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As long as you're careful not to spill, the computer can get you a great culinary education. Image courtesy of Flickr user Travelin' Librarian

Whether for career development or their own edification, the culinarily curious can gorge on all kinds of food knowledge online. Here are a few of the offerings:

Sharpen your cooking skills. Everything from nifty tips on peeling garlic to full-fledged cooking shows are available online. Saveur (source of the amazing garlic video), Epicurious, Chow and Cook’s Illustrated (for subscribers only) are good sites to check for short technique and recipe demonstrations. The Culinary Institute of America’s ciaprochef.com is full of recipes and videos. And a number of YouTube cooking shows have gained a loyal following, including Show Me the Curry, where Hetal and Anuja help you navigate South Asian and occasionally other cuisines; Great Depression Cooking, starring 96-year-old Clara; and the amusingly enigmatic Cooking with Dog (tagline: It’s not what you think…), where you can learn to make all kinds of Japanese dishes while the host’s coiffed poodle looks serenely on.

Get a culinary degree. Until someone figures out how to transport food via the Internet, you can’t actually attend cooking school online. But you can earn an online degree in a culinary-related subject that doesn’t involve cooking. Le Cordon Bleu USA offers a bachelor of arts in culinary management and an associate of occupational studies in hospitality and restaurant management. If you can’t move to Vermont (which you should consider, because it really is lovely), the New England Culinary Institute offers an online bachelor of arts in hospitality and restaurant management. And Virginia College Online’s culinary arts associate’s degree  is designed for those who have already completed cooking school elsewhere.

Feed your inner geek. One of the greatest developments in recent years for people like me who love to learn but live far from a big university is iTunes U. Institutions like Oxford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the National Portrait Gallery upload audio and video of lectures—and most of them are free to download from iTunes. A few of the foodie offerings are Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Science’s public lecture series on science and cooking, with demonstrations from top chefs like Wylie Dufresne, on meat glue (transglutaminase), and José Andrés, on gelation; the University of Warwick on how to build a chocolate-powered race car; and culinary historian Jessica Harris speaking at the Library of Congress National Book Festival.

Learn how to write about food. If you already know plenty about food and want to share your knowledge with the world, online food-writing classes can help tune up your presentation. Indian cookbook author Monica Bhide offers occasional e-courses covering everything from recipe writing to food memoir. The latest class started in September, but check her site for upcoming dates. Gotham Writers’ Workshop’s next 11-week course, which includes a Q&A session with a New York Times food editor, begins October 4.

With veggies like these, would you make soup or music? Image courtesy of Flickr user SF à gogo.

Kids are usually admonished for fooling around with their food, be it making duck lips out of a pair of Pringles or claws from Bugles corn chips. (Although big kids aren’t always above the sort of mealtime horseplay that would make Miss Manners say “ahem.”) But while playing with one’s food is the sort of behavior that might not be appropriate for the dinner table, it does have its place—namely, the concert hall.

Since 1998, the Vegetable Orchestra, a Vienna-based experimental musical group, has explored the sonic qualities of goods found in the produce aisle. The 11 musicians in the group are a collective of artists and writers who, one evening, began to ponder what would be the most difficult things they could use to try to make music. As luck would have it, they were making soup that night. Their first experimental outing had led to more than a decade’s worth of music making around the world. (They enjoyed their first play dates in the US in 2010, and sadly, their current schedule doesn’t have them on this side of the pond anytime soon.)

Of course, given the impermanent nature of the materials, the orchestra needs to be purchased—as much as 70 pounds  of produce—before every concert. Some veggies have ready-made musicality, such as the percussive sounds that can be produced by thunking on a pumpkin. But other instruments are crafted before each show, such as the carrot recorders and cucumberphones. After a show, the veggies are divvied up, with some going into a vegetable soup shared by the musicians and audience members while some of the instruments are given away. In terms of style, the group’s compositions—yes, you can compose music for vegetables—is more or less its own genre, though it draws on experimental, electronic and pop music.

And no, they’re not vegetarians.

Farming and new media are not mutually exclusive. Image courtesy of Flickr user IRRI Images

Conscientious eaters want to know all about where their food came from, how it was grown and who grew it. Part of the appeal of farmers’ markets is getting face time with those who spend their days with their hands in the dirt. Suddenly, consumers want to have a “relationship” with their small-scale farmers, ranchers and cheese makers — people who once toiled in obscurity. (This is still usually the case in the larger agricultural industry, where the vast majority of our food comes from.)

