Author Archives

Aaron Gilbreath
Aaron Gilbreath has written essays and articles for Harper's, The New York Times, Kenyon Review, The Dublin Review, Brick, Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and Saveur. He's the author of This Is: Essays on Jazz, the personal essay Everything We Don't Know, and the forthcoming book Through the San Joaquin Valley: The Heart of California. @AaronGilbreath

In Praise of Polarizing Food

Canned sardines turn many Americans off to fresh sardines, which is a shame. In Tin House‘s 2009 Appetites Issue, Jeff Koehler shares the little fish’s pleasures, describing how eating canned sardines in his vagabond youth led him to savoring fresh sardines as an adult, which culminated in years of culinary experimentation in his adopted home of Barcelona. Koehler’s essay was reprinted in the Best Food Writing 2010 anthology and is for anyone who’s ever loved something other people find gross.

Sardinas en escabeche became part of my repertoire, and I still enjoy it in autumn when the hues and scents of the dish feel right for the cool, clear days. Eventually, I learned to prepare sardines in many different ways. At home we like them pan-grilled and eaten with plump grapes. Or grilled and crowning a slice of toasted country bread piled with strips of roasted red peppers, eggplant, and onions. Or batter-dipped and fried with slices of acidic apple. These days, my two girls love it when I bury a mess of sardines whole under a mound of coarse sea salt, and then bake the lot in a hot oven for 15 minutes. They enthusiastically take turns breaking open the salt crust with a wooden mallet while my wife and I scramble to dig out the succulent fish—moist and completely cooked in their own juices—before the girls crush them.

But, without a doubt, the most pleasurable way to eat fresh sardines is a la brasa, grilled outside in the open air over hot embers. The flavors are at their robust finest, the flesh sparkling and briny, shaded with smoky oils. Inside, that distinct smell of searing sardines is overpowering, even pungent (and immediately alerts every neighbor as to what’s on the stove), but outside, among green leaves and dusty loam, or on a sandy beach with sea breezes, it’s evocatively, stirringly aromatic.

Read the story

How Homelessness Looks in the Tech Boom

It’s a familiar American tale: people living in poverty amid great wealth. In Palo Alto, California, where the per capita income is over twice the state average, the tech boom has driven real estate values up, and evictions have left many renters homeless. In the New Republic, Monica Potts profiles an elderly couple who lived in their van while searching for affordable housing, and portrays the hostilities and NIMBYism that Silicon Valley’s homeless face, as well as the social services available to them.

One night, about a month after leaving Cubberley, the police pulled Suzan and James over. Their registration was expired. “This officer, he got a wild hair, and he said, ‘I’m going to impound your car,’ and called the tow truck.” Suzan told me. They got out of the car. Without pushing and demanding, she realized, she was never going to get out of the situation. She told me she said to the officer, “This is our home, and if you impound it we will not have a home.” He insisted. “I said ‘That’s fine. You do that. We will stay right here. I will put the beds out, I will put what we need here, right here on the sidewalk.” Other officers arrived and talked to them. They asked Suzan whether, surely, there was some other place they could go. “I said, ‘We have no place to go, and we’re staying right here.’ I was going to make a stink. They were going to know about it.” Suzan told me people were poking their heads out of their homes, and she realized the bigger fuss she made, the more likely officers might decide just to leave them alone.

Read the story

Researching Our Martian Heritage

In Nautilus, Tim Folger writes about how scientist are still debating whether organic and inorganic materials found on Martian meteorite ALH84001 contain evidence that life existed on Mars before it existed on Earth. If it did, then life could have spread to Earth from meteorites, which could make human beings ─ and other Earthly life ─ descended from Martians.

While many scientists consider liquid water to be the most essential ingredient for life, Earth may once have harbored too much water. “The best evidence we have suggests that early Earth was completely covered by oceans,” says Kirschvink. Without some dry land, he says, it would have been difficult for the basic chemical ingredients of life to form. “The reason is very simple … if you link two amino acids together to make a protein, you have to remove water.” And that would have been impossible if the amino acids were immersed in an ocean. Life needed some land—literally a beachhead—to get started. Ancient Earth might not have had any dry land, but Mars certainly did.

“All this is controversial since we’re talking about a world 4 billion years ago,” says Kirschvink. “But it’s very clear that Mars had southern highlands, and what is looking more and more like a north polar ocean basin. If you’ve got volcanic terrain sticking up, with rainfall and streams and rivers—if life had managed to get started there, it would have thrived.” That scenario, which seems very likely to Kirshvink, has some remarkable implications: Life, after its genesis on Mars, might have spread from there to Earth, borne here by meteorites. And that would make us—and every other living thing on Earth—the descendants of spacefaring microbes from Mars. According to Kirschvink, we won’t find our first ETs on some other world—we just have to glance in a mirror. “I really think we’re Martians,” he says. For Kirschvink, life on Mars is unlikely to represent the second genesis that McKay is looking for.

