‘You want to learn how to make a salad? I’ll teach you how to make a salad,” says Michele Anna Jordan, moving quickly through the modest kitchen in her Sebastopol home. Placing a wooden bowl already filled with mixed greens in front of her, she reaches with her other hand for a two-gallon jar to her left.

“The first thing you do when you make a salad is you put salt on it. ‘Insalata’ means that which is salted,” she says.

Her hand reaches into the giant salt jar and she waves it over the bowl in concise circles, raining down tiny white crystals of flavor.

“Then you put on some really good olive oil,” she continues. “You’re kind of generous with this.” More circling; Jordan is indeed generous. “Then you add a little bit of acid, and for this you can squeeze a lemon on. And that’s it, that’s your daily salad.” Jordan smiles, red curls spilling over the frames of her glasses. “If you want to get really fancy, you can add some peppercorns.”

For Michele Anna Jordan, this isn’t just a salad; it’s a story told through shared experience. And it’s a story she’s been telling since she was seven. This year, the former chef and author of more than 20 books is looking back and telling some of her favorite stories once again, rereleasing four currently out-of-print books from her Good Cook’s Book series. Each title is infused with new recipes, new narratives and full-color celebrations of tomatoes, mustard, oil and vinegar, and salt and pepper.

On May 15, Jordan appears at the Occidental Center for the Arts for a reading and discussion that highlights her most recent rereleases, The Good Cook’s Book of Tomatoes and The Good Cook’s Book of Mustard, as well as her other recent works, More Than Meatballs and Vinaigrettes and Other Dressings.

BORN TO EAT

Jordan was born and raised in Vallejo. “I was born a good eater; my mother was not a good cook,” she says. From an early age, Jordan exhibited a sophisticated palate, one that allowed her to identify watermelons’ peak ripeness at age four and propelled her to order her steak rare before she was in high school. By seven years old, Jordan was throwing dinner parties and recreating dishes by taste alone.

“The hardest thing was getting my mother to get the ingredients I wanted,” she laughs.

Self-taught in the kitchen, Jordan moved to Sonoma County full-time in 1972, where she attended Sonoma State University for liberal studies, as well as French, Russian and English literature. “I just cooked. I had dinner parties for everybody in college,” she says.

Forty years ago, Sonoma County was a very different place. “There was no food scene, but there was a farm scene,” she says. “I used to go out to buy salmon in Bodega Bay. There was Miller’s drive-in dairy in Petaluma. It was an actual drive-in and they had raw milk in glass bottles. There was Sonoma Cheese Factory.”

Jordan was soon working in restaurants, learning tricks of the trade on the job and refining her palate. A decade later, she was running professional kitchens, even earning “Outstanding Sonoma County Chef” from the Sonoma County Art Awards in 1989.

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WILL WRITE FOR FOOD

As with cooking, Jordan began writing at a young age, always with an eye to journalism. Yet it wasn’t until she was running Brass Ass Pizza in Cotati in the 1980s that she found an opportunity to write. Bruce Robinson, then an editor at two local papers and now the news director at KRCB where Jordan has long hosted Mouthful, her James Beard–nominated talk show covering food, wine and farming, approached her with an offer.

“He said, ‘I’m looking for a food columnist, why don’t you write for us?’ And he didn’t know me,” explains Jordan. “So I had this three-month anxiety attack, and he called back and said, ‘Are you ever going to write that column?’ So I did, and I never stopped.”

Robinson remembers that Jordan was willing to work for free, which was what he could afford to pay her. “What she turned in was great,” he says. “She’s a very effective and enthusiastic advocate for the local food scene. I think she has, in her own substantial way, contributed to the perception of Sonoma County as an attraction.”

In 1988, Jordan met an editor at Aris Books and sold him a proposal for A Cook’s Tour of Sonoma, released in 1990. The book was praised for its community focus on Sonoma County at a time when the North Bay was just beginning to flirt with culinary renown. Jordan is perhaps best known for her writing in the Press Democrat, where she has maintained up to four food columns and blogs continuously since 1997. She says she really blossomed as a writer in the early 1990s while freelancing at the Sonoma County Independent, an earlier incarnation of the Bohemian, and the books started coming very quickly.

