand Ballroom (oil-glossed roasted vegetables, grilled halibut, multicolored ravioli, and buckets of white sauce made from the inescapable Cooking Creme), the French-born chef Dominique Crenn of the hotel's Luce Restaurant discussed her career path, and the challenges of being a woman in the still very much male-dominated world of French kitchens.

On leaving France for the States, she said, "I wanted to show the world what I had...maybe it took me longer, but I'm glad I went through the struggle I did. It's a hard profession, but you just have to push through. I'm all for women on top!"

Elizabeth Falkner

And what would a women's food-blogging conference be without something cute, something pink, something chocolate...something like a maroon velvet cupcake (made with beets & cocoa) swirled with rosewater-raspberry icing and topped with popcorn? At the end of the day, pastry superstar and Scharffenberger spokeswoman Elizabeth Faulkner (Citizen Cake, Orson) was on hand to guide conference-goers through an assemble-your-own-cupcake adventure, choosing from an assortment of Falkner-made cupcakes, fillings, icings, and toppings. Holding up her stout-laced Chocolate Pub Cake topped with chocolate ganache, salted peanuts, Meyer lemon rind, and ancho-chile-laced cocoa nibs, she told the audience, "It's like the best bar snack ever, in a cupcake!"

Can BarSnackCupcake, the blog, be far behind?

Food & Wine This Week:
City and suburban residents who want fresh eggs, milk and produce are raising animals, poultry and bees in their yards. Leslie and her guests, Oakland-based urban farmer and author Novella Carpenter, and Rebecca Katz with San Francisco Animal Care and Control, look at a growing trend -- backyard farming in urban areas.

WATCH VIDEO:

VIEW SLIDESHOW:

Related Posts and Websites:

• Goat-Curious? Take Urban Goats 101 with Novella Carpenter
• KQED Forum: Novella Carpenter's "Farm City"
• Ghost Town Farm
• City & County of San Francisco: Animal Care and Control
• A Tomato Grows on Capp Street

Mother's Day this year was a bit atypical. My interest in urban farming had peaked with the possibility of raising goats in my Oakland backyard and I needed a dose of reality. So, instead of brunching with Mom I spent the morning learning about goat husbandry in an Urban Goats 101 class at the BioFuel Oasis.

The BioFuel Oasis is a worker-owned cooperative in Berkeley specializing in ASTM quality biodiesel made from recycled vegetable oil. In addition to supplying BioFuel, they offer urban farming classes in Beekeeping, Raising Chickens & Ducks, Basic Vegetable Fermenting, Raising Milking Goats and other DIY pursuits.

Novella Carpenter, an Oakland-based urban farmer (GhostTown Farm), owner/worker at BioFuel Oasis, and author of Farm City: The Education of An Urban Farmer teaches like she writes. Her casual yet methodical approach contains hints of dark humor sprinkled lightly with four letter words. Learning to raise goats in the ghetto had been an iterative process -- there was no definitive "urban goat manual" and the lessons learned from owning other city farm animals (chickens, ducks, turkeys, rabbits, pigs) didn't necessarily translate. Throughout the class, Novella shared her methodology along with lists of essential information to raise milking goats in an urban environment. Clearly the need for guidance in urban farming provided inspiration for teaching this class and writing the much needed general manual, The Essential Urban Farmer, Novella's forthcoming book.

I love a good class handout and Novella's 8-page Goat 101 packet was extremely informative and well-organized. It opened with this sobering statement:

Warning: No one should enter into goat husbandry without full knowledge that goat ownership is an all-engrossing hobby that will suck up your time and money.

She covered legal issues; dispelled goat myths; described different types and breeds of goats; provided a list of essential housing and caretaking necessities; and shared how to buy, breed, and milk goats.

