I try to send our superstar features intern, Kaitlyn Goalen, to as many fabulous lunches as possible. So I felt a little Devil Wears Prada–esque when she came back from a recent event telling me she had to drink hairspray. To my relief, the beauty-based concoction tasted great, as did the rest of the meal that followed. Here, Kaitlyn reports:

A few weeks ago I watched, horrified, as a grown man poured a healthy dose of hairspray into a glass, gave it a club soda floater and a twist and downed the whole thing in a single gulp. I expected some gastrointestinal unpleasantness to ensue, but the gentleman assured us that his hairspray cocktail could do him no harm—on the contrary, it was good for him. This whole spectacle was part of a luncheon to launch Intelligent Nutrients, a new food-grade, USDA certified–organic beauty line from the founders of Aveda. The hairspray Houdini was none other than Mr. Aveda himself, Horst Rechelbacher, who has paired up with a team of organic farmers and food chemists to create fragrances, hair products and eventually makeup items that are free of toxins and full of antioxidant-rich and immune-boosting ingredients like cumin seed oil, bergamot, and grapefruit—all grown on the Intelligent Nutrients farm in Minnesota.
    
The lunch, designed to underscore the line’s edible ingredients, included a mixed-vegetable salad spritzed with pumpkin seed oil and Intellimune Oil from the Intelligent Nutrients lab and infused mint lemonade sparklers with red grape and raspberry flavors.

After enjoying Intelligent Nutrients on my salad, I took them home and tested them. One favorite scent, Focus, is reminiscent of a Tahitian cup of tea with notes of chamomile, jasmine, ylang ylang and citrus. Another, Seductive, has warming scents of nutmeg, cloves and vanilla.  

Fragrances, hair and body care products are now available at select Aveda salons; the Intelligent Nutrients makeup line will launch in September.

I recently met up with chef Daniel Snukal from the restaurant 3 on Fourth in Santa Monica for a short chat on sustainability. The next time I looked at my watch, it was an hour-and-a-half later. The reason: Snukal's fascinating (and sometimes contrarian) take on the subject. My crib notes:

On locavorism: "Locavorism is an old-fashioned idea and doesn’t work for the way we live now. You can’t look at things as absolutes. I really get the idea of locavorism, but it’s really impractical. For a farm to deliver to 80 restaurants in Los Angeles is a lot of work and fuel and driving if they don’t have a central distribution area. With the way infrastructure is in some places, delivering produce locally might use more fuel overall than having items shipped via FedEx, since the FedEx plane would be carrying a lot of other items as well."

On seafood: Snukal is working with a farm in Trang, Thailand, to exclusively import naturally farmed (meaning no antibiotics or hormones) soft-shell crabs from a river sanctuary that’s protected by the government. He serves the crab at his restaurant and is selling it to other restaurants in California, including Sushi Roku. Snukal also likes ecologically farmed Loch Duart salmon from Cleanfish.

On beef: "Most grass-fed beef in the U.S. is just finished with grass for the cattle's last 60 days," says Snukal. Instead of domestic beef, he buys Uruguayan Estancia Beef, raised entirely on grass. (The company claims that the amount of fuel used to transport their beef to the U.S. is far less than the amount required to fatten the average U.S. feedlot steer.)

On chicken: Snukal likes a number of different chickens for braising, specifically Niman Ranch’s Poulet Rouge Fermiere, a French heritage variety, for its "tighter" meat. While Niman Ranch is currently only selling the chicken wholesale, expect it to hit stores within the next couple of months.

In one of my first most painful days as a line cook many moons ago, when the slightest error on my part provoked near nervous breakdowns, my head chef discovered I was about to serve perfectly fried crabcakes that were frozen within. The refrigerator had run too cold the night before, and in my over-reliance on tongs I hadn't noticed my cakes were all ice. She turned to me in my panicked state and said, "Emily, I can't have a blabbering line cook. Watch me." As she deftly, subtly split the frozen thing in half to blitz it a moment under the broiler, she continued, "99% of being a good cook is knowing what to do when you screw up, because you're going to screw up all the time."

