Look for raw fish in dishes other than sushi to show up more and more on menus in coming months. “Crudo” — the Italian and Spanish name for raw seafood — is one of the rising trends pinpointed by Barbara Fairchild, editor-in-chief of Bon Appétit magazine, during a recent talk at the CIA in St. Helena.

Prefer your food well-cooked rather than raw? You’re still in fashion. Another trend she noted is for long, slow cooking.

Fairchild was in Napa on a book tour promoting the new “Bon Appétit Cookbook,” a hefty 800-page tome with more than 1200 recipes drawn from the magazine’s pages.

In her talk, Fairchild mentioned a number of changes that she has seen in her time with the magazine, where she began working as an editorial assistant in 1978. She was named editor in 2000.

One major difference is that her readers today are starting from ingredients rather than recipes. “You’ll be walking along the farmers market and see something that looks fabulous and you bring it home and look for a recipe for it,” she said. This has prompted the magazine to move away from menu-driven stories, focusing instead on what is in season.

She also noted “the proliferation of different types of Asian food — Thai, Vietnamese — and all these kinds of ingredients” that are now increasingly available in stores and via the Web.

Beyond Asian food, which is getting to be mainstream, Fairchild now is seeing Moroccan influences coming to the fore, along with Indian food — particularly from the Goa region — and a rising interest in South American specialties like chimichurri sauce.

Flavors are getting more complex, but in the kitchen, she says, “the trend is away from equipment (and) back to basics.” You can make just about anything, she said, with just a decent chef’s knife, a rubber spatula, a stand mixer — and your hands.

Fairchild also noted that recipes in the magazine are “much, much lighter” than in the past, with less fat.

She applauds that trend, but expressed concern that it is being countered by the negative influence of food television. “People who watch the Food Network, that’s what they do — they watch, they don’t cook,” she said. And they are not learning how they should be cooking or eating by cheering on Emeril and Paula Dean while they add vast amounts of fat in dishes on their cooking shows. “That’s the road to obesity,” she said.

She called even perky Rachel Ray “a danger to society,” noting that you can put a dish on a bed of arugula, but “the food isn’t healthy just because it has some green things in it.”

On a positive note, Fairchild commented that the proliferation of food coverage, both on TV and in magazines as diverse as Oprah and GQ, “shows how far we’ve come since the ’50s [when] Swansson’s frozen dinners were a treat.

“Food has influenced and permeated our culture,” she said. When she started in the field 28 years ago, the idea of working as a chef was suspect. Today, “becoming a chef is a perfectly ‘legitimate’ career,” she told the group of mostly CIA students.