To a charcutier, sausage making is a beautiful thing.

Rusty Bowers is the owner of Pine Street Market in Avondale Estates, Georgia. He and his staff create a range of charcuterie (cured meats) from every part of a pig, from an award-winning coppa and an 18-month-old prosciutto, to a wide variety of salami, bacon and hot dogs.

They buy whole pigs from a local farm, so creation of any given sausage format is closely tied to the production of all the rest. Bowers explained the process of curing salami and coppa, a symphony of salt, seasonings, meat and mold.
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Cassandra Lawson admits that beekeeping wasn't popular and was considered "a little eccentric" when she first started.

"Most people thought that it was weird," the Decatur, Georgia, beekeeping teacher says. "Why would you want bees and you live in the middle of a city?"

But Lawson's not the only one fascinated with bees these days. Interest in beekeeping, or apiculture, has been on the rise in the United States.

Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture Magazine, estimates about 150,000 noncommercial beekeepers are in the United States – up from 110,000 in 2008.

Read the full story on CNN's Light Years blog: "Backyard beekeeping creates buzz"

Now that former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman has officially entered the GOP presidential field, he's making a play for a small but passionate group of voters: street food fanatics.

"Street food is so fresh, and it's so good and it's so cheap," he says.

The Republican presidential candidate's newly launched website includes a video called "Jon's Favorite Foods" where he talks about only one kind of cuisine: the kind you eat on the street.
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"Street food adds life and vibrancy to the city," says Greg Smith, President of the Atlanta Street Food Coalition, a group seeking to help entrepreneurs break into the industry.

While some cities, like Los Angeles, have long-standing street food scenes, others have sprouted up in recent years. Instead of the LA-style trucks that are truly mobile, cities like Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas, employ a model where more-or-less stationary carts and trailers gather in designated areas.

Other cities are developing models somewhere along that spectrum; Greg Smith thinks Atlanta will end up with a hybrid approach.

"There will be multiple 'food truck lots' around the city and the trucks might move on a daily basis from lot to lot," predicts Smith.
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"You don't get dirty at a desk," says Amy Rentenbach.

That's why she joined around 40 other would-be farmers on a Sunday morning in a field nearly one hundred miles from her suburban home. They are volunteering on Tewksbury farm in central Georgia, building greenhouses, harvesting corn, and spreading straw.

Retenbach, who grew up on a farm, says, "This kind of gives me the opportunity to just get out and do what I grew up doing, and what I loved doing growing up, and get dirty."
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Editor's note: all week, CNN Newsroom, Rick's List and Eatocracy are teaming up to take a look the effects our dining choices have on our minds, bodies and wallets. Tune into CNN Newsroom daily from 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. ET for on-air coverage and join in the discussion here on Eatocracy. ALL COVERAGE

Wes Little is a CNN Editor/Producer based in Atlanta.

"They're turning over all the land which is what people do with machines, but you know, we do it with pigs," Jared Pickard tells me as a few small black pigs wander out of the woods on Fowler Farms outside Athens, Georgia. They are followed by a few larger red ones. They give me a sniff and move on.
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World-renowned chef, author and Emmy winning television personality Anthony Bourdain visits Los Angeles' Koreatown in the next episode of "Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown," airing Sunday, April 21, at 9 p.m. ET. Follow the show on Twitter and Facebook. This piece originally ran in 2010, but we're sharing again as part of Bourdain's exploration of L.A.'s vibrant food truck scene.

On a well-lit street in Los Angeles' Venice neighborhood, a crowd of thirty-somethings wait in line. It's not for a club. They're waiting to order food at one of the trucks in the club's parking lot.

Los Angeles has a long tradition of mobile food service. After all, this is a city often defined by its obsession with restaurants and automobiles. Trucks serving cheap, delicious Mexican style tacos and tortas have been around since the 1970s and remain a vibrant business.

There are around 6000 food trucks in Los Angeles, according to the Los Angeles County Health Department, and the last few years have seen a new wave of food trucks arriving and taking advantage of social media to alert customers to their changing locations.
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