Tag
Food
-
On Our Nightstands: July 2026
At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is actually on our nightstands? Here we bring you, in our own words, a behind-the-scenes look at what we have been reading this month. Nicholas Dames Editor in Chief Frederic…
-
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 would assemble his reflections on the lives of Parisian service laborers into the first part of a gritty satirical memoir called, Down…
-
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 sheep than people. A thin bridge perched across a stretch of sea connects it to the Croatian mainland: when one crosses it, the northern…
-
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 Prize. One reviewer found it “glorious,” a “ferocious, magnificently death-affirming novel,” another a “bracing, visceral, system-shocking addition to the Anglophone reader’s diet.”1 Speaking…
-
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. Eleven Madison had been steadily scaling up its operation since opening in 1998 as a mid-range French bistro notoriously out of step…
-
John Cage’s Mycological Legacy: Green Mountain National Forest, VT
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. When it comes to wild mushrooms, morels get a lot of love, but the chanterelle is the sexiest of fungi, and one of the tastiest. Sun-yellow to orange, its silhouette can be vase-like and curvy, voluptuous even, and…
-
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 American nature writing, Living Quarters offers readers a portrait of rural modernity1 rather than pastoral nostalgia—a portrait that unsettles the divisions of agricultural versus industrial and provincial versus cosmopolitan that…
-
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 cracher, meaning to spit. Brittany is harsh. It has the pointed chin of a witch, jabbing out into the Atlantic Ocean on…
-
The Market and the Fest
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. In the rural villages of southern Germany, the rain rolls in breakers down the hills, curving along the little streets, stretching its path in tiny rivulets, dampening window box gardens. The villagers are so efficient: on the highways…
-
Who is General T?
By now the March 30, 2005 Powerball drawing seems to have taken on the workings of a tall tale: In a pot nearing $14 million, Powerball officials usually expect four to five second-place winners. This time, 110 players got five of the six numbers correct, winning anywhere from $100,000 to $500,000, depending on their original…
-
Edible Comics
Comics and food have a longstanding relationship, most spectacularly in a unique genre known in Japan, its country of origin, as ryôri manga, or cooking comics. These are comics entirely devoted to food—its preparation, its appreciation. Today we can find food comics in France and the US, but this is a genre that traces its…
-
Michael Pollan’s Dilemma
In the 20th anniversary edition of On Food and Cooking, the celebrated food writer Harold McGee claims that “to understand what’s happening within a food as we cook it, we need to be familiar with the world of invisibly small molecules and their reactions with each other.”1 But why, we might ask? Cooking is cultural as…
