Jane Black, activist reporter

We’re following her projects with interest

By Culinate staff

December 27, 2010

A former staffer at the Washington Post, national food reporter Jane Black is all over the place these days, writing for the Atlantic's food channel about school-lunch reform and podcasting on the Edible Communities website about food activists.

In the wake of Jamie Oliver’s efforts at taming obesity in West Virginia, Black is also working on a book about the intersection of food, culture, and class in, yep, West Virginia. As she asked this fall on her website, “What will happen after the revolution has been televised?” After all, she points out, the eating in the land of coal miners can be just as good as anywhere else in the land.

Black also recently penned an op-ed for her former employer, dinging conservatives for attacking good food as elitist:

For the good-food revolution to have a chance, people have to make finding and preparing fresh food a priority at a time when everything about our modern food system urges us not to bother. And, we argue, that won’t happen if people think healthy food is an elitist plot to take away their McRib.