The advice offered to me by people when I explain I am going to live by myself in the woods for a week varies from the sensible (“Develop a routine”) to the frankly awful (“Take some weed!”). But it is Michael Harris, the Canadian author who published a book in 2014 called The End of […]
Quotes
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Cultural Heritage and the Family Dinner Table
What is lost when families are not involved in selecting the dishes they cook? For one thing, it means that they are not sharing food drawn from their own store of recipes, their heritage, or even regional specialties. I was born to an Indian father and a Chinese mother, but spent my childhood around the […]
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
Troy James Weaver on Pleasure and Shame in Cross-Dressing as a Young Boy
So we were in the food court eating chili dogs and my dad was smoking his cigarettes and drinking a cup of coffee…Then, out of nowhere, my friend started blushing, eyes fixed to his plate, very clearly distraught, so my dad asked him: What’s the problem? And my friend, he said: That lady looks like […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Gaijin Who Makes Great Ramen
As a ramen maniakku or enthusiast myself, I reread Lucky Peach‘s debut Ramen Issue once a year. The issue has an essay by chef Ivan Orkin, where he tells what it was like operating a ramen restaurant in Japan, as a gaijin, or outsider. Lucky Peach is a food quarterly started by chef David Chang and writer Peter Meehan in 2011. The […]
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‘Gentle Exploration’ in Video Games
Leigh Alexander explores the importance of the home and its artifacts in different video games.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How the World’s Biggest Food Chain Got Its Start
Subway debuted as Pete’s Super Submarines in Bridgeport, Conn., in the summer of 1965, when a Brooklyn-born 17-year-old named Fred DeLuca borrowed $1,000 from a family friend, a doctor named Peter Buck. DeLuca, an aspiring doctor who is now worth $2.6 billion, hoped slinging sandwiches would help him pay his way through medical school. The duo […]
Posted inQuotes, The Atavist Magazine
What It’s Like to Live On Top of a Glacier
The Atavist Magazine presents “Welcome to Dog World,” Blair Braverman’s account of life atop an Alaskan glacier, leading dog-sledding excursions for tourists and isolated from the rest of the world.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Inside the Secretive Industry That Makes Junk Food Addictive
The companies that make up the flavor industry — including international manufacturers such as Givaudan, Firmenich and Sensient — are not household names. But they make their money by selling flavors to big food companies such as Kellogg, Kraft and Nestlé. Last year, Switzerland-based Givaudan reported 4.4 billion Swiss francs (roughly $4.8 billion) in sales of flavor […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
James Salter on Writing and the Open Road
The author’s 1992 interview with poet Edward Hirsch.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
It’s A Big Ocean, Full of Seaweed
In Lucky Peach‘s twelfth issue, Rachel Khong writes about the harvesting of wild algae, more commonly known as “seaweed,” on California’s coast: The seashore is where all our stories start. It’s understood that present-day humans evolved in littoral spaces, where the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish and shellfish, originally from seaweed, were needed to evolve complex nervous systems […]