Metro Newspapers publishes weekly newspapers in California's Silicon Valley, Santa Cruz County and the North Bay. Metro's award-winning publications reach more than half a million readers in the San Francisco Bay Area every week.

NEWS:
Sacramento Is Burning
Think the budget battle is just a numbers game? This summer's blazes reveal the real cost of the state's money problems

The Fly: 07.16.08
Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Can't Waite and Watch Your Head 

COLUMNS:
Silicon Alleys
Local Chefs Say Eat Me

Sporting Events
The Catfish Swim will be held July 20 at Steven's Creek Reservoir.

Events
The barbecue action is heating up for this weekend's Connoisseurs' Marketplace, which features local artists and craftspeople showing off their talents, lots of live music, plenty of food and drink, and a play area for kids. The festival takes place July 19–20, 10am–6pm, on Santa Cruz Avenue in downtown Menlo Park.

Kids
The denizens of a prehistory world threatened by a food shortages decide on a better way in a new show called 'The Dinosaur Musical,' presented by Wingspread Summer Stock and Palo Alto Children's Theatre, Friday (July 18) at 7:30pm and Saturday (July 19) at 2:30pm at 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto.

Download Metro Silicon Valley, July 16, 2008

PDF format,  60MB, 88Pages.

Cover Story: One Nation Under Garlic

How Gilroy turned a potent Italian bulb into a culinary staple and the country's biggest and smelliest food festival
By Stett Holbrook

THIRTY YEARS AGO, a group of American food writers trooped into a packing shed at Gilroy's Christopher Ranch off Highway 101. Greeted by the pungent aroma of millions of garlic cloves being processed in the building, the journalists sat down for a garlic-laced lunch that included scampi, calamari, pasta and pepper steak.

Together with the Fresh Garlic Producers Association, an industry trade group, Christopher Ranch founder and former president Don Christopher hosted the journalists to showcase Gilroy garlic. Gilroy was then the world's largest producer and processor of the odiferous vegetable.

The event proved to be more than another press junket. The luncheon set Gilroy on a course no one could have imagined. Along the way, it helped solidify a culinary revolution already bubbling in the kitchens of America.

Today, garlic is as common in food as salt and pepper, but it wasn't always that way. That a half-dozen food writers would travel to Gilroy for a garlic tasting reveals how different American tastes were just 30 years ago. Back then the "stinking rose" was still regarded with suspicion, a foreign ingredient that carried a powerful whiff of exoticism that made some white-bread Americans nervous.  ...

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News, music, movies & restaurants from the editors of the Silicon Valley's #1 weekly newspaper. Serving San Jose, Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Campbell, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Fremont & nearby cities.

A service of Metro Newspapers

Metroactive is a Northern California meta-site specializing in arts and entertainment information and featuring content from three of the San Francisco Bay Area's leading publications: Metro, Silicon Valley's Weekly Newspaper; Metro Santa Cruz; and the North Bay Bohemian.

Both Metroactive and Metro's weeklies have won national awards for writing, editing and design.

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