Health

In the course of the great recession, household incomes went down and food prices went up. The combination did no favors for the American diet. Sales for the least expensive snack foods climbed. As part of our week-long look at food, NHPR's Jon Greenberg digs into some cheap calories.

SFX - Crunch

Along with Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs, count the potato chip as one of the big winners of the recession. John Dumais, president of the NH Grocers Association, says, many of his members would have had a much worse year if it hadn't been for sales of snack foods.

To wrap up “Eating In”, this week’s series on food, we invited our program director Abby Goldstein, quite the foodie, to talk about her grilling lesson this week with cookbook writer Kathy Gunst.

Kathy Gunst is a cooking teacher and author and co-author of thirteen cookbooks. Her latest is “Stonewall Kitchen Grilling”.

All week we’ve been investigating where our food comes from. If we’re eating right, that leads back to a farmer.

Today the average age of the American farmer is 57 years-old. In the last 5 years, 35 percent of farmers turned 75 years or older. Last year, the country lost 10 percent of its dairy farmers. On top of the troubling demographics, kids growing up in rural America are less likely to join the agriculture business.

Food is something we share over a table, but in the virtual world, food bloggers are sharing recipes, reviews and culinary tips across the web.

NHPR’s Webmaster and Word of Mouth Internet Sherpa Brady Carlson has been checking out New Hampshire’s crop of food blogs and is here to share some of his favorites.

An Awesome Choice of Food Blogs:

Tucker Cummings: A Brave New Breakfast

All this week New Hampshire Public Radio is following some of the most commonly eaten foods back to their source.

So far, we’ve heard about potatoes, pasta and the source of ground beef.

In our next installment NHPR’s Dan Gorenstein looks at the cheese that melts so good- mozzarella.

Ok, so you have a few friends over, like NHPR reporter Josh Rogers did a few weeks back.

Have a few drinks.

Do a little cooking.

And Barbara Gannon of Sargento says odds are somebody is bound to sprinkle some mozzarella on something.

Got Milk? Maybe you do. But how about this: Got raw milk?

While the USDA opposes the sale of raw milk – they’d prefer you drink pasteurized - raw milk - straight from the cow, filtered and chilled - is making a comeback. It’s now sold in 28 states. Don’t bother looking for it at the store though.

People need to come here and they need to bring their own containers. They come here so they can see my animals, they can see our operation. They can decide for themselves whether the animals look healthy, whether everything’s clean.

NHPR's week-long look at food, "Eating In", continues now with the next course in our dinner at Josh Roger's house. Josh cooked for the NHPR news team and each day this week, we trace the supply chain of one of the more common ingredients used in that meal. Today, NHPR's Jon Greenberg presents the humble potato.

A new green business start-up called EcoMovement is working with Seacoast cafes and restaurants to separate their compostable waste from normal trash. Their goal is to push the Portsmouth area to become a "zero waste" community, while helping business owners be more eco-friendly and save money on trash removal.

Word of Mouth's Avishay Artsy has this profile of the company.