The Fighting Azov Dolphins
The Mariupol, Ukraine Dolphins play (American) football seven miles from the front lines — a weekly chance for “three hours of American way of life.”
The Barnacle Queens of the Spanish Seaside
Matt Goulding profiles the González sisters of Galicia, four women thriving in the dangerous, male-dominated field of percebes, or gooseneck barnacles, a rare Spanish delicacy. Adapted from Grape, Olive, Pig: Deep Travels Through Spain’s Food Culture.
The Sandwich That Ate the World
The Vietnamese bánh mì sandwich is one of the world’s most delicious creations. Fortunately it has endured without the colonialism and xenophobia that marked its origins.
Could Eat a Horse
The phrase ‘horse meat’ elicits strong responses, from gags to cries for justice. But what really goes on in the edible equine trade? Why do people buy horse meat, and how does it taste? One journalist in Canada finds out.
The Guatemalan Chef Who Became a Hiroshima Comfort Food Star
The origin story of Okonomiyaki – the harmoniously messy pancake that has become a staple of post-war Hiroshima cuisine – and of its unlikely master.
Land of Pork and Honey
In secular Tel Aviv, a renaissance for the most unkosher of foods.
Drink, Edit, Repeat
For a young expat writer, strange days at a Thai newspaper:
Some background is in order. I was 25 at the time, and several months before my arrival in Thailand, I wouldn’t have been able to identify its elephantine outline on a map. But I wanted to move to Thailand to soak up some of the fellow-feeling and goodwill I had experienced on an earlier holiday visit. The country had a strengthening democracy and an economy that was gradually righting itself after being upended in the 1997 Asian financial crisis. It felt to me like my own silliness and incompetence wouldn’t be punished because everything was going to be all right. I was going to fit right in. And I was going to try something I had never done before: work in the newspaper business.
Of Men, Okapi & Rebels
On the past, present, and future of the pygmy Mbuti people of northeastern Congo. Rosen reports on the ground, in the forest:
“A trip like this may seem strange to you. You could reasonably accuse us of a kind of exoticism. But people travel for lots of reasons. There’s beach tourism, sex tourism, wine tourism. This trip, for me, offered something a lot more interesting: a chance to feed our long fascination with the idea of pre-agrarian society. For 40,000 years, from the rise of behaviorally modern humans until the development of agriculture 9,000 years ago, all of our ancestors had lived somewhat like the Mbuti do today. More than anything, Dan and Chris and I just wanted a glimpse of what that past might have looked like.
“Before joining the Mbuti in the forest, however, we first had to reach Epulu. Though we’d hoped to arrive by nightfall, the going along the washed out dirt road had been slow, and eight hours after leaving the border of Uganda, we still had 50 miles ahead of us. Swallowed by the fast-falling equatorial sunset, our Pajero trudged on into the darkness.”