The Good Cook’s Book of Oil & Vinegar kicked-off Jordan’s long-running series in 1992. The Good Cook’s Book of Mustard followed in 1994, with The Good Cook’s Book of Tomatoes following right after it, in 1995. From there, Jordan covered foodie topics ranging from the seemingly mundane to the sensational. Her works all possess strong narratives to accompany the recipes and topics, and with each dish, Jordan invites readers to share her experience.

“I think she’s highy underappreciated,” says Lucas Martin, chef and co-owner of Sebastopol’s K&L Bistro. “She’s definitely one of the leading voices for farm-to-table. She has a good sensibility about how she reviews and critiques, with an open mind and equal temperment. She knows there is no wrong or right way about food.”

Chef John Ash agrees.

“I’ve been a friend and most of all an avid reader of Michele’s work for more than 25 years,” says Ash, himself a venerable figure in Sonoma County cuisine. “She has the unique ability to take even simple subjects like salt or mustard and help us all understand their history and importance in our culinary lives.”

Empowering readers through her narratives, Jordan offer tools in identifying and exploring each individual’s taste.

“Julia Child used to say we learn to cook so we don’t have to rely on recipes,” says Jordan. “A recipe is a way to tell a story to another person; cooking is something else. Cooking is intuition, knowing your ingredients and what to do with them. For me, recipes are translations of that knowledge into a story. They’re like a map, a way to get to your destination, but there’s more than one way to get there.”

We’ve become very precise in the last several decades, she says, and home cooks don’t feel that they make food as good as in restaurants. Nonsense, she says.

“I tell people, to get used to tasting their food, learn the principles of what makes it taste good.”

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A MATTER OF TASTE

For Jordan, personal taste compels her writing. She isn’t one to follow trends; in fact, being ahead of the curve is par for the course. In 1999, she released Salt & Pepper, a decade before Mark Bitterman’s Salted supposedly changed the landscape of American cooking. She also explored everyone’s favorite pork product, bacon, back in 2003 with The BLT Cookbook, right around the time folks were discovering the endless enjoyment bacon provides on sweets and savories alike.

“I was 20 years ahead of the curve in thinking that Sonoma County was the bee’s knees,” she says. Luckily, the county was quick to catch up. “A year after my mustard book came out, they launched the Napa Valley Mustard Festival, and a year after my tomatoes book came out, they started the Kendall-Jackson Tomato Festival,” she smiles.

For all her acclaim, including a James Beard Award for journalism, her Good Cook’s Books have all gone out of print—and in Jordan’s mind, out of date.

“I’ve changed, and my cooking has changed as well,” she says. “I’m much more confident as a cook, and the pantry available to us all is so much better now. I wanted to bring the books up to date, give them a longer life because they deserve a long life. I feel like they warrant time.”

Over the past 12 months, Jordan has been furiously revising and updating several titles from the Good Cook’s collection. In addition to the books already published, Skyhorse Publishing will rerelease The Good Cook’s
Book of Salt & Pepper, The Good Cook’s Book of Oil & Vinegar and The Good Cook’s Book of Days:
A Food Lover’s Journal this July.

KEEP IT GREEN

Jordan is still committed to the farm scene today, though watching Sonoma County transform from sleepy pastureland to a coveted agricultural hub has been a sometimes scary prospect.

“There’s always the expression ‘To kill the goose that lays the golden egg.’ A lot depends on what the [Sonoma] County Board of Supervisors and the Planning Commission do,” she says. “The good side is that we can sell our stuff. Produce from here sells much higher than produce from anywhere else. There is a market for Sonoma County. At the same time, the wrong people have money.”

