How kaiseki — Japan’s formal dining tradition — became a major (though often unacknowledged) influence on modern haute cuisine.
benhuberman
Posted inEditor's Pick
Peak Peaks
Twin Peaks: The Return is a show that clearly aimed to render weekly recaps impossible. That didn’t stop Sarah Nicole Prickett, whose Artforum mini-essays — now collected into one mammoth post — also challenge what it means to write about a TV show as it airs.
Posted inFood, Nonfiction, Quotes
Moonshine: The Black Tradition of Distilling ‘White Whiskey’
If craft food culture looks overwhelmingly white, it’s because black influences have been routinely scrubbed from its history.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The White Lies of Craft Culture
How the artisanal-food movement has built its success by appropriating — and erasing — the labor of people of color.
Posted inFood, Nonfiction, Quotes
If Clean Food Is for Everyone, Why Are Its Gurus All Young, Pretty Women?
How gendered marketing tropes continue to fuel the latest lifestyle fads.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Why We Fell for Clean Eating
On the rise of orthorexia — “an obsession with consuming only foods that are pure and perfect” — and the burgeoning industry that feeds it.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Corals and Crabs Get Moonstruck, Too
For many marine species, moonlight is both aphrodisiac and metronome. Yet scientists have only recently started to study it seriously.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Lunar Sea
What do humans and corals (and numerous other marine creatures) have in common? We all seem to find the moon irresistibly romantic.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Other National Pastime: Unusual Baby Names
“Brayden” and “Nevaeh” have got nothing on their 17th-century predecessors, “Waitstill” and “Supply.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Notes from a Baby-Names Obsessive
Names channel our identity — or at least our parents’ idea of our future identity — in ways both big (class, ethnicity) and small (subcultural affiliations, self-awareness). When the mother’s American and the father’s French, things get complicated, fast.