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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Sasha Issenberg, Libby Copeland, Jamilah King, Berry Grass, and Dayna Evans.

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Bread, Disrupted

People — frequently women — have been baking bread without recipes, or measurements, or fanfare, for 6,000 years. In the past few years, people — mostly men — have been been baking bread with spreadsheets, and multi-volume cookbooks, and intensive Instagramming of “crumb shots.” At Eater, Dayna Evans explores the (classist, gendered) sourdough boom running rampant among tech bros.

Hallelujah, bread is back. But these new bread beasts are not the bakers of yore, early risers peacefully toiling at their craft, their secrets trapped just beneath the crust of a fresh loaf whose sweet smells are wafting through the streets. No, this bread is engineered. With custom-made bread ovens, temperature-controlled proofing boxes, at-home grain mills, laser thermometers, and a $600, 52-pound cookbook. A sample caption from breadstagram: “Loaf from yesterday’s cut video. 80% bread flour, 20% whole wheat, 80% hydration, 2% salt, Leaven was 100% hydration, whole wheat, young (4 hours), and comprised of 10% of total *dough* weight (60g for a 600g loaf). Hand mixed via Rubaud Method for 10 minutes. Bulk for 3.5 hours, low 80s F, with coil folds at 60 minutes and 120 minutes (around 40% rise in volume).”

Bread requires little and it has existed in some form for thousands of years, relatively unchanged, because it’s simple to make and it feeds you. But if you were to scroll through Instagram, or watch recent YouTube tutorials, or read the libraries of blogs and self-published e-books, you might come away thinking that making bread was more challenging than performing brain surgery. That’s because bread-baking in America has, of late, found a friend in the unlikeliest of people: engineers, technologists, and the Silicon Valley-centric and adjacent. The image of a folksy baker laboring from muscle memory over her humble daily loaf, this is not.

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A Thereness Beneath the Thereness: A Jonathan Gold Reading List

Jonathan Gold poses for a portrait during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images)

For the past four decades, Jonathan Gold tirelessly catalogued the ebb and flow of cuisine in Los Angeles, and in the process, became known as the “food writing poet” of the city. That poet, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this past month, died last week at the age of 57. In his New York Times obituary Ruth Reichl, who published Gold in Gourmet magazine, said of the writer-critic,

Before Tony Bourdain, before reality TV and ‘Parts Unknown’ and people really being into ethnic food in a serious way, it was Jonathan who got it, completely. He really got that food was a gateway into the people, and that food could really define a community. He was really writing about the people more than the food.

According to David Chang, no one knew more about Korean cuisine than Gold, and the critic, whose career began as a music journalist, became the foremost expert on the various regions of the world. Some opine his speciality was Mexican and Central American cooking, having eaten at every pupuseria, taco stand, and restaurant along the 15.5 mile stretch of Pico Boulevard. But really, Gold’s expertise wasn’t limited by borders. Read more…

The Unbearable Blandness of Water

a woman with shoulder-length brown hair and a red jack holds a goblet of water in front of her face
Water Judge Karen Cara at the 2011 Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting. (AP Photo/The Journal, Chris Jackson)

Dave Stroup didn’t just attend the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting, aka the Academy Awards of Water, he became a certified water-taster and judge. At Eater, he tells us all about the experience of trying to judge a substance whose main characteristics are colorlessness, odorlessness, and tastelessness — and about the lengths water companies go to in the effort to distinguish their tasteless product from their competitors’.

There are no big brands at the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting — no Dasani, FIJI, Evian, or Deer Park. The waters that compete tend to be local, niche, or super-high-end (think small-batch or mail-order only). There are four different categories, three of which are bottled — non-carbonated, purified, and sparkling — and municipal water. The bottled waters include all sorts, from ancient springs to waters that make claims of being specially pH-balanced or oxygen-rich. Alongside more typical fare, such as Hope Natural Spring Water from Virginia and even Berkeley Springs’ own purified drinking water, there’s Frequency H2O, from Australia, which is described by its manufacturer as “a synthesis of wisdom and evolution” that is “alive with the pulsations of the Universe” after being “put through a 2-stage kinetic energy process and infused at 528Hz, the Solfeggio frequency of LOVE.” Svalbarði’s Polar Iceberg water costs about $80 for a 750-milliliter bottle and literally comes from a melting iceberg off the Norwegian island of Svalbard.

Of course, it’s not all pontificating about the mouthfeel subtleties of expensive glacier water. There’s also space to discuss global water challenges. Well… sort of.

