Not About Food: New Job

Since so many of you were so kind with your thoughts and comments about my layoff, I wanted to let you know that after a flurry of interviews and leads, I have accepted an offer for a new job. Technically, I’m jumping the gun a tiny bit, but I’ve got the offer letter in my hands and I plan to sign it.

So barring any disasters, I will be doing server-side work for Spore, the upcoming game from Maxis. If you’re a video gamer, you’ve probably heard of the game. If you’re not, just think of it as the iPhone of video games. The Wikipedia page gives a good overview of the real information and rumors.

I’m super excited to be on the team: I meshed well with everyone I met, and they thought the same of me. The game is slick, the challenges will be really interesting, and my new commute is about 10 minutes by car. And several of my new teammates are serious foodies. (I should note, however, that I will probably have to cut back on my freelance writing for a bit, as I’ll be arriving right at the beginning of the crunch cycle.)

Thank you again for all your kind words (and, in a couple of cases, the leads you sent me).

Not About Food: The Other Kind Of Java

On Tuesday, our company’s president came all the way from Chicago to pay us a surprise visit.

Many of you are probably thinking the same thing we all did: Uh oh. And sure enough, headquarters is shutting down our office and laying all of us off at the end of May.

A few of you remember that this has happened to me before. That time, I took a month or so off, cooked a lot, made bread everyday, and generally loafed around. Now, I have a mortgage; my attitude has changed.

I already have a few promising job leads, but I decided to cast my net further out to sea: to all of you, in fact. If you’re hiring senior Java programmers — full-time writing probably isn’t realistic — and you’re in the San Francisco-East Bay area, I’d love to chat with you about a possible fit. Just drop me a line, and I’ll send you my resume. I’m pretty open to possibilities: I’ve worked in very small companies and very large ones in several different domains. I like in-the-trenches programming work that gets problems solved.

And if you’re not hiring, think good thoughts for me. I’m not panicked at all; I’m getting a good severance and I have always kept a large chunk of savings on hand because layoffs are a natural part of the modern-day technology industry. Still, tapping into that reserve isn’t my first choice.

Remember That Survey? Here Are The Results

Back in September, I asked you to participate in a survey to help me better understand my readers. I had 135 responses, which I estimated to be 2.7 percent of my readership at the time. (My readership is a larger number than my daily visitor count, because many people read me occasionally. Of course that means I can’t tell you how many distinct readers I have; I know it’s more than my daily visitor count, and my weekly/monthly visitor counts just add up all the daily numbers.) That response rate probably doesn’t give a meaningful result, but I have kept your comments in mind since then.

Only in mind, in fact. Some of you have written and asked me to publish the results. I apologize for dragging my heels on this. Here, at last, are the results, livened up with the Google Chart API. (Note that those charts might not show up in your RSS reader.)

How Do You Read OWF?
RSS/Site is for people who see the update in their RSS reader and then click through to the site.

These data didn’t surprise me because I see which browsers people use to visit this site. In addition to the obvious clients, I also see lots of RSS readers of various stripes. For those who don’t use an RSS reader, it doesn’t make sense to come here every day; I only update once or twice a week.

Do You Read An Obsession With Everything Else?

I used to say that I could count OWEE readers on one hand, but clearly I was wrong. Still, I’m not surprised to see so few OWEE readers: My rants about silly editing issues and my links to mechanical puzzle sites probably have a more limited audience.

Do You Ever Follow The Snacks Links On The Right?

One person pointed out that those who read the site via RSS don’t see the sidebar. I posted about the feature when I first implemented it, but I agree that most RSS readers have probably forgotten about it. (Of course, Snacks has its own feed, but the links that make it in are even more eclectic than the ones that show up on OWEE.

What Do You Like About OWF?
Fifty-five of you left comments here, and I was happy to see that you all like the facets I’m proudest of: the writing style (thanks!), the strong opinions, the deep knowledge, the “from scratch” mentality, the focus on techniques, and of course Melissa’s photos. I appreciated all the kind words you left.

What Don’t You Like About OWF?
(I rolled the next question — Other Comments? — into this one.) Forty-three of you offered suggestions for things I could improve. Many of you wrote something along the lines of “Do you ever cook anymore? Maybe you should write about that.” Here’s one typical comment in that vein:

… lately you've veered much more in the direction of writing more about food politics, the food blog community, etc. and have had less frequent posts about actual cooking, which were what drew me to the blog originally. It seems like the blog is less focused on actual food lately and more focused on talking about food, if that makes sense. I'd love to see more technique-focused posts, like the ones you've done in the past on rendering lard and making gravlax, for example.

I may have corrected this a bit since then, but once we’re settled in the house, you’ll find lots more cooking posts. I promise. A number of you gloss over the wine posts — “I tend to read the food posts more closely than the wine posts... but that's my habit in all my reading,” says one commenter — and the book reviews — “Honestly, your book reviews are usually pretty boring and I'm almost never interested in buying the books,” writes another. Others mentioned some design issues, which I hope to focus on soon. And, of course, many of you mentioned my low-frequency posting schedule, which I’m sure has only gotten worse as I’ve done more writing for other venues.

I’m constantly trying to improve my wine descriptions, and at least one person commented that my wine tasting notes read more or less like Wine Spectator’s: in other words, yawn-inducing. So I’ll keep experimenting to find a nice balance. My book reviews are another experiment in form, so I hope that you’ll bear with me on those.

How Did You Find OWF?
As I quickly realized, this wasn’t a very fair question. Could I tell you how I found most of the sites in my blogroll? No. And most of you couldn’t really remember either, though “from another blog” was a popular guess. I guess this makes sense: Search engine referrals usually make up a pretty small piece of my traffic, and my mentions in the mainstream press usually give me spikes that disappear after a day.

How Long Have You Been Reading OWF?

With five years of blogging under my belt, I wanted to know how many of you have been here since the beginning. More than I would have guessed, though maybe you’re more likely to have taken this poll. My readership went through a period of linear growth (albeit with a low slope) and now it stair-steps: I go up by 100 readers or so every few months. I don’t check my stats all that often these days, but that’s my sense of what happened.

Name Five Other Food Sites You Read
I asked this question for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to hear about interesting sites from you all. Second, I wanted to know if there was some correlation between OWF’s readership and the readership of other blogs. Some of the results suggest surprising overlaps, but I think my graph may just prove that people who read food blogs tend to read the popular ones. Here are all the sites that 5 or more of you mentioned (sub-blogs within the New York Times or Chronicle went into those totals):

Do You Have A Blog?

A big thanks to everyone who participated; it really helped me understand what you like and don’t like in your food blog reading habits. If you missed this survey, stick around until 2012, when I post one for my 10-year anniversary.

The Cook I Always Wanted To Be

Photo by Melissa Schneider

A lot of people have influenced my cooking: from close-to-home guides such as my parents to distant idols such as Alice Waters and Judy Rodgers. But one person transformed my cooking more than anyone else: my friend Tom Dowdy, whom many of you know as the writer behind Butter Pig. He introduced me to The Art of Eating. He told me about On Food And Cooking when it was still a cult book. He inspired me to try daunting dishes at home and host extensive dinner parties. He taught me to lean on techniques rather than recipes. He even taught me those techniques.

Despite his culinary wisdom, he was only five years older than I when he passed away the other night.

Photo by Melissa Schneider

Memories of him and his food have consumed my mind since then. I remember his quick-paced pop culture references, flying faster than I could catch. I remember talking puzzles and programming with him; we had more than cooking in common. I remember the pièce montée he made one year, a towering pyramid of cream puffs and spun sugar. I remember the deep-fried chocolate truffles, liquid chocolate in a hard crust. I remember terrines of foie gras, a pink, truffle-studded slab he taught me to make. I remember wild mushroom cassoulet, an original recipe of his that even cassoulet purists would love. I remember his sauce Foyot, a rich hollandaise mixed with glace de viande that had my wife ready to leave me for him. I remember a puzzle cake he made in my honor.

But what I really remember is his unfaltering generosity. He and his then-girlfriend Carol gave us not just a smoker but a smoker brimming with supplies and accessories. He treated us to dinner and half the wine at Santa Monica’s stunning Capo restaurant so that I would choose a wine priced above my normal comfort level. He answered random cooking questions whenever I had them, despite being a busy engineer at Apple.

Photo by Melissa Schneider

And then there were his parties, his ultimate displays of generosity. His annual winter party made our 6-course dinner parties look like amateur hour. Imagine hosting 40 or more people for an 18-course gourmet meal where everything — everything — is made from scratch. He auditioned dishes and ideas for a year in advance. He prepped ingredients in the month leading up to it. He stayed home the day before to get everything done. He even had a kitchen staff, drawn from his foodie friends, who helped on the day, turning vegetables, making sauces, prepping ingredients, and cooking dishes. One of my proudest moments as a cook was when he asked me to join the kitchen crew. I called it the Tom Dowdy Cooking School, because, as accomplished as all of us are behind the stove, we always learned something when we worked at his parties.

Last night I made meatballs, and I thought of when I first learned to make patés: both the mousse kind and the ground-meat kind. Even then, he told me that my instinctual salt proportion wouldn’t be enough, and even yesterday my meatballs needed more salt than I originally added. Whenever I make a detailed list with dinner party prep steps, I think of his multi-page lists, the direct ancestors of mine. When I smoke a chunk of meat, I remember his comment that the less I check it, the better it will be.

That voice, at least, will always be with me, even if my friend and mentor isn’t. I can’t count all the things that I learned from him. I am the cook I am today because of him.

Photo by Melissa Schneider

Other odes
William's
The Blog That Ate Manhattan's
Pablo's

Not About Food: Ethical Guidelines

Sorry for all these housekeeping posts. Regular food and wine programming will resume shortly. Meanwhile, take the OWF 5-Year Anniversary Reader Survey.

I get a number of press opportunities as the publisher of OWF, and I wanted to spell out my policies about freebies. Everyone sets their own rules for this kind of thing, but few disclose them. Some basic rules I follow: When I take samples, I don’t promise to review them, and I don’t promise to only post a good review; I flat out reject press junkets, which are both useless and pricey; and I will always disclose if the item was a freebie.

As a blogger, I decide whether I’ll take samples based on their relevance and educational opportunity for you. I don’t set explicit price caps, but the more expensive the item the more relevant it has to be: Few items pass the test. Recently, Visa offered me dinner at Quince’s chef's table. They wanted to demonstrate the benefits of the Visa Signatures Rewards program. But how relevant would that have been for you? This is not a lifestyle blog. Last year, a company offered me a lobe of fresh foie gras. This is relevant to you — some of you eat it and cook it when possible — but the company had repackaged Hudson Valley Foie Gras lobes. I’ve not only used that foie gras, I’ve done extensive research on their production methods. I already recommend it, and a new sample wouldn’t have added to my knowledge. On the other hand, I did take grass-fed steak samples, because I wanted to test the claims of meat terroir that grass-fed-beef producers often tout. I tend to take books and bottles of wine, because these are relevant and, for the producers, relatively inexpensive.

But I’m not just a blogger: I’m a professional writer. I decide whether or not to take samples based on a potential client’s impression of me. I never want an editor to look at this site and say, “Send him our ethical guidelines so he knows how strict we are.” I want him or her to say, “Wow, look how strict he is.” Freelance writers don’t have staff guidelines to shape our decisions. We are responsible for our own integrity. I take this to ludicrous extremes — I don’t participate in affiliate programs because they amount to kickbacks for reviews, and after I did work for Wilson Daniels, I told my other clients so they would be aware of any conflicts of interest — but who else will keep tabs on me? (All that said, when I’m on assignment for a publication, I follow their guidelines. I didn’t bat an eye when I received several $100/bottle samples for my heritage cabernet piece, because that was in line with The Wine News’ policies.)

In reality, I make my decision based on the WWJBD rule. What would Jon Bonné do? (Sometimes I just ask him.) Many writers are ethical, but the Chronicle's wine editor, along with Tish and maybe two other writers I know, actually thinks about ethics and integrity in a careful way.

So I don’t have explicit rules, but I do have guidelines that inform my decisions.

Not About Food: BlogDay 2007

Take the OWF 5-year anniversary reader survey.

Today is BlogDay, an annual event where bloggers point the way to five “new” blogs. I interpret that phrase to mean “new, perhaps, to you” rather than “less than one year old.” So I looked in my RSS reader for blogs you might like. (Of course I call out specific sites throughout the year as well).

Comics Curmudgeon - Nothing gets me giggling like Josh's sarcastic rundown of the morning comics page. (I’m less fond of his occasional guest blogger UncleLumpy.) Who knew there was so much humor in Mary Worth, Mark Trail, and Family Circus?

Terroir at Wine Library - I have a love affair with off-the-map grapes, and so does Tom, who uses his blog to write about oddball varieties and the wines they produce. He gives out lots of information and writes with a distinct voice.

