A more critical consciousness of the connections between family, health, race, and gender was brewing among food allergy advocates in the exceptionally catastrophic summer of 2020.
Tag: Food
Don’t Listen to Morals, Listen to Vegetables
Making food joyful—even while educating on food insecurity—is a tall order for a children’s show. But Waffles + Mochi is a show like no other.
Public Thinker: Ashanté Reese on Food Geographies and Food Justice
"So many people don’t think about food as political."
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?
Fast Food, Precarious Workers
Today—as in 1968—it remains to be seen if McDonald’s pivot toward racial justice will mean anything for how it treats its scores of Black workers.
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 ...
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 ...
Smiling Donors, Bored Recipients: Free Food In America
People lining up for free food are often tired, bored, and shabbily dressed ...
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 ...
What Is at Stake in Yemen?
As a commodity in the United States, coffee has gone through three waves. In the early 20th century, with the advent of mass production and vacuum packaging ...
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 ...
Keyword of the Week: Hunger
Humanitarian groups are projecting four impending famines, in Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Yemen. This week’s Public Bookshelf features Public Books articles about the history of food crises ...
Wading Through the Swamp: Nairobi, Kenya
Above the low traffic hum on Woodvale Grove, the main street running through Nairobi’s affluent neighborhood of Westlands, a woman in braided hair …
Syria’s Wartime Famine @100: “Martyrs of the Grass”
In the days leading up to the Muslim holiday of the Feast of Sacrifice (Eid al-Adha) in October 2013, several Syrian clerics issued a fatwa ...
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 ...
Cheese in Your Bones: The Sheep and Shepherds of Pag
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. The island of Pag, which protrudes into the Adriatic like an accusing finger, has more ...
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 ...