It’s probably not surprising that the seminar portion of the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting is so lightly attended. No one wants to be told the grim truth that much of the world, even here in the United States, lacks access to clean water, or of a Mad Max future with nations fighting wars over it. At least, no one wants to hear it in a hotel ballroom, next to an elaborate display of thousands of dollars of fancy bottles evoking the image of pure, flowing water.

Next year I’ll be entering water bottled from my very own kitchen sink; it’s municipal Roman water, and if you close your eyes you can just pick up a whiff of imperial ambition in the nose.

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Remembrance of Folks Past: A Reading List of the Stories We Tell

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories. 

In “The Depth of Animal Grief,” Carl Safina writes, “A researcher once played a recording of an elephant who had died. The sound was coming from a speaker hidden in a thicket. The family went wild calling, looking all around. The dead elephant’s daughter called for days afterward. The researchers never again did such a thing.”

How do we remember our dead? We hold funerals. We engage in rituals that celebrate a life and symbolize its worth. We build monuments — headstones, perhaps, or statues. And we do something else, something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. To crib a line from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s tiny little off-off-off-Broadway theatrical experiment “Hamilton”: “Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?”

Who lives? We do.

Who dies? They do — as shall we.

And who tells your story? The living. And while we are among the living, it is our job (if we so choose) to tell the stories of those who’ve gone. I’ve been thinking (and writing) about death and endings rather often of late. Here are some lovely examples of obituaries and tributes, some chosen by me, some chosen by helpful friends.

1. “Anthony Bourdain and the Power of Telling the Truth” (Helen Rosner, The New Yorker, June 2018)

Helen was my editor when I did this death-focused piece about TGI Fridays for Eater. She’s consistently edited James Beard Award nominees and winners, and she’s been a nominee herself. Her piece about her pal Tony is beautiful. She gives a more-than-well-deserved mention to his longtime creative collaborator, Laurie Woolever. And boy, does Rosner ever land the dismount. What. A. Kicker.

2. “Remembering Mr. Rogers, a true-life ‘helper’ when the world still needs one” (Anthony Breznican, Entertainment Weekly, May 2017)

I met Anthony Breznican — a gifted writer who regularly creates illuminating stories about entertainment and entertainers — after we spent 15 minutes chatting at a mutual friend’s barbecue, comparing his luminous Italian-American wife’s family funeral practices to those of my own clan. It was around the time his wonderful Twitter thread tribute to Fred Rogers went viral.

In college in Pittsburgh in 2001, Breznican was going through a hard time. This essay, based on the tweets, tells his story of running into Fred Rogers on campus. Here’s a snippet of what happened at what Breznican thought would be the end of a brief, polite exchange.

That’s when I blurted in a kind of rambling gush that I’d stumbled on the show again recently, at a time when I truly needed it. He listened there in the doorway. When I ran out of words, I just said, “So … thanks for that. Again.”

Mr. Rogers nodded. He looked down, and let the door close again. He undid his scarf and motioned to the window, where he sat down on the ledge.

This is what set Mr. Rogers apart. No one else would’ve done this. No one.

He said, “Do you want to tell me what was upsetting you?”

The rest is more than worth your time, neighbor.

3. “Colonel Michael Singleton” (The Telegraph, January 2003), suggested by Neil Gaiman

I ventured through the thickest wood, o’er hills and across rickety wooden spans under which dwell only the very sexiest bridge trolls (they have never heard of the internet and will eat you if you try to explain it) to climb a talking tree atop a mountain and whisper a single word into the ether: “Gaiman.”

This, as most people know, is the only way to contact Neil Gaiman. He then sent a fox riding an owl riding an elephant riding a second, extremely annoyed fox, all of them inside a hot air balloon basket, and they appeared after two days (during which time I had to urinate on the talking tree, who had some pretty colorful thoughts to share about that), and then the owl opened its mouth and dropped a piece of paper, which had the URL for this obituary on it. I borrowed the tree’s iPhone to read it and boy, did we smile!

Colonel Michael Singleton ran a boys’ prep school and was of the philosophy that young men “should be neither cosseted nor cowed,” which is as great a recipe for raising a decent human as ever I’ve heard. I’m not 100 percent on board with all the Colonel’s methods, but I admire his sense of politeness: “Knocked unconscious during action in Holland, he was saved only when a family emerged from a farmhouse cellar to drag him inside. In peacetime he returned to thank them and was delighted to be reunited with the field glasses which he had mislaid in the blast.” He was also wounded three times in battle. Later, he was appointed a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth.

