About Seasonal Chef

This web site has been online since 1995, way back in the day when I was just figuring out what the Internet was all about. It was a successor to a print newsletter called Farmers Market Monthly that I published for more than a year when I was living in Los Angeles and was fascinated by the region’s fabulous farmers markets, which were just beginning to take off. The newsletter won some modest critical acclaim, in publications including the Los Angeles Times, but it practically cost me the shirt off my back. So I move it off of paper, into the new realm of  cyberspace where it has resided ever since. At first, the web site  was called marketreport.com, focusing on the farmers market reporting I do. But I sold that domain name around the year 2000 and snagged the current domain, which is well suited for this site, given my interest in interviewing and profiling chefs who are part of the burgeoning farm-to-table phenomenon.

These days, I lived in Philadelphia and am an editor at Current History, the nation’s oldest foreign affairs journal, published by the University of California Press. I have also written a book, called American Character, about Charles Lummis, a flamboyant Indian rights gadfly who lived in California and the Southwest from the 1880s until his death in 1928. And I have published two culinary histories, Vintage California Cuisine, about early California cookbooks, and Vintage Vegetarian Cuisine, about the evolution of vegetarian cooking in 13 early vegetarian cookbooks published between 1699 and 1910. 

You can see reviews of my books, samples of my other published work, and more about me at MTPortfolio.me.

– Mark Thompson