Bread forms a bond that cannot be easily broken. Even while working as a travel writer for a Birmingham based regional magazine, Joe Rada, aka “Bakery Boy,” retained his childhood love for the work and lifestyle of a baker.

Graziano will be a part of a panel discussion following the screening. Also present will be Scott Silver of Jones Valley Urban Farm (JVUF), Amanda Storey of the United Way’s Healthy Kids, Healthy Community Grant and Maureen Alexander, Child Nutrition Program Director for Shelby County.

As the wheels of the school bus start turning again this month, school gardening programs seem to be cropping up in curriculums all over Birmingham. Offering students hands-on lessons in farming and nutrition, several local campuses have instituted student-groomed plots.

The look and taste of Southern food is evolving. Though the classics live on, the South is much more than fried chicken and barbeque, according to Amy Evans Streeter, oral historian with the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.

As summer heats up, Birmingham is keeping it cool with a hearty helping of frozen yogurt. Already home to a handful of recently-opened yogurt bars, Birmingham and its surrounding areas are projected to host more than a dozen additional locations within the year. Yogurt consumption has increased more than any other food in the last decade, according to NPD Group Market Researcher Harry Balzer in an interview with National Public Radio. It has a “health halo surrounding it,” and it defines what Americans want from the food supply, he says.

Scheduled to stop in Birmingham at this Saturday’s Pepper Place Market, the tour will bring nine of our local chefs together with Alabama farmers to give market customers a taste of the possibilities buried in our good dirt.

According to Angie, the Jackson site was started by a foodie and small business marketer who wanted to use social networking technologies, including blogs and Twitter, to get new people through the doors of locally owned eateries in Jackson.

Birmingham ranks among the most insecure cities in the nation when it comes to food — 39th, according to a study conducted last fall by the Food Research and Action Center. Food security, by definition, is the availability of food and public access to it.

When journalist Shaun Chavis came to Birmingham from Boston to work as an editor at Health magazine, she hungered for a community of people who shared her tastes in food and books. Her job at Health was a great fit, but she wanted to recreate the long, lingering meals and discussions she had grown to love with classmates in Boston, where she earned a Master’s degree in gastronomy and a culinary degree. When Chavis met Sean Kelly—a fellow foodie, food writer and well-connected Birmingham resident—she suggested a food-centric book club. Kelly “helped [her] put people to the idea.”

For more than four decades, Lovoy’s Italian restaurant was a mainstay on Greensprings Highway in Homewood. Part of its enduring charm was that it remained almost completely unchanged all those years. Its familiar menu and staff, dark wood paneling and red-and-white checked tablecloths were comforting reminders to loyal regulars that it wasn’t about to change all willy-nilly. So when Lovoy’s current president, co-owner and fourth-generation family member Zac Lovoy, decided that it was time for a change, that decision wasn’t made lightly.