One unintended consequence is that, now, personality counts. A grower with a winning smile or the gift of the gab may get the sale even when the wares at the next table are just as fresh and succulent-looking. There’s a pair of young, attractive male farmers in my area whose tent always seems to be crowded with female customers.

Now, technology that wasn’t around a decade ago—blogs, smartphones, Facebook and Twitter—is taking the farmer-consumer relationship to another level. It’s how CSA members can find out what’s likely to be in their share soon, get recipes for what to do with bok choy or celeriac, and read cute little stories about how the farm animals are doing. The farmer gets to communicate with current and potential customers, and office-bound readers get to live vicariously through their computer or phone screens.

Ree Drummond, who has parlayed her rural life as the wife of a cattle rancher into a wildly successful site called The Pioneer Woman, gives a glimpse of the possibilities for savvy online self-marketing. She doesn’t quite qualify as a rancher herself—although she often rides along and helps out with the chores, she seems to usually have a camera in hand—but her gorgeous photographs and folksy anecdotes about life on the range are about as good an advertisement as any for making a living off the land.

Most farmer blogs are far simpler (and, some might argue, more authentic). The Dairyman’s Blog, written by a young Alabama dairy farmer, offers “MooTube” videos of life on the farm. Self-described farm wife Jill Heemstra focuses on the funny side of farming at Fence Post Diaries, with blog titles like “You Might Be a Farmer’s Wife If…” (example: “…you use the phrase ‘semen tank’ in casual conversation”).

Blogs and tweets are also providing a new platform for farmers of all stripes to express their views on agriculture and politics. Missouri hog farmer Chris Chinn advocates on her blog for fewer government regulations and conventional farm practices that she feels have gotten a bad rap, while small-scale farmer Gavin Venn tweets as @morethanorganic with his thoughts on animal welfare and genetically modified foods.

Social media has become a stand-in for the kind of conversations farmers have always had in person, about the weather, what’s growing, advice and opinions. The Twitter hashtag #agchat encompasses discussions of parenting on the farm, venting about too much or too little rain, links to agriculture news and just about everything else of interest to the ag-minded.

But tweeting from the tractor has its perils. As Stewart Skinner, a Canadian pig farmer with the Twitter handle @ModernFarmer tweeted recently about his gadget, “The blackberry can’t stand up to the rigors of the barn. RIM needs to come up with a smartphone for farmers.”

Brazilian bombshell Carmen Miranda, the lady in the tutti-frutti hat. Image courtesy of Flickr user patrickrigon.

Food has served as inspiration for clothing ranging from everyday wear to theatrical costumes, such as Josephine Baker’s banana skirt or Carmen Miranda’s headgear. But by and large we’re brought up to believe that the things we eat belong in our bodies and not on them, so we probably won’t see the Gap rolling out a line of edible wearables anytime soon. Nevertheless, there are designers out there who have bridged the gap between the kitchen and the closet, so while we’re in the throes of fashion season—Milan’s fashion week closes today, Paris’ gears up on October 3—let’s take a look at the fusion of food and fashion.

Food packaging might be the most convenient resource for clothing and accessories. Wonder Bread wrappers have inspired young home economics students to create raincoats, while the Wonder Bread company similarly noticed the rain gear potential of its product and printed its trademark primary colored dots on plastic rain bonnets. For purses and handbags, look to gum wrappers which, when folded and sewn together, are sure to complement your Wonder Bread wear. You can buy these items already made, or you can pick up a book on vintage crafts to learn how to create them yourself. The only catch is that you need to love gum more than Violet Beauregarde in order to amass enough wrappers to complete a project.

But also consider the lowly potato sack. Devotees of the television show “Project Runway” might recall a Season 7 episode in which aspiring fashion designers were challenged to create runway-quality apparel out of potato sacks, generating some spectacularly surprising results. However, well before Tim Gunn laid this task on the table, actress Marilyn Monroe famously sported the sack. One story goes that someone made the remark that the rising star would look good even in a potato sack, prompting 20th Century Fox to take a series of publicity shots. Monroe certainly looked a lot better than a bag of tubers in the short-cut, sleeveless ensemble. Who knew glittery bracelets and lucite heels went so well with burlap?

