A Tribute to Tom Valenti, The Best Chef You Never Heard Of

The idea that food is medicine has been around for centuries. On this week's Special Sauce The New York Times's Kim Severson and the Aspen Institute's Corby Kummer talk about how doctors, the government, and even insurance companies have been engaged in a half-century long process to treat various medical conditions with food cooked healthily that the government and health insurers pay for. Chicken soup is indeed good for the soul.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last November ICE launched Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, terrorizing both restaurant customers and workers in immigrant communities all over the Windy City.We heard firsthand accounts of ICE's violent misdeeds by Chicago Tribune reporter Zareen Syed and restaurateur Marcos Carbajal of the esteemed Carnitas Uruapan. I checked in with Zareen and Marcos this week to get an update on the situation.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Tom Valenti, one of my favorite chefs of all time (who also happened to be a swell, generously spirited human being), died suddenly last week. Tom was a friend of mine, so I gathered writer Andrew Friedman (who co-wrote Tom's cookbooks) and Dinosaur Bar-B-Que founder John Stage to celebrate the life and times of the best chef you might never have heard of.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As someone who has spent the greater part of a half-century searching for and obsessing about where to find the best of any kind of foodstuff, I was immediately drawn to Ella Quittner's book Obsessed with the Best. Quittner and I delved into the pleasures and pitfalls any writer encounters when he or she tackles this most subjective undertaking.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Smitten Kitchen's Deb Perelman explains why she and many other recipe developers and food writers regard AI as an existential threat on this week's episode of Special Sauce.  This is serious business, serious eaters. Listen up! Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

According The New York Times, Noma chef and co-owner René Redzepi physically and verbally abused more than thirty of his kitchen staff between 2010 and 2017. To find out what that means, I sat down with longtime restaurant critic Bill Addison of The Los Angeles Times, and best selling author and youtuber, Kenji Lopez-Alt. Kenji worked in many serious restaurant kitchens in Boston for a number of years after graduating from college, before opening his own restaurant Wursthall in San Mateo, California. Can fine-dining restaurant kitchens become kinder and gentler places? What should happen to Redzepi? We mull over these questions and more on this episode of Special Sauce. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week we're reheating one of our favorite recent episodes on the ongoing struggle between ICE and the immigrant-driven food cultures of major American cities. LA Taco's editor-in-chief  Javier Cabral explains how and why his website became one of the leading voices of ICE resistance in the "City of Angels'.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On part 2 of our revealing and refreshingly honest conversation with three of the best food critics in America, Hannah Goldfield of The New Yorker, Bill Addison of The Los Angeles Times, and Elazar Sontag of The Washington Post, all three are not feeling particularly sanguine about the future of restaurant criticism in general. And it's not just social media to blame.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Are restaurant critics dinosaurs in the age of social media? We discuss that and more in part one of our critic's roundtable with The New Yorker's Hannah Goldfield, The Washington Post's Elazar Sontag, and The Los Angeles Times' Bill Addison.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week Pete Wells and I talk about our mutual worst food enemy, our addiction to sugar. Pete explains how the hidden added sugars in many packaged and processed foods just compound our dietary problems. We also talk about how the mixed messages we get from the government add to our dietary woes.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices