Meredith Goad

Staff Writer

Many people tell Meredith Goad that she has the best job in Maine, and most of the time she agrees.

Maine has a crazy appetite for food stories, and it’s Meredith’s job to satisfy those cravings with juicy tales from chefs, food producers, local farms, and the state’s fast-growing restaurant scene. Her work appears in Wednesday’s Business section and the Sunday Food & Dining section, and occasionally, but not as often as she’d like, on the front page.

A native of Memphis, Tenn., Meredith shamelessly flaunts her knowledge of good barbecue in front of her Yankee friends. She earned a bachelor of science degree in wildlife biology from Colorado State University, then studied science writing at the University of Missouri, where she received a master’s degree in journalism. She spent the first 20 years of her career covering science and environmental news, then switched to features in 2004, just as Portland’s food scene was taking off.

Her own most memorable meal? Back in the 1980s, on assignment in Finland, she shared a dinner of reindeer and Russian vodka with Maryland’s governor and a bunch of hungry scientists.

Meredith lives in Portland, but spends much of her time off back in Tennessee - either visiting family, or in online archives, researching her family’s history.
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Posted inFood, Life & Culture

Soup to Nuts: Pie on the Fly

by Meredith Goad

Reesa Kashuk and three friends, all Colby College students, lounged in the grass waiting for their hand-tossed pizza topped with organic ingredients to finish baking in Bennett Collins’ mobile wood-fired oven set up on Route 1B in Damariscotta.

Collins, who lives in Bremen, is one of four artisan pizza makers whose mobile ovens have been appearing around Maine on roadsides and at farmers markets, public events and private parties.

Posted inFood, Life & Culture

Soup to Nuts: Healthy school lunchis in the bag (or box)

by Meredith Goad

If anyone should know how to pack a healthy school lunch, it would be Dr. Dora Anne Mills, former director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention – and a recently converted “veganish” vegetarian.

Yet every year, she still struggles to find good-for-you foods that her children, ages 9 and 12, will actually eat. She has even dreamed up her idea of the perfect school lunch: It’s plant-based, as fresh as possible, very low in fat and high-fructose corn syrup, has gone through little processing, is environmentally friendly and served in a reusable container (and lunch box).

And, oh yes, it can be prepared in five minutes the night before.

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