American food supplies are increasingly channeled through a handful of big companies: Amazon, Walmart, FreshDirect, Blue Apron. What do we lose when local supermarkets go under? A lot — and Kevin Kelley wants to stop that.

Your favorite Mexican shrimp dish isn’t about the shrimp at all: “People think the star of the dish is the shrimp, but really it’s the chile.”

Pro tip: your fat friend (read: me) doesn’t want to sit in the booth.

Don’t disrespect the fish. Or do! It’s your dinner.

“I was thinking a lot about childhood as this special status, an almost endangered status … that is eroded the more that we start thinking of ourselves as these units of value and worrying about what we’re worth.”

Black women take power where they can find it, and sometimes that’s in a pot of hot, skin-searing grits.

When caviar-crazed Eastern Europeans flocked to Warsaw, Missouri to poach eggs from a vulnerable species of fish, federal agents went undercover and spent two years to build case against them.

Now tat certified taste experts specialize in a range of foods, from hot sauce to honey, is taste becoming too codified?

One Tucsonan writes a love letter to the 24-hour Mexican food joint that shaped his youth.

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in food writing.

Talking about male bulimia.

I love bagels, but not as as much as Lloyd Squires loves bagels.

Bread: it was so terrible, right? Thank goodness the tech industry finally iterated on it so we can make a decent piece of toast after 6,000 years.

If the personal is political, then food is political — and food writing should be, too.

How America stacks the deck against black farmers.

Portland’s most successful restauranteur doesn’t care about your fancy, fresh-picked, locally sourced garden ingredients. He cooks for $$$.

Investigating the benefits of menu hacking and customer re-personalization.

A California cult had more success producing award-winning wine than sustaining their religion, so why are thousands of bottles gathering dust in a storeroom?

Japan is committed to waiting: its language includes the phrase gyouretsu no dekiru mise: “restaurants that have very long lines.”

Until his passing in late July, Jonathan Gold celebrated food for decades in publications such as LA Weekly and The Los Angeles Times.

Water companies go to impressive lengths to distinguish their tasteless product from their competitors’ tasteless product.

After large corporate farmers started growing nuts in one southeastern Arizona, local residents’ wells started going dry. The situation is only getting worse.

Is food nourishment, or art, or both?

Three meals a day don’t erase the scars of a childhood marked by hunger, violence, and loneliness.

The history of the chili pepper is entwined with the history of Chinese Communism and the fiery temperament of the Sichuanese people, but why?

We’re eating alone more often than in any previous generation. But why should a meal on our own be uninspired? Why shouldn’t the French saying “life is too short to drink bad wine” still apply?

Ollie Gleichenhaus cooked up a mean hamburger. How come Americans are eating Big Macs and Whoppers instead of Ollieburgers?

Remember when you could only buy milk that came from cows and goats, rather than nuts and seeds? We live in a post-dairy world now, and soy milk started it all.

On the complex history and triumphant ubiquity of America’s most comforting staple.

How California farmers are planning ahead for climate change while balancing their immediate economic concerns.