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 I thought might interest you.

The perfect foodie beach rental has a well-equipped kitchen, access to markets selling fresh fruit, produce, and fish, and proximity to restaurants where accomplished city chefs have established outposts.

 

Likewise, the perfect foodie beach bag contains prime kitchen lit: books on food history, essays on sustainability, food-centric fiction (call it foodtion), and sentimental food memoirs, or foodoirs.

Julie Powell blogged her way through cooking every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking; a book deal and movie followed. Are food bloggers thrilled for her? Hardly; Powell is a foodie infidel who must be stopped.

 

Powell's movie is part blogger story and part Julia Child biopic; Meryl Streep plays Child, the famous home-cooking guru.

A report issued yesterday by Dr. Alan Dangour of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, commissioned by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) in the UK, claims that there is no substantial difference in nutritional content between organic and conventional food. The report was based on the review of fifty years worth of research papers on the subject. But reading it makes one wonder if influence caused a misreading of the findings, and in addition, if the agency has addressed the wrong questions entirely.

A little garden between the skyscrapers and busy streets of a metropolis is no longer a luxury only for those with deep pockets and great patios. Urban farms and gardens are being planted in major cities throughout the U.S. thanks, in part, to an increasing need to lower the cost of locally grown, organic food. While it's impossible to gauge just how many urban farms and gardens there are across the country (they range from personal plots to full-scale farms with viable acreage), many are found in urban epicenters, often in low-income neighborhoods lacking grocery stores and farmers markets. They're wedged between government housing, abandoned buildings, halted construction projects and streets known more for their crime problems than their heirloom tomatoes. And as the economy fails to thrive, advocates say the benefits of these gardens are even more pronounced

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