Read the story

The Joy and Pain of Life with Pets

Anyone who has pets knows the alternate joys and pains of the walks, the smells, the snuggling and whining and inconvenient late-night demands, as well as the inevitable misery of their absence once they die. If crapping on the floor was a business, some of us pet-owners would be millionaires. In The Morning News, Gregory Martin writes about his relationship with his ancient cat Tess, relating his cat’s aging to human aging, and exploring what it means to have quality of life.

How many nights in a row would Tess have to pee in the bed before enough was enough? Five? Ten?

When I think about putting Tess down because she’s driving me crazy, ravaging my sleep, I can’t help but wonder: How will things go for me someday when I’m in diapers and think that Christine is my mom?

The more I think about it, the more I think that “How much are you willing to put up with?” is not the right question. Because no matter how tired I am, the answer is always: I could put up with more. Yes, I need four cups of coffee just to get going on the day. But I am not at my limit. To say so would be ridiculous. To even suggest it is to fail to recognize how many people are, actually, at their limit, or beyond it, and not because of their old cat.

Read the story

The Future of Restaurateuring in Portland

Photo by Carl, Flickr

This “safer bet” is where the second generation of Portland’s food industry intersects with the region’s commitment to density in the face of growth. Micro restaurants and food halls celebrate small spaces. Their inherent informality appeals to diners who treat dining out as an everyday form of entertainment. The small, turnkey spaces make it easier for established local food businesses to expand. “It took only three months to get all nine Letters of Intent at Pine Street signed,” says project developer Jean Pierre Veillet, principal of Siteworks design-build firm. “There’s a hankering for small space in the city’s core.”

Projects like Pine Street and Bethany are the logical evolution of food carts — a codifying and commodifying of the once gritty first-generation food entrepreneurship. Done right, they will ensure that Portland’s food cred will continue to grow, one meal at a time. The statewide food system that fuels these restaurants, and other food-based industries, is also evolving. That is: The first generation of food business would never have taken off without the quality and diversity from Oregon’s small, family-owned farms. Will those conditions persist for the second?

In Oregon Business, Amy Milshtein writes about the way a few new food hall projects signal the future of restaurateuring in Portland, Oregon, and how the city’s rising rents, increasing density and success as a food destination have pushed it into a new phase of greater polish, greater competition, higher financial stakes, and greater responsibility to create sustainable food systems.

Read the story

More on food from the Longreads Archive

The Myth of the Birth of Rock ‘n ‘Roll

Who created rock ‘n’ roll? Sam Phillips, the owner of the legendary Sun Records who first recorded Elvis Presley, claimed he did. But history is written by the winners and the outspoken. In The New Yorker, Louis Menand writes about Peter Guralnick’s biography Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, and about the larger racial, commercial and economic factors, and the other players, that also shaped the music we call rock n roll.

Still, it raises an interesting question. Phillips had had success in 1951 with a song called “Rocket 88” (the title refers to a model of automobile), performed by Ike Turner’s band and sung by Jackie Brenston, who became the headliner (much to Turner’s annoyance). The band had damaged an amplifier on the way to the studio, so it buzzed when music was played. Phillips considered this a delicious imperfection, and he kept it. That is the sound that makes the record, and many people have called “Rocket 88” the first rock-and-roll song. (I guess some song has to be the first.) But “Rocket 88” was performed by a black group. Why, if white kids were already buying records by black musicians, did the breakthrough performer have to be white?

The answer is television. In 1948, less than two per cent of American households had a television set. By 1955, more than two-thirds did. Prime time in those years was dominated by variety shows—hosted by people like Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, Milton Berle, and Perry Como—that booked musical acts. Since most television viewers got only three or four channels, the audience for those shows was enormous. Television exposure became the best way to sell a record.

On television, unlike on radio, the performer’s race is apparent. And sponsors avoided mixed-race shows, since they were advertising on national networks and did not want to alienate viewers in certain regions of the country. Nat King Cole’s television show, which went on the air in 1956, could never get regular sponsors. Cole had to quit after a year. “Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark,” he said.