Jordan points to instances like the recent lawsuit filed against the Sonoma Compost Company in Petaluma by several of the business’ neighbors in an attempt to shut it down, and proposals for mammoth winery “event centers.”

“People move up here because they want what they think is this idealized Sonoma lifestyle and then they get pissed off because it smells like cow shit,” Jordan says. “It’s like, you bought a house next to a farm—sometimes they smell. There’s always been that tension. You want to preserve the best of Sonoma County because it’s such an amazing place—the fertility, the versatility, the microclimates,” she says.

Jordan is hopeful that preservation efforts will prevail. She cites the recent developments at Middleton Farm in Healdsburg. The farm’s matriarch of many years, Nancy Skall, passed way in January, and there was a question of what would happen to the land. Last month, the farm sold to Anne and Monty Woods of San Francisco. So far, they are saying that they want to keep it open and running under the same name.

WHAT’S ON TAP

Looking ahead to the future of food, Jordan sees good things brewing.

“Cider is coming on strong, and sour beer. Sour beer is going to be huge. It’s refreshing, its tart, the acidity really connects with food,” she says. “And people are going to discover Vinho Verde. It’s a Portuguese white wine, very effervescent, and it’s inexpensive. I discovered it when I was stranded on the outskirts of Lisbon one day.”

Jordan is looking forward to giving her books a new life. After a much needed respite from publishing deadlines, she is already in the planning stages for her next work, a comprehensive and definitive look at Sonoma County told through the eyes of someone who’s seen, and tasted, it all.

Whether you’re a strict vegetarian or a contented carnivore, meat poses a vexing efficiency problem. Crowded into feedlots, the modern cow burns through an estimated 25 pounds of corn and soybeans for every pound of edible meat it generates. Pork, chicken and egg production require an average of five pounds of feed per pound of product yielded, which is somewhat more efficient, but they, too, raise a provocative question: Why not just eat the protein-rich grain and beans that go into all that feed rather than running them through the body of an animal first?

When author Frances Moore Lappé first asked this question in 1971’s game-changing manifesto, Diet for a Small Planet, global meat production stood at about 121 million tons annually. Today that output exceeds 300 million tons per year—and it’s projected to exceed 500 million tons by 2050 as economies modernize and demand for meat increases in developing countries like China.

If this ever comes to pass, the planet simply won’t be able to handle the additional strain on its already stressed resources. As ecologist Vaclav Smil says, global meat production is one of humanity’s “most environmentally burdensome activities,” fouling groundwater, spewing greenhouse gases and eroding soil at untenable rates. By his estimate, the earth is capable of supporting no more than 220 million tons of annual meat production—meaning we’ve already entered unsustainable territory.

If Smil and the many others who share his view are correct, then clearly the problem is serious. And fixing it will mean marshaling the most innovative thinking to change the way the world consumes and produces protein. Unsurprisingly, several titans of Silicon Valley—where perpetual invention and love of problem-solving meet the profit motive—have been investing heavily in start-ups that aim to do this very thing. They’re all betting big on a food industry sector that saw its sales rise 8 percent between 2010 and 2012, the same year that the U.S. market for fake meat crossed the half-billion-dollar mark.

Surprisingly, the chief driver for consumers doesn’t appear to be a dietary shift toward vegetarianism; according to a 2013 report by the market research firm Mintel, about one-third of the people who buy meat alternatives identify as carnivores who are simply trying to eat less meat.

Several of the new businesses are developing ways to alter the form and taste of beans and grains so that they’re virtually indistinguishable from real meat—right down to the fibrous texture of muscle and even the subtle tang of blood. Others are dedicated to synthesizing actual flesh from living animal cells without killing any animals.

But some experts, Smil included, doubt that “mock meat” will ever be “anything but a marginal choice” for most consumers. With each new iteration, however, the new protein gets closer and closer to looking, cooking and tasting like the real thing. At some point, it will get there. Whether people will actually make the switch, en masse, remains to be seen.

