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Elissa Altman from The Huffington Post is a exemplary food writer, covering everything from the beauty in simple food to the article I commented on about the contemporary domination of food celebrity over tried-and-true food writer. Here's what she had to say in response to my 5 questions:

Andrew Zimmern: What have been some of your highlights from this last year of food writing, either your own or others?

Elissa Altman: Speaking as a reader and a food editor, I’m delighted to say that there’s been a lot of really wonderful new, real food writing published this last year; I read Alice Water’s The Art of Simple Cooking as though it were a manifesto (which it is) preaching sensibility and clarity in a sea of culinary glitz and inauthenticity. I loved Suvir Saran’s American Masala, because he infuses every recipe with life, love, and the sensuality that is Indian food. Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food gives me hope that we can return to real eating, and real food. Cook with Jamie (Oliver) was a blast to read—he’s just so passionate that everything he says virtually jumps off the page. Jean Anderson’s Love Affair with Southern Cooking might just be the greatest Southern cookbook published since the early days of Edna Lewis: Jean is incomparable, both as writer and recipe creator. In terms of journalism, I fell over with a howl and a weep reading Dorothy Allison’s great piece about gravy in the Sunday Times magazine; hand’s down, my favorite piece was Jane Kramer writing on Claudia Roden in The New Yorker. I think I read it eight times.

In terms of my own writing, I’d say my Huffington Post articles about trans fats and Monsanto; and certainly the one that I wrote about the death of the cookbook. I got a lot of comments—good and horrible—about that piece. Got lots of folks thinking about food writing, and that’s always a positive thing, whether or not they agree with what I said. On the flipside, one restaurant review (in which I likened a piece of veal to petrified shoe leather) I wrote this last year had someone suggesting to the reader’s rep at the Hartford Courant that I be reassigned to the Basra bureau. But you know what? I bet the food in Basra’s pretty good, when the cooks aren’t all killing each other.

AZ: As a food writer, who do you read?

EA: Anything by M.F.K. Fisher, Elizabeth David, Jamie Oliver, Jeffrey Alford & Naomi Duguid, James Oseland, Andrea Nguyen, Tony Bourdain, Madhur Jaffrey; Bittman’s a great practical writer, and his recipes are (usually) flawless. I love Amanda Hesser’s writing, but I will probably be buried with my copy of Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking tucked underneath my arm. Other than those folks, I tend to be food memoir focused: I loved Abe Opincar’s Fried Butter, anything by Nigel Slater, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Now there’s a woman who went back to the land as a message both practical and political. And her writing --all the way back to Animal Dreams--just makes me weep.

AZ: In your past experiences as a cookbook buyer and editor, what are some of the trends that you have noted that have created the biggest influence on contemporary gastronomy?

EA: Without question, the biggest trend has been a backlash against obnoxious culinary snobbery and the related lack of authenticity that goes hand in hand with it; put another way, many if not most food lovers now want the real thing. They’ve grown tired of attempting to vertically plate at home; they’ve come to realize that home cooking and restaurant cooking are two very different things, and should be.

Food TV has forced food onto the mass American consciousness in a way that I’ve certainly never witnessed before, and that’s a great thing; the downside, though, is all the poor shlubs who try to brulee their kid’s vanilla pudding with a blowtorch because they saw it on TV, and they wind up setting the family poodle on fire. I’m not being literal here, but you get the idea. So, there’s been a return to real, homestyle food meant to be prepared at home by the home cook, and that’s a great thing. (The funny thing, of course, is when all this reverses direction, and homestyle food starts showing up in multi-star restaurants, and we start paying huge quantities of money for a good, basic hamburger. )

Another trend, thank goodness, has been a mainstream, conscious return to eating real food, rather than dreck masquerading as food. And the fact that small farmers are again being elevated to the status that they should have never lost to begin with makes me very, very happy. Of course, as long as we have the corn lobby and the beef lobby, and all manner of crap being dumped into our waters while politicians look the other way, eating well and safely and knowing exactly where our food comes from, what’s in it, and who is producing it will be an uphill battle, if not an outright fight. And there are a lot of folks out there willing to fight, ceaselessly: Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan, Joan Dye Gussow, Nina Planck, Jamie Oliver, I could go on, but we don’t have enough space. This is a trend that I hope just gets bigger and bigger.

AZ: What’s fallen flat?

EA: Foam. Don’t even get me started on foam. I know that Tony Bourdain went to Spain and I listened with rapt attention as he ooed and aahed, and I know that that’s nothing that he does with abandon, or unless he means it. The problem is that you have great artists, like Ferran Adria; or Wylie Dufresne; and then suddenly people who can’t boil an egg are foaming everything all over the place. It’s disgusting. It looks like spittle.

AZ: What is it exactly that you find missing in “bobblehead” cookbooks?

EA: In a word: heart. The passion isn’t there, the love isn’t there, the authenticity isn’t there. It dilutes “real” food writing. It’s all about here-today-gone-tomorrow trend and profit and market timing, and nothing at all about teaching readers the glories of food and culture; you might as well be buying a pair of shoes.

As an editor, I am deeply offended that I cannot acquire the next Claudia Roden, or the next Elizabeth David or Laurie Colwin—truly literary food writers who wrote of food as culture—because there’s no money left in the coffers after the publisher pays some bobblehead six or seven figures to put their face and name on the cover of a book that, usually, they didn’t even write. Invariably, those books return (bookstores are able to return to the publisher for full credit, every copy they didn’t sell), so the publisher winds up eating the cost of production, printing, etc, and the book is deemed a failure at the end of the day. And then what happens? The publisher cuts the cookbook program wholesale. Look what happened to one of the greatest cookbook lists of all times (HarperCollins): they published Carol Field, Marcella Hazan, Gil Marks, Jasper White. And it’s gone now. Do I blame it on the bobbleheads? Yes, in part.

AZ: In your writings you often praise simple food, do you have any quick tips for our readers on how to search out simple in this crazy food world full of choices?

EA: Go ethnic. Whether you’re Italian or Mexican or Jewish or Asian or Lebanese or Indian, go food shopping with an older family member (and if you don’t have one, borrow one) and listen to them as they cook the food you bring home. Simple food, though, is not always easy to prepare; what it is, though, is real, and older folks are our most vital connection to soon-to-be defunct, real ethno culinary landscape of our past. Another way to eat simple? Farmer’s markets. CSAs. Go fresh and you will also almost always go simple.

AZ: What’s in your fridge?

EA: Tamarind chutney, which I could eat with a soup spoon, white corn tortillas, homemead chaat masala, half of a tarragon-stuffed roast chicken, dal, eggs, avocados, two pieces of halibut for dinner tomorrow night. And a nice bottle of wine.

Elissa Altman is a longtime food journalist and book editor, a regular contributor to The Huffington Post, the restaurant critic for The Hartford Courant, and the author of Big Food (Rodale).