Read the story

In Iran, Dizi Is More Than a Dish

No matter how widely you eat or curious your palate, too few Americans have tasted much Iranian food. In Roads & Kingdoms, the anonymous writer named Pedestrian writes about one of Iran’s most popular dishes, a stew named dizi. Pedestrian’s article ran in July, 2015:

In Iran, dizi is more than a dish. It is a ritual, one with its own history and rites. There are photos of early twentieth century Iranian teahouses with men sitting around dizi pots, stuffing themselves. A sense of camaraderie and openness is associated with dizi, unparalleled in Iranian cuisine. It is the food of laborers and commoners, and it is valued for being a dish to share and enjoy in the company of others. This imagery is reflected in the artwork that adorns dizi houses. Larger than life warriors like Rostam from the Book of Kings, or dervishes—those who submit to a life of truth-seeking and worship—are portrayed in colorful scenes.

Today, dizi is a common restaurant food, most famously served at Iranshahr Dizi House, a restaurant in downtown Tehran. But in the past, it was most often served at teahouses and corner stores, where it fed tired men finishing a hard day’s work.

Read the story

On Ugly Food

Gravy, curry, casserole, beef stew ─ some of humanity’s most comforting, aromatic foods are the least photogenic. At Serious Eats, Kat Kinsman analyzes America’s obsession with culinary appearances and makes the case for learning to measure food by other, non-visual standards.

I’ve been thinking about ugly food, and ugly things in general, for an awfully long time now. I still remember using my post as a high school yearbook editor to make sure the wallflower kids were just as well represented as the tall poppies in our class. Sure, they weren’t the prettiest of the bunch, but I felt a certain solidarity with them. I knew we had a special value all our own. As a girl who figured I’d never measure up as lovely enough (mostly because so many people flat-out told me so), I had always identified with the ugly and the overlooked—the teddy bear with the wonky eye, the holey thrift store dress. I understood these things. I celebrated them.

The foods that pleased me the most were the objectively ugly ones: the stews, gravies, gumbos, curries, goulashes, mashes, braises, and sauces that were cooked long and low until they slumped and thickened. Maybe I knew that these foods, like all the ugly ducklings in this world, had to work harder to get their proper due. It takes time and effort to transubstantiate flour and fat into cocoa-dark roux, a rough hunk of muscle into sumptuous brisket, and raw, tough leaves and tops into sweet, savory greens. Time, it seems, can make some foods taste like heaven, and look like hell.

Read the story

Remembering the Female Voice of the Blues

In the 21st century, if “the blues” has any face, it’s Robert Johnson’s, or, more typically, a Johnson-esque silhouette, dark and downtrodden: slumped, itinerant, devastated, male. He has usurped all the torture and torment, a fantastical incarnation of a fantasy. That, in the 1920s and ’30s, commercial artists like Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith were the dominant figures of the genre has become irrelevant to the myth of the blues as it’s been written by collectors and critics. Smith was phenomenally successful—a stout, outspoken black woman in a fur coat and pearls, stuffing theaters—and her success so directly contradicts a more romantic saga (the-blues-as-marginalized-cry) that she’s been nearly excised from its telling.

Amanda Petrusich, writing in the Oxford American magazine about blues singer Bessie Smith, one of the most popular blues musicians of all time, an architect of the musical form, and the first to appear on Columbia Records’ “race series” in 1924. Petrusich’s piece ran in December, 2013.

The ’90s Soda that Nobody Cared About Until It Was Dead

In The Believer in February, 2014, Michael Schulman wrote about one of the most dramatic and memorable failures in American branding: Coca-Cola’s OK Soda. Marketed to Gen X’ers in 1994, the OK Soda brand died by 1995, though its artifacts live on in collector circles and advertising lore. As ’90s fashion and music cycle back through popular culture, this epic story of food, failure and the secret heart of youth culture highlights the arrogance of business people who think they know what you want and how to manipulate you into buying it.

When OK Soda was introduced, of course, Coke executives were certain they had it right. Drawing on a study from MIT, the company had pinpointed what Generation X was all about. “Economic prosperity is less available than it was for their parents,” Lanahan theorized. “Even traditional rites of passage, such as sex, are fraught with life-or-death consequences.” Tom Pirko, a Coke marketing consultant, told NPR, “People who are nineteen years old are very accustomed to having been manipulated and knowing that they’re manipulated.” He described the soda’s potential audience as “already truly wasted. I mean, their lethargy probably can’t be penetrated by any commercial message.”

How to sell soft drinks to such people? The answer was to embrace the angst. Coke turned to Wieden + Kennedy, the ultra-hip Portland, Oregon, ad firm that had devised Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign. The agency’s pitch has become the stuff of soda lore: research had shown that Coca-Cola was the second most recognized term in the world. The first was OK, which, the firm pointed out, was also the two middle letters of Coke. So why not combine the two? The drink was christened OK Soda, and its semi-reassuring motto was “Things are going to be OK.”

Read the story