Can we please make every issue of verve about food?

Much as I might love that, it could turn out to be detrimental to our staff’s health. Working on our food issue these past two months, I think everyone in the VERVE office may have gained a few pounds. For days, there were big hunks of delicious local cheese sitting around our office, along with City Bakery sourdough bread, Wildflour rye, Imladris Farms jams and Sweet Betty Bee’s honey. And don’t get me started on the Sugar Momma’s cookie, which is gigantic compared to most cookies but is more like a sweet little heaven-sent pizza. It even shows up warm and in a pizza box. Our summer intern Cassady Sharp said it was torture driving 30 minutes with a warm box of Sugar Momma’s in her car.

In the list of broad topics we thought would appeal to our readers—things like love, money, food and adventure—food seems to elicit particularly intense opinions from local women. Want proof? Just ask a Western North Carolina woman whether she should be allowed to raise chickens in her backyard or whether it’s worth the effort to seek out heirloom tomatoes . We had a tough time narrowing down our story ideas. Every writer and reader we talked to seemed adamant that we write about one food-related subject or another.

All this is made worse by the fact that, in WNC, it seems we’re of two minds about food. We live in the South, the land of the fried and spicy, grits and deep barbecue pits. But Asheville is just as well known for its vegetarian cuisine, chefs who love soy and seitan and use local, organic ingredients. For this issue anyway, we tried to come up with stories that give you a taste of both veggie-friendly Asheville and the deep-fried South.
One more thing: if you thought restaurant chefs always had everything under control, think again. We found a handful of local women chefs and bakers to tell us hilarious, juicy stories about what can go wrong in the kitchen.

That’s not to say the rest of the issue isn’t just as juicy. VERVE was lucky to have a chance to sit down with Pulitzer Prize-winning author and longtime Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen, who came through Asheville in June for the Community Foundation of WNC’s Power of the Purse fundraising luncheon. And, I couldn’t have been more pleased that, as Sonia Sotomayor begins her Supreme Court nomination hearings this summer, VERVE was able to interview Hendersonville’s Athena Brooks to get a closer look at the life of a woman judge. We hope you’ll find plenty to chew on.


Jess  McCuan   
jess@vervemag.com