The Wine Importer - Joe Dressner — like Terry Theise, Kermit Lynch, and Jorge Ordonas — is one of those wine importers whose name on a bottle is sufficient reason to buy it. He champions biodynamic wines here in the U.S., and his sporadically updated blog injects humor into the so-often-self-important wine industry.

Lexicographer's Rules - Grant Barrett is the co-host of A Way With Words, and his personal blog lights up the cave of language and dictionaries.

Violent Acres - She's often blunt; she's often caustic. She often paints in broad strokes of black and white. But she's also funny, introspective, and thought-provoking. If you don't like strong language, or if you love the mommy bloggers she so often attacks, stay clear of this site.

Technorati tags: BlogDay2007

Not About Food: Love Song To Editors

I tell anyone who listens that my current passion for improving my writing comes from good editors. (I had good editors when I wrote my books, but I wasn't ready to understand what they were doing). One editor in particular changed my writing forever, both through example and by inspiring me to learn on my own, but I've had the good fortune to stumble across other good editors and coaches. (I've also found some whom I don't like; they just reinforce how wonderful the others are.)

So I enjoyed this ode to editors at Salon enough to post about it here, in the main body of OWF, instead of in the Snack bar on the side or on OWEE. A good editor is a treasure, and I'm not just saying that because some of mine happen to read this site. Some day, I hope to pass to some future young writer the wisdom they continue to give me.

iPhone Day

Every now and then, I step out of the food groove here on OWF to write a personal message. Births are a good excuse, and this weekend must feel like one for a dear friend of ours, so it's reason enough.

For the last year or year and a half—maybe longer—our friend meriko has all but disappeared from her own life and the lives of her friends and loved ones. In that time period, she's had three dozen days off; that includes weekends and holidays. Her typical work day lasted about 15 hours; often they'd run longer. She's learned to get by with teensy-tiny amounts of sleep.

She doesn't work for a startup.

She was a key member of the team that brought you the most anticipated consumer electronics device on the planet. Few of the people who camped out at Apple Stores on Friday can imagine what she's been through. But we've had up-close seats since she joined the group. (As with everyone, including her husband, she could only say she was working on a secret project until January's MacWorld. Imagine working so hard and not being able to talk to anyone about it.) If you like your new iPhone, if you were impressed by that keynote, if you're amazed it shipped on time, thank meriko and her team for their sacrifices and dedication.

Congratulations, meriko, and welcome back. Melissa and I send hugs galore.

Now, go! Sleep! Take a day off, or maybe even two—in a row.

Toast Guy Talks

Taken with an Apple iPhone

The Internet Celebrity Fairy bops about the web, granting with a wave of her wand a flood of traffic, parodies and meme status. After a short time, she moves on to someone else, never to return, leaving a whiff of former Internet glory. No one checks in on Peter Pan, or the Numa Numa kid, or the two Chinese boys anymore, but they can always say, "I was that guy."

It figures that I'd be anonymous when the Fairy visited me.

At the end of April, a throng of Internet fans picked apart this picture of me, looking for any details they could find and discuss. Why? Because the metadata in the photo named the camera that took it: an Apple iPhone. As of today, that's no big deal. Six weeks ago, when a dedicated blogger hit pay dirt by searching for "Taken with an Apple iPhone", it was the centerpiece of frantic forum chatter.

Nothing teaches you to distrust Internet chatterboxes like reading their speculation on a subject of which you have intimate knowledge. Theories flew like birds. The photo was a fake. (Sorry, Gizmodo, you were wrong; but thanks for the "hair as silken as an Arabian stallion's mane" comment.) The photo was part of a viral marketing campaign. (Don't you think they would have staged a better photo?) The photographer was due for the chopping block. (Thankfully, no.) The person in the photo, "Toast Guy," was none other than Richard D. James. (Uh, no.) Toast Guy was the photographer. (I'm still trying to figure out the anatomy one would need for that.) Toast Guy didn't know how to spread jam. (Hey!) Toast Guy was a run-of-the-mill dork. (Hey! Whom are you calling run-of-the-mill?) Toast Guy had an awesome Legend of Zelda hoodie. (He does.)

And oddest of all: Toast Guy was a woman, and an ugly one to boot. I blinked the first time I saw it, but my gender was as much a topic as the photo's source. I've got a ponytail, but it's also clear I haven't shaved in a couple of days. Just a note for any who were confused: Men can grow their hair long, too.