Here are some goaty reality factors that might stop you from responding to a Craigslist ad on a whim:
1. To keep milking goats lactating they need to be bred annually. So, that means you are also a goat breeder and need to deal with stud services, birthing and (goat) kids.
2. Male goats stink and it is illegal to own them in Berkeley. If your goat gives birth to a male kid you will need to have a plan how to deal with him. Selling, giving away or eating are your basic options.
3. Goats don't like to be alone so you need to have at least two females, ideally three. (Berkeley law allows only two female goats per household. Oakland law was only specific about goats not being raised on properties occupied by apartments, hotels or in a business district. San Francisco law was only specific about goats not being used for animal sacrifice but did cite a limitation of four small animals total.)
4. Dogs and goats are natural enemies (however, goats and chickens are compatible)
5. "Goats are not lawnmowers. Many a person has been disappointed when they brought their goats home and expected them to trim the grass, and instead the goats denuded the shrubs and trees first....But the main feed for your goat should always be hay."
6. Be prepared to spend $500-600 for a good quality milking doe.

After the didactic lecture plus Q&A we moved into the experiential goat-handling portion of the class. Blue-eyed Milky Way and bearded Orla May entered the space and brushing and hoof trimming was demonstrated and practiced. Novella went through the motions of demonstrating milking technique but her milker goat Bebe was off getting "freshened" so she was not available for an actual milking demo. That was my only disappointment. I was hoping to witness actual goat milking and possibly have a hands-on experience and tasting. However, taking photos and interacting with these unfamiliar and extremely cute creatures was quite a thrill.

The folks attending the class ranged from goat owners to goat-curious. The class was 3 hours long, cost $30 and was kept to a comfortable size so all participants wanting to handle the goats had easy access. Novella brought samples of her own GhostTown Farm goat cheese for tasting and briefly discussed goat milk products. A great class to follow this general introduction would be "How-To make Goat Milk Cheese, Yogurt and Kefir."

Novella will be teaching this class again on Sunday, June 20th from 9:30am to 12:30pm. It will be taught at a house with a backyard so there is more natural space for the goats to wander around. If you are even slightly goat-curious I recommend attending, but register ASAP because her classes sell out quickly.

In 2009, urban farming, like punk in 1991, broke. While San Franciscans have been raising chickens in backyard coops and tending verdant patio gardens for decades, the trend has now sprouted up in the city's mainstream, expanding from the realm of co-ops and collectives to the mayor's cluttered desk: In July, Gavin Newsom issued an executive directive aiming to reshape how city residents make food choices, and now, eight months later, neighborhoods and communities are beginning to taste the (literal) fruits of City Hall's efforts in the form of initiatives like public vegetable gardens and mobile produce markets. In recent years, urban farmers have started seeing their flora and fauna as something more than sustainable, super-local eats. They're hyper-aware of how their work can impact their surroundings, and intrigued by what larger ripples they might make. Thus, their missions are evolving, moving in inspired directions towards a brand of community-conscious agri-activism.

Having a president keen on arugula and a first lady tilling soil outside the White House helps, but the movement has found creative, diverse expression locally. Brooke Budner and Caitlyn Galloway run Little City Gardens, a miniature Mission District farm and salad greens business. The founders see their project as "an experiment in the economic viability of small-scale urban market-gardening," a working model for a career path they'd like to see become more common in America. The greens are fantastic -- as knows anyone who has crunched down on a Bar Tartine salad -- but producing good food for people who care is only a facet of the over-arching goal; it's about the people too -- which probably has something to do with the ongoing success of their Kickstarter-funded expansion campaign. Since 1994, Alemany Farm has gone by a few different handles, but the 4.5 acre South Mission garden, tucked away along the intersection of two major highways, staffed largely by volunteers and neighborhood residents, remains committed to growing food and creating jobs for citizens in low-income communities. Craigslist -- you know, that site we used to use for finding jobs -- is a cornucopia of produce. Its farm and garden classifieds always bristle with city farmers looking to unload excess hauls -- whether they be bunnies, bok choy, or Meyer lemons. Novella Carpenter has raised turkeys, goats, pigs, bees, chickens, geese and rabbits in the backyard of her house in Oakland -- everything "short of a cow," she professed in a February 2009 interview with the aptly named Twilight Greenaway of Culinate. Along the way, Carpenter has never identified her efforts as a model to be followed exactly; her farm comes across like a more personal journey. Nonetheless, she chronicled the tending of her plot and its furred, feathered and winged inhabitants in the acclaimed memoir Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer. Published over the summer, her book presents the sorts of funny-sad lessons rookie urban ranchers might want to take into account: how to fatten a hog on donated restaurant scraps, for example, or how to scale a barbed-wire fence to try and rescue an errant turkey from bloodthirsty dogs. Note the "try" in that last clause.

