I write about Oxford local Joe York’s great films on The Atlantic’s blog. York’s latest project, a feature-length movie on Southern food and culture, is particularly poignant in the light of the Gulf Oil spill.

Those of you who once counted fresh, sweet Gulf shrimp among their local foods know what I’m talking about.

I recently wrote about one of my favorite places on earth, California’s Owens Valley, for The New York Times. The piece ran Friday, along with some nice photos of the high desert.

I got the chance to explore a gorgeous corner of Louisiana while working on a piece for the Escapes section of The New York Times. Good food, great scenery and fascinating history.

For the March issue of Men’s Journal, I wrote about the wheat-free diet used by Team Garmin-Transitions, a professional cycling team, during events such as the Tour de France. No pasta? No bread? Yep. But they hired a professional chef to keep meals tasty, and they got plenty of energy from alternate carbohydrate sources:

“Wheat-based pasta is the carbo-loading standard mainly because it’s cheap, readily available, and easy to cook, but other carbs are just as effective, including rice, oats, corn, and quinoa, a seed that’s high in carbs and protein.”

This summer, I took my third extended trip to Chile, where I lived in an icebox of a flat near Santiago’s Plaza Italia. My story on eating in the Chilean port city of Valparaíso ran in The New York Times:

“Porteños, as residents are called, made great snacks: fried empanadas stuffed with shrimp and cheese, for example, or the glorious bar dish known as chorrillana, a rock-heavy, grease-slick mess of French fries, sautéed onions, chopped meat and fried egg.”