A conversation with Charles Platkin at 12:30 p.m. on The Wisdom of 90 Years: Dr. Marion Nestle on Food and Living Your Best Life. Registration is here.

Thanks to Colman Andrews, food writer par excellence and now writing for Gourmet.com, for his impassioned defense of food writing as a means of analyzing and making sense of important issues in society. I’m constantly having to defend my academic interest in food against charges that it is too quotidian to matter. Food matters. That’s why my column in the San Francisco Chronicle is called Food Matters.