Lucky Peach

For a country with over 3,500 years of history, Vietnam’s famous noodle soup is fairly new, but in its short life, phō has gone beyond nourishment and woven itself into art, political protest, the national identity and grounding for the Vietnamese Diaspora. Andrea Nguyen examines its influence and origins.

From Lucky Peach‘s long out of print inaugural issue, an essay about what it’s like to operate one of Japan’s finest ramen restaurants while being a white Jewish New Yorker who sneaks rye flour into his noodle dough.

90 percent of all independent doughnut shops in CA are owned by Cambodians. In this James Beard Award nominated story, Richard Parks goes in search of answers.

How an obsession became a livelihood for a California endive farmer.

On the rise of Monterey Park, California, and other suburban Chinatowns.

A Del Posto pastry chef’s account of taking off work for a week, going on a mini-tour with his punk band in California, and all of the food he eats along the way.

Our latest Longreads Exclusive comes from Michael Snyder and Lucky Peach—a trip into the Sundarbans, where groups of honey hunters risk their lives in the forests to follow the ancient practice of collecting honey.

Exploring the food diary as a mnemonic device. “Andy Warhol kept what he called a ‘smell collection,’ switching perfumes every three months so he could reminisce more lucidly on those months whenever he smelled that period’s particular scent. Food, I figured, took this even further. It involves multiple senses, and that’s why memories that surround food can come on so strong.”

“A case of reinvention through preservation.” Sullivan’s friend leaves the celebrity world to go back to his roots to work in canning:

These days when you say someone becomes “obsessed” with something it usually means they spent four hours reading about it on the Internet last night, but it seems accurate to say that Kevin became obsessed with preserves. It gradually became not the only thing he talked about, but the thing you could tell he was always thinking about. He started making cross-country trips to track down fruits that supposedly “put up” well. He tried to preserve things he’d never seen preserved, stuff that would have made his grandmother have to lie down and fan herself. He sent me a picture of a Buddha’s hand citron one time. It was an unearthly yellow and looked like a squid. If one of the ghosts in Pac-Man had been bright yellow and was preserved in a specimen jar, where it got all distended over time, it would have looked like this thing. “Found this last night at the Altadena farmer’s market,” he wrote. “My first thought was, I wanna get that, I wanna preserve it.”