Some forum poster made
a LOLDerrick!

I read it all silently and laughed at the wackiness. I learned that I gave a talk at WWDC on Dashboard a couple years back. (Why can't I figure out the problem with my widget, then?) I learned that I was married to the photographer (I swear, Melissa, we're just friends), who was clearly the woman in the other photograph (she's not). Some people pieced together the details, but by then the furor had died down, and either way I wasn't going to comment. A co-worker joked that he would make up all sorts of lies about me if I didn't tell him the truth; I challenged him to do worse than the other commenters.

The truth is so banal it was funny. A few units were given to team members for real-world testing. My friend had one of those units, and she was told to use it as her normal phone. She took a picture of me with it and uploaded it to Flickr, where it showed up on that search. I wish I could spin some exciting story of corporate intrigue, but I can't.

There is a moral, though: The ability to post on a forum about a secret topic does not make someone an expert. Quite the opposite, in many cases.

Do you want to know some iPhone secrets? Well, tell me if you know any, because I sure don't. Our friend couldn't show it off or demo the phone. She couldn't mention anything that wasn't mentioned in the keynote. She couldn't let us touch it or take a picture of it. It's exciting when you first learn that your friend has the world's coolest product about two months before anyone else, but when you can't really see it or play with it, you quickly move on to just hanging out with her and discussing what an ugly woman you make.

So I can always say, "I was that guy" (yes, a guy) but after today you'll find . . . Wait, Internet Celebrity Fairy! Come back! What if I make up something else? Wait!

The Chef Programming Language

I have a fondness for the esoteric programming languages of the world. I'm not talking about Smalltalk or Prolog, languages out of the mainstream but in general use; no, I'm talking about ones such as Befunge and Whitespace, languages that no one in their right mind would use. (Of course, some might say that about Prolog.)

Imagine my delight, then, to discover Chef, a programming language where the instructions read like a recipe. Commands include "put x in the bowl" and "mix together."

Food Puzzles: Kamei's Spinach Can

Photo by Melissa Schneider

What is this? See here if you missed the first one.

Even if you don't collect mechanical puzzles, you've probably seen Japanese puzzle boxes. Eye-dazzling, hand-crafted marquetry on the surfaces of these wooden boxes hides panels that shift and slide until you find your way inside.

And then there's Akio Kamei.

Kamei diverged from the path of traditional secret boxes to make karakuri, or trick, boxes that rely on new-for-Japan locks. (Many have existed in Western puzzles for a while.) Magnets, pins, and centrifugal force rods that fly apart as the box spins are just some of the mechanisms he uses, and he marries them with fine Japanese craftsmanship to produce some of the world's most sought-after mechanical puzzles. His work has inspired a small squadron of other Japanese box makers, the members of the Karakuri Creation Group. Kamei's hand-crafted puzzles aren't cheap—though you can buy passable commercial versions of some of them—but the ones I own are the treasures of my collection.

Among his most famous puzzles are the figural boxes, where the real-world model provides clues to solving the puzzle. Looking at Kamei's "old radio" box? It doesn't seem to be working, so how would you get it going again? Looking at his "dice" puzzle box? What do you do with dice? Think this way, and you'll be on the road to the answer. A few involve food, so you'll see Kamei's name here again.

His spinach can, a cylinder with a marquetry spinach leaf on the "label," follows in the footsteps of his other "real-world" puzzles. Get the spinach can open, and you'll find a deep compartment. As with all my secret boxes, this is where I store the solution that comes with the puzzle. This is one of the few Kameis where you see the mechanism: Usually you can only guess at the locks hiding in the wooden walls, even after you open it.

I like to share puzzles with my friends and dinner guests, but the spinach can rarely emerges from the puzzle drawers. I worry that the fragile mechanism will give out sooner rather than later.

Where Did The Feast Move From?

A fellow National Puzzlers' League member posed a question to the mailing list: Where does movable feast come from? The answer isn't "the title of a Hemingway novel." A flurry of word geeks chimed in, and I guess it's no surprise that Wikipedia gives the full scoop. Christian holidays tied to a particular date, such as a saint's day or Christmas, are immovable feasts. Christian holidays that can shift around the calendar, such as Easter, are movable feasts. Now you know.

