Is “low-tech” a more sustainable alternative to moving fast and breaking things? Or just a new iteration of the neoliberal fantasy?
Food
Past Editor: Patrick Abatiell
Public Thinker: Ashanté Reese on Food Geographies and Food Justice
"So many people don’t think about food as political."
Anticipating Extinction in the Tales of Two Fish
Deciding to not order the tuna or eel at a restaurant won’t save those dying species. But imagining a new kind of “multispecies thriving” might.
The World Is a Factory Farm
If factory farming is the source of pathogens like SARS-CoV-2, could smaller-scale farms and communities—even in China—be the safest alternative?
Public Thinker: B. R. Cohen on How Food Became “Pure”
“There were so many new laws, I had to make a map showing the spread and intensity of antimargarine laws in states over a quarter century.”
Why Seek Impossible Foods?
The Impossible™ burger does pollute less. But does this matter, in the face of capitalism’s continued control of the global food system?
A Culinary Golden Age—but for Whom?
In the 17th century, nostalgia was considered a disease. Today, nostalgia has shifted from an individual illness to a collective malaise. It is now often ...
What Future for Magic Mushrooms?
Hallucinogenic mushrooms have been used for centuries by numerous indigenous peoples around the world. These fungi appear in Aztec statues (like the one ...
“There Is Always a Norther North”: Highway 1, Alaska
There’s a fire burning by Swan Lake. For the sixth time in the last 20 years ...
Can a Recipe Save Your Life?
A recipe can be more than a guide to making food. A recipe can be a mantra, a ritual, a symbolic stay against chaos in the psyche and in the world. A hybrid genre ...
For the Love of Doughnuts
On the surface, Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie tells the story of Minerva and Cal, who fall in love with each other. Really, though, Bet Me is a story about a fat woman ...
India’s Garbage Politics
Writing in 1993, after decades spent documenting America’s shifting landscapes, poet A. R. Ammons suggested that “garbage [ought] to be the poem of our time.” Inspired by “mounds of disposal” along a ...
The Vegan Resistance
In 2011, Oprah Winfrey asked her staff at Harpo Studios to take a vegan challenge: eat no meat, fish, eggs, dairy, or any other animal products for seven days. The episode, which has since enjoyed a ...
Visible Cities
We’ve seen a lot of maps in the past six months, but a multitude of maps doesn’t necessarily translate into an expanded sense of the territory. It can be awfully hard to find one’s place. During last ...
On the Origin of Extinction
Extinction has never been a purely scientific concept. When theories of extinction exploded onto the Western intellectual scene in the early 19th ...
Tell Us How We Did
In 1928, Eric Blair, an unemployed, itinerant writer and former British colonial policeman, went to work as a dishwasher in a Paris hotel. Five years later, under the pen name George Orwell, Blair ...
Sex, Violence, and “The Vegetarian”
The verdict is in. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian has not only received glowing praise from British and American literary supplements; it has become the first Korean novel to be shortlisted for a Booker ...
On Writing and Restaurant Labor
December 1, 2015 — In the late summer of 2010, Eleven Madison Park, a four-star restaurant in New York City catering to the tastes of the super-rich, decided to temporarily shutter and rebrand ...
The Postindustrial Pastoral
Adrienne Su’s accomplished new book of poems Living Quarters invites meditation on the material specificities of too-readily-typecast locales. Recalibrating the geographical and cultural tropes of ...
Eating Galettes in Rennes
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. The sky above Rennes spits gentle rain. In French we call this crachin, from the verb ...