HAMPTON CREEK FOODS

What It Makes Gunning for a piece of the $213.7-billion-a-year chicken-egg market, this San Francisco–based company is focusing on knocking off egg-based edibles such as mayonnaise and cookie dough. Its two-year-old Just Mayo, made from canola oil and pea protein, received enough media hoopla to make conventional mayo producers nervous. Unilever, which owns the Hellmann’s brand, felt compelled to file a widely mocked lawsuit asserting that any product being marketed as mayonnaise must contain eggs. (The suit was eventually dropped.)

Who’s Behind It Hampton Creek has raised more than
$100 million from a loose affiliation of angel investors including Sun Microsystems cofounder Vinod Khosla, twin brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi (who have a knack for picking winners, including Facebook, Zappos and Dropbox) and the Hong Kong–based venture capitalist Li Ka-shing, whose firm, Horizons Ventures, also owns sizable stakes in Facebook and Spotify.

Tasting Notes When Wired reporter Kyle VanHemert sampled an omelet made from the company’s scrambled-egg substitute in 2013, he wrote that it was “a little chewy, definitely, and oddly tasteless. If it was served to me at a restaurant, I’d send it back; if I encountered it while hungover, I’d probably inhale it without thinking twice.” He raved, however, about Just Mayo: “[It] doesn’t just taste normal. It tastes good.”

Where It Stands Just Mayo can now be found in grocery stores nationwide, from high-end markets like Whole Foods to discount chains like Dollar Tree. Another product, Just Cookie Dough, rolled out last fall and is currently available in select Whole Foods. The brand’s scrambled-egg replacement, Just Scramble, is slated to debut later this year.

BEYOND MEAT

What It Makes “Meat is actually just the combination of amino acids, fats, water, carbohydrates and trace minerals,” CEO Ethan Brown says. “These things are available in the plant kingdom.” Fittingly, his products are plant-based substitutes for chicken and beef made primarily from pea protein and soy.

Who’s Behind It Early investors included Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and Twitter cofounders Biz Stone and Evan Williams.

Tasting Notes Two years ago, using patented technology licensed from University of Missouri researchers, Beyond Meat rolled out a product that mimicked the stringy texture of cooked chicken. The New York Times’ Mark Bittman observed that it “doesn’t taste much like chicken” on its own, but when it’s wrapped in a tortilla filled with burrito fixings, “you won’t know the difference.” The just-launched Beast Burger, which is said to offer “more protein and iron than beef and more omegas than salmon,” reminded veteran food writer Rowan Jacobsen of “the Salisbury steak of my youth—not exactly something to celebrate, but not terrible, either.” (Touché, Marcel Proust!)

Where It Stands The company, which was named one of 2014’s most innovative businesses by Fast Company magazine, had rolled out its fake-chicken strips to all Whole Foods stores by 2013, retailing at about $5.50 for a 12-ounce, four-serving package. The Beast Burger became available in Whole Foods this past February.

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IMPOSSIBLE FOODS

What It Makes This Silicon Valley company has embarked on an even more audacious hamburger knockoff: a veggie patty that bleeds (well, sort of bleeds). Founder and former Stanford biochemistry professor Patrick Brown observed that heme, an iron-rich molecule found in blood that gives meat its meaty flavor, can also be found in the roots of plants like legumes. By combining plant proteins like heme with amino acids, vitamins and fats extracted from a blend of vegetables, grains and beans, the Impossible Burger looks and smells like the real thing while it’s being prepared, according to Evelyn Rusli, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was present at a cooking demo.

Who’s Behind It Gates and Khosla (who also have stakes in Beyond Meat and Hampton Creek, respectively) were early investors, as was Google Ventures, the company’s in-house start-up incubator. From them and a handful of others, Brown was able to raise $75 million.

Tasting Notes How it looks and smells are both important, to be sure. But when it came to the crucial taste factor, alas, Rusli found late last year that “the burger [didn’t] quite hit the mark”—it just wasn’t juicy enough. (She did have some nice things to say about the texture.)

