By Woodrow J. Hinton

Tell me what you eat, I'll tell you who you are.

As food writers we watch what's being dished up. And like debate club geeks who took a wrong turn in the hall and ended up in home economics class, we sincerely love to talk it, smell it, hug it, walk it, lick it and roll in it. Despite the fickle finger of food fads, for us it's always the small moments -- a whiff of this, a sip of that, a little juice dribbling down our chin, and life itself becomes the meal shared.

Lora Arduser has a routine
I am very ritualized in my food habits. Being diabetic involves a lot of pomp and circumstance around mealtime -- timing the food and insulin shot, figuring out how much to eat, and the sacrament of shooting up. I guess that's why some of my favorite dining experiences involve elements of comfort and routine.

Everyone likes to be treated special when they dine out, so Tink's has become a bit of a habit on Monday nights. It's as close as I'll ever come to living in Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery, one of my lifelong goals. People table-hop and chat with the Faux Frenchmen between sets. The gypsy Jazz floats through the air as you enjoy good food, wine and stellar service. One of my favorite menu items is the Creole wheat loaf sandwich. It's served with a spicy aioli and always seems to fill the corners of my stomach in just the right way.

A more bittersweet memory for 2004 was my annual birthday dinner at Mullane's. Every year my husband has taken me there, and I've allowed myself to splurge, habitually ordering one of their large salads and a piece of raspberry pie for dinner. The salads were always good, but they were simply a pretense, something to please the mother in the back of my brain. The pie was the real meal. The unadorned, flaky homemade crust filled with sweet-tart raspberries made turning a year older a little less painful. Unaware that Mullane's would close just four months after my birthday, I blissfully enjoyed this indulgence one last time.

Craig Bida keeps it simple
Three meals a day for 365 days, with a plethora of snacking in between -- that's more than 1,500 food experiences in 2004. From dinners out to home-cooked meals to keyboard lunches, they spanned a wide range of location, quality and company -- from the scintillating and celebratory to the forgettable and mundane.

So which of these experiences has lifted itself above the daily churn to become a most treasured food moment? One of the very simplest: A handful of freshly picked cherries ...

It is a transcendent day in May, and I am standing by the side of the road in a tiny Polish farm village, heading back to the U.S. after a friend's wedding. Birds are chirping, the bright spring sun is warm on my face, the smell of earth and green is heavy in the air, and I am savoring a bounty of extraordinarily fantastic, sweet cherries -- picked moments ago and bought for a pittance from a rosy-cheeked farm girl at her family's roadside stand.

Fingers stained with juice, spitting pits in the air like a gleeful kid, I am flush with the infectious joy of the world in springtime, and a foodie's elemental pleasure of eating food within sight of where it was cultivated, and bought from the hand that grew it. Sometimes it's the simplest things.

Donna Covrett gets connected
I took cover as the low-carb craze blew through like a Florida hurricane. I tried not to nod off as born-again carnivores sermonized the good fat dogma from the Atkins pulpit. I smiled as butter and eggs became heroes once again after years as diet pariahs, and licked my chops as the counterintuitive soul food boomed. I paid respect to the Rodney Dangerfield of the kitchen -- the crock-pot. I wrote in glycemic index, fast-casual and fusion prose.

All interesting limbs but never the heart for me. When I reflect on my favorite food moments it always involves relationships -- the mosaic of food and people at Findlay Market on Saturday mornings; several courses of Chef Daniel Boulud's sensual, wondrous food shared with three close friends in his Manhattan restaurant; the present- centered power of a group meditation at Slims in Northside on the beautiful simplicity of an orange, equally profound and messy.

Sunday dinners taste better with my family. My perspective of wine, good cheese and a sparkling city view changes with love leaning in to me. I'm more apt to seek to understand first sitting at Sugar 'n' Spice breakfast counter shoulder-to-shoulder with community and a Popeye omelet.

Food, like music, is a universal language to be shared and enjoyed with others. And in the words of the late, great Julia Child, "Above all, have a good time."

Anne Mitchell sharpens her knives
Something surprising happened in 2004: I started cooking again. After a half-decade crusading from bistro to cafe to diner and back in search of the holy grail of restaurant meals, I started going back to Findlay Market on Saturday mornings to pick out ingredients for Sunday dinner.

I began to create meals again, rather than just selecting them. I read food blogs, blew the dust off my cookbook shelf, sharpened my knives and started to connect again to the creative process of cooking. I fixated on certain things and prepared them until I got them right -- spending last summer working on the perfect roasted beets. Damned if I didn't get them just right by Thanksgiving!

We're lucky to have Findlay Market as a resource. It's easy to be enthusiastic about organically grown purple potatoes. The advantage of buying apples from the man who grew them is that he knows which ones are sweet and which are tart. And when you buy a sack full of eggplants in more sizes, shapes and colors than you ever knew existed, you want to play with them as soon as you get home.

At the risk of revealing my inner Marxist, I advise you: Fight food alienation. Cooking is a process, and it's nice to be a part of it.

Bill Carroll seeks the real deal
My year reviewing restaurants was a study in opposites, because my favorites were both highbrow and lowbrow. Overall, my favorite restaurant was Mary Jo's Cuisine in Oxford, which, alas, is no longer open. Second was Brandywine Inn in Monroe, which is suffering and might not be around much longer. Why these two? Both provided what I think a restaurant should offer: Delicious food prepared by people who love what they are doing ... which is astonishingly rare and refreshing in this world of cookie-cutter restaurants and corporate behemoths.

On the lowbrow end, another favorite assignment was a September feature for which I visited several local joints to compare their burgers. Not only fun, the experience affirmed for me that family-owned establishments are the choice cut. I especially liked Quatman's Cafe in Norwood and Zip's in Mount Lookout, both of which offer quality burgers in a memorable atmosphere.

The restaurant business has changed dramatically in the last 20 years; I've been working in the trade for at least that long. While many restaurants are merely interested in separating you from the contents of your wallet, a number of superb, locally owned places want you to enjoy the food, have a genuine experience and come back frequently. Go to them. Tip well. And enjoy. ©