To taste

A brother offers my mother Indian food left over from his take-out lunch: tandoori chicken, chickpea curry, naan. They are items she seldom eats, prepared in ways with which she is not entirely familiar.

"Try it," he says. "It's different. You might like it."

"Taste it," my mother says, correcting his Cantonese. "With food, the word is taste."

It is a small distinction, I realize, between trying something and tasting something. But it is an important one. It is the same subtle distinction perhaps between seeing and knowing, between hearing and listening. "Taste it," she says.

Sir Duke

"I accept this in memory of my mother. I know that Lula Mae is smiling right now. Mr. President, I know that if she were here, she'd say, 'Let me give him a peach cobbler.' She would say peach cobbler."

Stevie Wonder at the White House, on receiving the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from Pres. Obama.

In the Sunday paper

The San Francisco Chronicle writes of Bill Niman, co-founder of Niman Ranch, subsumed in January by its primary investor, Chicago-based Natural Food Holdings LLC.

Theirs is an engaging piece on the "idealist, whose mission was to change the way people eat and encourage them to think ethically about their food."