Where It Stands The Impossible Burger isn’t ready just yet for your next barbecue. Its commercial debut will likely be next year, once the company has perfected its recipe and scaled up production. It also needs to bring down the unit cost, which right now is a whopping $20 per patty.

MODERN MEADOW

What It Makes In Brooklyn, Modern Meadow aims to produce animal-free meat from cell tissue, a process called biofabrication. Founded in 2011 by Andras Forgacs, who previously headed up a firm that 3-D prints human tissue for medical purposes, the company is taking cautious baby steps by “applying the latest advances in tissue engineering to culture leather and meat without requiring the raising, slaughtering, and transporting [of] animals.”

Who’s Behind It Forgacs received a grant from Breakout Labs, a business incubator funded by PayPal cofounder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. And last summer, Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures (also a stakeholder
in Hampton Creek) invested
$10 million in the company, which is now developing lab-grown leather while continuing to improve and refine its cultured meat. (Maybe start with the funny color, guys.)

Tasting Notes At last year’s annual reThink Food conference, where Forgacs was handing out the orange-tinted disks of his lab-grown meat that he calls “steak chips,” one satisfied taker was reported as saying that the sample “reminds me of beef jerky, but with much better texture. It melts in your mouth.” Another described it, somewhat less rhapsodically, as tasting “like bouillon.”

Where It Stands With production costs for individual steak chips coming in at nearly $100, commercial viability is still a ways off. According to Forgacs, cultured meat will take more time, as it will have to overcome greater technical, regulatory and market hurdles.

CULTURED BEEF

What It Makes Based in a laboratory at the Netherlands’ Maastricht University, this start-up might well be the best-known faux-meat project of them all. Like Modern Meadow’s Forgacs, project leader Mark Post is endeavoring to grow synthetic beef from cow cells without hurting any cows in the process. Unlike Modern Meadow, however, Cultured Beef has much more than an orange steak chip to offer: Post and his team have come up with an actual, identifiable, edible hamburger.

Who’s Behind It A large chunk of the project is being bankrolled by Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who—as Post recently told Time magazine—injected enough new funding after a 2013 taste test to allow a fourfold increase in staffing, from five to 20.

Tasting Notes At a 2013 demo in London, two lucky souls were given the chance to taste-test the project’s long-awaited burger. One proclaimed the product “close to meat,” albeit “not as juicy.” The other—in a bit of phrasing that must have made Cultured Beef’s marketing team wince just a little—likened it to “an animal protein cake.”

Where It Stands About that burger? It costs roughly $330,000 to produce. According to synthetic biologist Christina Agapakis’ 2012 Discover article, tissue culture is incredibly energy-intensive to maintain. Lab-grown tissue must be “exercised regularly with stretching machinery” to make it resemble meat—both visually and in terms of mouth-feel—and the growth medium required to catalyze the division and growth of cow cells costs about $250 per liter. Even so, Post expects his burgers to reach the consumer marketplace in 10 to 20 years.

Since I try to buy my food locally, I don’t typically avail myself of too many online food sources. But I do avail myself—all the time—of online food resources. One of my favorite sites, Civil Eats.com, covers food and ag issues with a critical eye, teasing out the crises of industrial agriculture and spotlighting emerging alternatives.

Author-reporter Maryn McKenna has long been my go-to source for the latest on the meat industry’s problem with antibiotics resistance; I was happy to learn that she recently began contributing to National Geographic’s science blog, Phenomena (phenomena.nationalgeographic.com). And to keep abreast of what kinds of trouble the industrial meat giants of Big Ag are getting themselves into, I regularly check in with trade sites like Meatingplace.com and WattAgNet.com.

A cofounder of Maverick Farms, a North Carolina–based sustainable farm and food-education center, Tom Philpott writes about the politics of food for publications such as ‘The Guardian’ and ‘Newsweek.’ A former columnist and editor at ‘Grist,’ he now writes the “Food for Thought” blog for ‘Mother Jones.’