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A new year often brings new things—a new workout routine, new career aspirations, a new home, you name it.
One of the best things about new beginnings is a new set of trends, especially food trends. While a forecast of what will be attention-grabbing, cult-inducing and downright delicious in the coming year is naturally

Please welcome Dana Henry, longtime Grid contributor, to The Griddle. We’re excited to have Dana on board; she’ll be filing bi-weekly posts. A building is not an island, and LEED ratings might soon be updated to reflect that fact. According to the Center for Neighborhood technologies, an urban sustainability think tank hired by the U.S.

West Philly: "Surprisingly Safe"Feel like getting your blood pumping this morning? Then go check out Philadelphia Magazine's recent story entitled: "Is West Philly the Next Center City." (What? Was "West Philly, the Cure for the Common Neighborhood" taken?)
There's obviously a great story to be written about development in West Philly, and the role of Drexel

More year-in-review goodness from PlanPhilly. They’ve put together a video compilation of the year in local development. The site had a big year; here are just a few of the things they covered: There was the interactive, multi-media, five-part project chronicling blight in Philadelphia and development by the APM community development corporation in Eastern North

Grist has a crowd-sourced list of the year’s best food books. The big winners? Paul Greenberg’s Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food and Jan Poppendick’s Free for All: Fixing School Food in America.  The list also mentions one of my personal favorites, The Town That Food Saved. Here’s what I had to say in

As we mentioned before, on January 9, the Mt. Airy Business Association and GRINCH (that’s Green in Chestnut Hill, not that green guy who hates holiday cheer) are hosting a TreeCycling event. Bring your browning, bare trees to Mt. Airy and Chew Avenues and have them mulched for just five bucks. You’ll keep that holiday glow knowing your tree

Yup, global warming leads to more snow. The New York Times explains on their Op-Ed page: As global temperatures have warmed and as Arctic sea ice has melted over the past two and a half decades, more moisture has become available to fall as snow over the continents. So the snow cover across Siberia in

M. EdlowHappy Holidays from Grid—whether that means Christmas or just a couple days off work. We’ll be back Tuesday.

OK, so you could get your loved ones beer soap. Or you could get them beer. (Or both.) My current local, seasonal obsession is Dogfish Head’s Chicory Stout. (Maybe you could do a mixed six with some other stouts?) I first sampled these suds at Standard Tap, and I’ve been on the bandwagon ever since.

Apparently we run in the same circles as Philebrity—right around the time they were posting this endorsement for Duross and Langel‘s beer soaps, we were perusing the 13th Street shop for some standout suds. Ever since my visit to Spotted Hill Farm, I’ve been hooked on all-natural soaps. Donna Howard sent me off with a