America is going through a food renaissance. We want to know the source of our food and the way it is made. It isn’t good enough that it just “looks” pretty; it needs to have flavor and preferably a story behind it. With perfect timing, Tracy Ryder and Carole Topalian brought out the first of the Edible Community magazines, Edible Ojai, in 2002.

They created a beautiful periodical about the food of their surrounding community and the people who produced it. Soon they expanded to 65 areas, including our own Edible Sarasota (for which I write), with plans for the addition of 10 more magazines this year. In addition, they’ve created their first book, Edible: A Celebration of Local Foods.

is a guidebook to the food of America. Richly photographed and beautifully written, it is much more than the sum of the recipes. This is a book that will guide you through regional flavors: an understanding of the complexities of being the last farmer in the Boston metro region; what it takes to “sprout healthy kids” through a school garden movement in Austin Texas; and the experience of catching wild salmon off Lummi Island in Washington state.

The concept of “reading” a cookbook is not new.

This article appears in Apr 28 – May 4, 2010.