It’s Friday afternoon, and that means it’s time for me to give you a little weekend reading from around the Web. Here are a few food-related items that might interest you.

As Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert says, "Italians take every ingredient they know and make a feast of it." According to her, "there are few ways to create happiness more efficiently than by cooking for yourself and others." In honor of the movie staring Julia Roberts, we chose perhaps one of the most famous simple Roman pasta sauces, made with black pepper and aged Pecorino Romano. It is sure to restore your appetite for life! Buon appetito. 

MILK, that icon of purity, has been taking some hits lately.

 

By the time they are 11, children drink more soda than milk. The amount of milk consumed in America over all has fallen to about 20 gallons a year per capita, from 25 gallons in the early 1990s.

For Shana Starobin, downtime means baking bread, knitting and crocheting, picking and canning fruit, doing woodwork or tending vegetables on her rooftop garden in Durham.

 

Starobin, a 32-year-old doctoral candidate at the Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment, sees her favorite do-it-yourself pastimes as more than hobbies, though.

 

"I feel, as a woman, so empowered to be able to learn how to do these things," she says. "They're kind of lost skills."

Image: Matt Callow