Newsom likely won't suffer so many slashes and scrapes. A March 23 S.F. Chronicle article outlined his plan of attack:

"Urban agriculture is about far more than growing vegetables on an empty lot...It's about revitalizing and transforming unused public spaces, connecting city residents with their neighborhoods in a new way and promoting healthier eating and living for everyone."

To this end, he's had all city departments look out for fallow land with garden potential. The Mission and Noe Valley public library branches have planted plots and held gardening classes for kids. Seven more branches may shortly follow suit. Last week, the city began building a new garden at a Department of Public Works-owned steam powerhouse at McAllister and Larkin. The farm's bounty will feed volunteers. The Department of Education-sponsored Urban Gleaning Program will teach interested San Franciscans how to plant fruit trees. While many did already, now all farmers' markets must accept food stamps as payment. Subsequently, food stamp purchases at city farmers' markets increased 85% last year, a sign that people will eat well and responsibly when they can afford to do so. And that's just for starters, it seems.

Say what you will about his no-doughnuts policy at civic meetings; the mayor might be on to something here.

Newsom thinks urban farms make life better for residents of a city's communities because they render our surroundings more beautiful and bring people together in the interest of a common goal -- a grassroots movement with actual roots. Quoted in the story's last paragraph, the mayor's "greening director" Astrid Haryati bridged the gap between Newsom's stance and the sorts of mission statements d.i.y. farmers actually kick around:

"It's not only about feeding mouths...It's about feeding the soul and feeding the pride of San Francisco urban dwellers."

The idea that relationships between gardeners might blossom along with the blighted spaces they plant is a compelling one -- that a vital, green space symbolizes a vibrant community -- but words like "soul" and "pride" carry a complexity their usage only occasionally signifies. Food does nurture us on a variety of levels, providing sustenance and pleasure, conjuring up memories of family, routines and valued moments in time: the tomato salad Mom started making every August, family trips to pick blueberries at a farm outside of town. What can a garden really do? It's true that greenery makes people happy -- whether it takes the form of a full-blown farm, or just a few plants on the windowsill of an apartment kitchen. A week or so ago, a friend posted a picture on Facebook -- a photograph of a shocking chartreuse moss snake swelling up and curling around the bottom of a parking meter. He added a caption: "Among the trash laden sheets of concrete in downtown Oakland, one can still manage to find a hint of beauty."

On the surface, feeding the soul sounds cheesier than a knob of Gorgonzola. It's a cliche you heard in college co-op kitchens, usually when you were about to steal a flat of eggs to take back to your slovenly apartment. Soul-feeding is not for everyone. Characterized as such, it's not for me. I hated gardening when I was a kid. I'd rather shop at Rainbow, Bi Rite, and farmers' markets than sow seeds myself -- much less decapitate a duck in my bathtub, Carpenter-style. I do not have a green thumb, or a desire to initiate intimate attachments to animals I intend to slaughter. A few months ago, my dad gave me a tomato plant and I completely forgot about it. It sat on the back deck, soaking in a handsome view -- the McDonald's at 24th and Mission, that dance studio above the cheap Chinese place, and a few willowy palm trees for inspiration. The pot flooded when the rains came; the plant withered when they did not. Still, despite my negligence, in late March, two very, very small yet well-shaped red heirloom tomatoes appeared on the end of one brown vine. I was outside drinking a beer when I noticed. I yanked them off the plant, and ran into the house, screaming to my girlfriend: "We grew tomatoes, and we didn't even try!"

Farm City
Novella Carpenter took over an empty lot next to her apartment in Oakland's gritty Ghost Town neighborhood, and over the years turned it into a lush garden and farm complete with bees, chickens, rabbits and even pigs. Urban farms are popping up in even the most cramped corners of densely populated cities, fueled by a desire for good food and a closer relationship with what we eat. Carpenter joins Forum to talk about her new book, "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer."

Host: Dave Iverson

Guest: Novella Carpenter, journalist, urban farmer and author of "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer"

Explore and buy the book "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer" at Amazon.com

Farm City News: Novella Carpenter's blog

Listen to story and view a slideshow of Oakland's Ghost Town Farm on The California Report: Urban Farming in Oakland