Advice for living, indeed. Fast forward 10 years: earlier this week I invited friends over for dinner, got stuck at the office and had only 20 minutes before they showed up to make them the roast chicken I'd promised them – mistake number one. I sallied forth, cutting up my chicken into quicker-cooking parts and switching from roasted baby yukons to faster mashed potatoes, when I discovered mistake number two: I'd somehow managed to run clean out of salt, and forgotten to get any more. I gave myself 2 long minutes to really savor my idiot status before I decided to get resourceful. I reached for my saltiest pantry items - soy sauce and fish sauce – and sprinkled a little of both on my chicken parts as they steam-sautéed in my skillet. A tablespoonful of each, and my caramelizing chicken skins turned that much darker and sweeter. As I gloried in my tasty triumph, I heard the doorbell ringing as I discovered goof number 3: no milk for the mash. Yogurt worked even better – somehow the tang made up for the salt-free status (as did loads of freshly ground pepper). My friends arrived and we sat down to a delicious meal, where I managed to avoid mistake number 4: confessing to them the extent to which I'd nearly screwed the whole thing up.

Last month, one of the top 25 search phrases on foodandwine.com, along with (Top Chef contestant) "Richard Blais" and "appetizers," was "lard." Animal fats have gilded restaurant menus for the better part of the last decade, but the interest in using them at home seems to have migrated from the rarefied air of the New York Times Op Ed page to the rest of us. In September Ten Speed will release an awesome-looking book on the subject by Toronto-based Australian food writer Jennifer McLagan. And just last week Steve McCarthy of the Prather Ranch Meat Company in San Francisco's Ferry Building was telling me how strong the response has been to their new leaf lard, rendered from the kidney fat of their heritage Range Brothers pork: it's flying off their shelves. Granted, this is San Francisco, but McCarthy insisted the most surprising part of the success is how few food geeks are a part of it. "Our lard customers are way more mainstream than the guys who come in here looking for belly to make their own bacon, I'm telling you," McCarthy said. So what accounts for its wider popularity? "I think it's just skipped a generation," McCarthy said. "People remember the biscuits and other foods their grandparents used to make with it, and don't want to use the margerine and vegetable shortening their parents used."

Two things I've recently learned about Allan Benton's pork-tastic products from Madisonville, Tennessee:

1. When a bunch of 2008 F&W Best New Chefs get together to eat Momofuku Ssam Bar's country ham tasting—various hams from different producers sliced paper thin accompanied by bread and chunky apple butter (both extraneous in my opinion)—the Allan Benton plate is the first to clear.

2. When a bunch of F&W staffers mill around plates of Benton country ham and lusciously thick-cut, fatty, smoky bacon, they find all sorts of ways to eat the pork, including with their fingers and ingeniously wrapping the bacon around chunks of peanut brittle (a crunchy, more decadent version of the bacon-wrapped prunes at the Spotted Pig in Manhattan). And yes, the plates clear up superfast, too.

Never underestimate the palettes of children. Not all rely on chicken nuggets, boxed mac and cheese and Lunchables. Meet my young friends Jack and Ian, whose mom placed the winning bid on a "Tour of the Test Kitchen and Cooking Lesson" on their behalf. They're 10 years old and eat anything not nailed down. When asked what they'd like to learn, they said,  "Something spicy, ethnic and complicated." How cool was that? With just two hours to do everything (including eat), I suggested Vietnamese food: spicy, ethnic and complicated—and quick.

"The recipes I chose were yummy fresh summer rolls with a spicy nuoc cham and a fantastic banh mi (Vietnamese hero sandwich) from Charles Phan, chef and owner of The Slanted Door in San Francisco. The summer rolls were especially fun for the guys because they could get their hands dirty and NOT have to wash them before eating. The spicy pork meatball banh mi on the other hand required hand washing before AND after cooking. Fish sauce, an otherwise adult flavor (or so I thought), was quite popular, as were the fiery hot Thai chiles for the nuoc cham.

As a mom of two kids and (just as importantly) a recipe developer, I think this encounter with my friends Jack and Ian has changed the way I'll think about children and their eating. I won't be so quick to dismiss their budding taste buds or take for granted their willingness to try something otherwise "Ew , gross." 

In honor of Earth Day earlier this week, we pulled together a snack with ingredients made all over New York City:

1. Crackly lavash, a Armenian bread that’s traditionally served soft but is equally delicious as a cracker, from Hot Bread Kitchen. Not only does this eco-conscious Long Island City organization use organic, local ingredients to bake its international breads, it hires immigrant women and funds their ESL classes.