But then there is the realm of fashion made from actual food. Perhaps the best-known example is the meat dress worn by Lady Gaga at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards. The piece was the brainchild of 24-year-old artist Franc Fernandez, who designed a meat clutch for the pop star before creating the head-to-toe outfit that was both applauded and derided. Detractors complained that the outfit was a waste of otherwise perfectly edible beef. (The dress itself weighed 35 pounds). However, after the awards, it was taken to a Burbank taxidermist who preserved the ensemble. Disregarding ethical and artistic debates about the piece, no one can deny that with flank steak purchased at $3.99 a pound, paying $140 for a major awards show dress is an epic bargain.

Gaga’s food fashion-forward sensibilities proved inspirational: Fashion and design students at England’s Bath Spa University crafted melted, molded and sculpted cheeses to create five dresses—and even a handbag and a pair of pumps. But before Gaga there was photographer Ted Sabrase, who shot a series of photographs in 2009 that featured models sporting artichoke dresses, waffle pants and a sliced bread miniskirt. And yes, there’s video of these pieces being created.

So the next time you open your vegetable crisper, do you think you’ll feel inspired to pull out the wok for another stir fry, or will you crack out the sewing machine instead?

A wild boar doing some damage. Image courtesy of Flickr user minicooper93402

For this month’s Inviting Writing series, we asked for stories about food and independence: your decisions about what, how or where you eat; the first meal you cooked; or about how you eat to the beat of a different drummer. Debra Kelly and her husband have taken food independence to an extreme: They have lived on 23 remote acres in California since 1978, experimenting with solar energy and eating organic, home-grown food. And sometimes fighting for it.

Confronting a Nemesis

By Debra Kelly

I live on a remote mountaintop. A four-wheel-drive kind of place. Living here requires independent thinking and action. In this place are deep canyons and heavy forests of redwood, oak, pine and madrone, crisscrossed with old logging trails and overgrown with brush. Our homestead is a solitary retreat. It is modest and handmade. We travel along eight miles of pitted, potholed and curvy dirt road—like a stream bed in some parts—until we reach pavement. In this setting, independent people and food grow and thrive.

Living far from a town makes you self-reliant. We planted a garden and fruit trees to supplement our diet. We were well on our way to a nice harvest of veggies, and our fruit trees were still young and fragile, when we noticed ominous signs on the ground. A presence pressing in on us. It ravaged and stalked our homestead in the middle of the night. It peeled the limbs off our young fruit trees, like you would peel a banana. It tore a path of destruction through our place like a rototiller without a driver. It was wily and fast afoot. It has tusks it could use if it were challenged. Although this independent food is prized by famous chefs around the globe, it was my nemesis. It was the wild pig.

Wild pigs began roaming the mountains in increasing numbers. One pair was so bold that they dared saunter up on our deck at night! Our St. Bernard lay silent as a lamb as they approached him. I heard a noise and looked out the window to see one pig at his head and one pig at his tail. He was afraid. I stoically said to my husband, “the pigs gotta go.”

We hatched a plan. We knew their habits. The problem was that their hearing was so acute. They could hear our footfalls inside the cabin, which would send them running into the darkness and safety of the woods. How then would we be able to shoot them? They would hear us get out of bed, climb down the ladder from the loft, get the gun and open the door. SIMPLE. We decided to shoot them without leaving our bed!

Yes, it was a master plan by masterminds….

Our bed was a mattress on the floor of a loft. It faced a picture window flanked by two smaller opening windows. We would leave one window open, just to slide the barrel of the gun out of it, as we lay on our bellies, ever watchful. My role would be to hold a powerful flashlight and turn it on the pigs below. My husband would finish them off. We’d have a luau and a boatload of meat for a season! We pledged to stay awake. It would be a piece of cake.

Midnight passed—no pigs. One in the morning passed—no pigs. I yawned and said, “this will be the only night they fail to come.” More time passed and we fall fast asleep. Then it happened. I awoke abruptly to the sound of a snort and a rustling below. I carefully, gently, shook my husband awake. He rolled into position and gave me the signal to turn on the flashlight. So I did. All hell broke loose, in an instant. Instead of the light piercing the darkness below, it bounced off the picture window glass, reflecting back at us, our own image. In a split second, my husband let loose both barrels, out of the window to the ground below. A short squeal resulted and they thundered off into the forest. At that moment, with the sound of the blast reverberating off the walls and ceiling of our small cabin, my heart pounded like a Ginger Baker drum solo. We looked outside to find no blood, and no pigs anywhere. Our master plan thwarted. We missed. The food got away!