Speaking of movable feasts, the rules for calculating Easter's date for any given year are deliciously complicated and worth a look. Über-mathematician John Conway published the algorithm, an adjunct to his system for determining the day of week of any given date, in the second volume of the original Winning Ways series. I don't have the new versions handy as I write this, but I'd guess it's now in Winning Ways Volume 4.

Food Puzzles: DoveTail Bar

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

Many of you know that I collect and design mechanical puzzles—think Rubik's Cube and wire puzzles instead of jigsaws. It may shock you to learn I own about 700 puzzles, but my collection is tiny. The largest United States collection, whose owner is bequeathing it to the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana, has about 30,000 puzzles. The largest in the world, a private collection in England, has about 35,000.

Most of mine come from International Puzzle Party, the annual, invite-only meetup for the 500-600 mechanical puzzle collectors around the world. Designers and collectors bring puzzles to IPP to trade and sell, and most of these teasers will never appear in a store. Each time I go I bring home anywhere from a couple dozen puzzles to more than a hundred.

Some of the items in my collection have food or wine themes, and I decided to post about them here from time to time. I'll still write about edible food and wine, but I hope you'll indulge occasional tangents about the way that food influences a single art form. Food's ubiquitousness makes it a wellspring of analogies and metaphors that work across cultures. I've seen solvers from around the world acquire these thematic puzzles and instantly get the joke. Far more so than, say, jokes about politics or sports that show up in other puzzles I own.

I won't share any solutions; it's bad form among puzzlers. If you ever find yourself holding one of these puzzles, you'll have the pleasure of solving it yourself.

DoveTail Bar
Norman Sandfield's "DoveTail Bar" is one of many dovetail puzzles that he and his brother Robert designed over the course of several years. The classic dovetail "puzzle" is more of a curiosity: A block of wood appears to have perpendicular dovetail joints. Norman and Robert jumped from this classic object into true puzzles that used new shapes and locks, and they worked with craftsman Perry McDaniel to explore new dovetail movement. Until you solve it, you're never quite sure how the sections of a Sandfield puzzle will move.

In the Sandfield dovetails, you're usually hunting for a hidden compartment, but in the DoveTail Bar you need to "take a bite" off the top. If you're holding the puzzle, you can see the joint, but you'll need to work through some steps before you can separate bar and bite. Melissa's setup for the photo obscures any part of the lock mechanism.

Perry used walnut and maple for this faux ice cream bar, and Norman presented the puzzle in a paper bag reminiscent of ice cream bar wrappers.

A Healthy Debate? Or A Healthful One?

At the end of November, Shuna of eggbeater posted a handful of her food writing pet peeves. Among them, she distinguished "healthful" from "healthy." "Food is not healthy," she wrote, "people are."

Poised to type "healthy" one morning in early January, I remembered the peeve but not the details. Are people full of health, and thus healthful, or are bran muffins? I reached for the reference closest to my keyboard, Fowler's Modern English Usage, a guide to British English. The book has an entry for healthy/healthful, but only so the author can ask why Americans care so much about the difference—"The currency of the disliked use in America is not clear to me."—and point out that "healthful" is considered old-fashioned by major British dictionaries.

Expecting an explanation about the two words, Fowler's head-scratching tone surprised me, and I fished other reference books from my shelves. My main dictionary gives "healthy" as the second definition for "healthful," though the first definition is "beneficial to health of body or mind," the sense that Shuna intended. (A similar meaning occupies the third slot for "healthy.") Among The Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk & White, and The Associated Press Stylebook, none mention the topic. Maybe this isn't an issue after all?

The American Heritage Dictionary finally provided a surprising usage note for "healthful" and "healthy." Authorities pronounced them distinct only in the late 1880s, while "'healthy' has been used to mean 'healthful' since the 16th century." The usage panel, whom I imagine as masked nobles meeting in a secret room, seems amused by the claims of the "healthful" camp.

"Healthy food" isn't wrong; neither is "healthful food." Use the one you prefer and ignore naysayers. As with most style choices, be consistent so that you don't confuse your readers. Personally, I agree with Fowler that "healthful" sounds awkward. Besides, who wants to remember another usage rule when the default word choice is fine?

Note: Thanks to Shuna for letting me use her post as a springboard for discussion.

Not (Really) About Food: Source Code for MFH Raffle Program

If you want to make sure I'm not rigging the Menu For Hope raffle, you can see the source code for the raffle program here. As I say in that post, pulling a random name from the list isn't hard; parsing the comments everyone left, however, proved challenging, though my program did a better job than I expected.