Topped with:

2. Creamy ricotta from Salvatore Bklyn Ricotta, which has almost a mascarpone-like richness yet is still somehow fluffy and light. A female Brooklyn duo makes the fresh cheese with Hudson Valley milk, and it’s available at Saxelby Cheesemongers in Manhattan’s Essex Street Market.

Drizzled with:

3. Delicate Berkshire Berries New York City honey gathered from hives on Manhattan rooftops (as well as in the Bronx and Brooklyn) and purchased at the Union Square Greenmarket.

In a rare display of mental toughness, I was able to squirrel away enough of last year’s pickled ramps to last until this spring’s crop came in. And boy—it looks like a good year for ramps (full disclosure: I say this every spring).

Last weekend I pickled my first few bunches (though I prefer the more mature, bulbous ramps for pickling; they have better crunch) while I munched on the remnants of my last jar labeled “2007 Ramps…Do Not F&*$%ing Touch!” As usual, I ended up with a pile of ramp leaves, which I divided into two piles. One bunch I pureed with some water and stirred into pasta along with some chopped pickled ramps. The other I blanched (to cut down on the young leaves’ acute pungency) and made into pesto with Pecorino, walnuts and lots of lemon juice.

It’s almost time for my own annual ramp-picking expedition. Anyone want to share the coordinates of their secret ramp cache? I didn’t think so.

In "Why Bother?" in the New York Times Magazine yesterday, "food detective" Michael Pollan laid out a persuasive case for why we should do something about climate change, however miniscule the deed—whether it's giving up beef or going entirely local. But the point he really wanted to get across was the importance of growing your own food, citing how, as recently as World War II, Victory Gardens supplied about 40 percent of the produce Americans ate. "Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do—to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind," he writes.

Walking around the packed Union Square Greenmarket Saturday afternoon, I like to think that New Yorkers were heeding Pollan's plea. It's too early in the season for loads of produce—I eyed heaps of root vegetables and some ramps—but it seemed like every other stall was selling herb starter containers. And people were snapping them up—whether for the fresh, full flavor only just-picked herbs can provide or for the economic efficiency of snipping just the leaves you need instead of paying $3 for a batch from the grocery store, or whether it's all in the virtuous name of climate change. (Note: I like to think all three are intertwined.)

Whatever the reason, I was astounded by the variety of herb and plant starters available, especially from Hunterdon County, New Jersey's Oak Grove Plantation, whose stall is on the west side of the market. I spotted about a dozen varieties of basil, including the spicy, anise-scented Thai Siam Queen. What's new for Oak Grove this season: Broadleaf thyme (typically found in Jamaican cuisine), Mexican cilantro, and Chinese Toon, whose young shoots and leaves supposedly give off an onion-y flavor when stir-fried. But I didn't get a chance to pick up any Toon—my hands were full of all the other herb starters I'd grabbed.

    I just talked to chef Jason Wilson of Crush restaurant in Seattle, and at least once a year, he tries to go fishing in Alaska. On his trip last summer, the fisherman who owned the boat recognized Jason from the cover of Food & Wine when Jason was a 2006 Best New Chef. He told Jason that he visited Seattle often and would come by the restaurant sometime to show him a new food product he had been working on.
    “Great, I thought to myself. Another smoked salmon,” Jason said. Several months later, the fisherman stopped by for dinner. Afterward, the two talked for a while, and the fisherman pulled out a metal tin filled with flaky salt crystals.
    “This is the product I told you about,” the fisherman said.
    Apparently, the fisherman has been collecting salt near Sitka, Alaska, and processing it like Maldon salt so it’s extra-flaky. Jason said that since the Alaskan waters are so pure, the salt varies naturally with the seasons. The winter salt is clean and minerally, but in the spring, the salt picks up flavor from herring, which lay their eggs in Sitka then. And thanks to all the kelp and seaweed that grow during the summer, the resulting summer salt has a slightly grassy note.
    Jason buys the salt directly from the fisherman and uses it constantly at Crush, including on the table with bread. He has also been sharing it with his Seattle chef friends, and when he comes to New York for the James Beard Awards, he plans to show it to some East Coast chefs, hoping they’ll try it out, too. Seasonal sea salts from Alaska? Somehow, I don’t think he’ll have a problem finding any takers.