There’s a lot more, but not too much, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

4. “The most awful kind of grief. The most beautiful memories. So long, son.” (Chris Erskine, Los Angeles Times, March 2018), suggested by Carrie Seim

My friend Carrie is a journalist who has been writing for years about all sorts of things; since journalists read a lot, I figured she’d be able to suggest a powerful example of this type of writing. And she sure did. I can’t imagine writing something like this, and yet I can, just a little bit, because writers write through pain. It’s one way that can help. Sometimes it exacerbates the agony but usually it helps – sometimes because our words end up helping someone else, who tells us so. That’s the greatest honor a writer can claim, I think.

5. “Eloquent Barbara Jordan: A Great Spirit Has Left US” (Molly Ivins for Creators Syndicate, January 1996)

“Barbara Jordan, whose name was so often preceded by the words “the first black woman to . . . ” that they seemed like a permanent title, died last Wednesday in Austin. A great spirit is gone.”

Hell of a lede. But then, it’s Ivins, who specialized in ledes, kickers, and everything in between. She catalogues Jordan’s magnificent life of public service, sure, but she also gives us personal gems:

Jordan’s presence was so strikingly magisterial that only her good friends knew how much fun she could be in informal situations. Before multiple sclerosis crippled her hands, she loved to play guitar, and she loved to sing to the end of her life. Jordan singing “The St. James Infirmary Blues” was just a show-stopper.

Barbara Jordan was the first black person from the South elected to Congress since Reconstruction. But she was a lot more than her resume, and Ivins gives us a glimpse at Barbara Jordan, musician and friend.

6. “Molly Ivins, 62; humorist who targeted her wit at the powerful” (Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times, February 2007)

I love Molly Ivins — not personally, as I’m sad to say I never met her. But when I was a teenager in the late ‘90s, her work furthered my love affair with political humor, a love that began when I was a mere kid reading my grandparents’ Art Buchwald books. Here’s Elaine Woo on the final days of Molly Ivins:

In her last weeks, she devoted her waning energy to what she called “an old-fashioned newspaper campaign” against President Bush’s plan to escalate the Iraq war. “We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders,” she wrote in her last column two weeks ago. “And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.”

What would Ivins have to say today about the Trump administration’s policy of ripping families apart at the border? I have a feeling that, with some small edits, it would look much like what she wrote above.

I miss her, I miss her, I miss her.

* * *

Sara Benincasa is a stand-up comedian, actress, college speaker on mental health awareness, and the author of Real Artists Have Day JobsDC TripGreat, and Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom. She also wrote a very silly joke book called Tim Kaine Is Your Nice Dad. Recent roles include “Corporate” on Comedy Central, “Bill Nye Saves The World” on Netflix, “The Jim Gaffigan Show” on TVLand and critically-acclaimed short film “The Focus Group”, which she also wrote.

Editor: Michelle Weber

David Chang’s ‘Ugly Delicious’ Pushes Food TV in the Right Direction

David Chang with South Philly Barbacoa's Cristina Martinez in 'Ugly Delicious.'

There’s no denying that David Chang’s new Netflix docuseries, “Ugly Delicious”, is aesthetically gorgeous. The show’s underlying concept—”ugly” food like tacos, barbecue, and fried rice all have intrinsic values that surpass its creation born out of necessity and a lowly legacy—is a sui generis angle for a well-worn genre that has long shifted to food porn rather that pursuing and examining the cultural and geopolitical value that food possesses.

In a recent interview with Grub Street, “Top Chef” judge and chef Tom Colicchio mentioned the rise of “unfussy” food on the program’s 15th season: “The chefs were doing more, I wouldn’t say rustic, but a much more conventional style of food.” Translation: This shift isn’t occurring in a vacuum.

As the New Yorker‘s Helen Rosner explains in her review of the eight-part series, “What makes “Ugly Delicious” compelling, ultimately, is Chang’s commitment to rejecting purity and piety within food culture…In food culture, particularly American food culture, the concept of authenticity is wielded like a hammer…[and] the problem with such rigid categorizations, according to “Ugly Delicious,” is, for one thing, creative stagnation.”

This certainly makes for a thoroughly interesting viewing experience; before I realized it, I had binge-watched four episodes. This sort of programming is also refreshing—Chang has subverted a genre. For a generation that has been bred on the gluttony of glossy networks and competitive cooking, “Ugly Delicious” throws up a middle finger, and instead asked questions that are relevant to how we should be thinking about food (and not just consuming for its sheer shock value). Read more…

Giving Tex-Mex Its Due

AP Photo/Larry Crowe

Texas’ size and cultural diversity have blessed it with delicious geo-culinary diversity: chili in the west, barbecue in the middle and east, and Tex-Mex in the south. Yet somehow barbecue gets most of the attention.

At Eater, Meghan McCarron lavishes praise on Tex-Mex, the state’s homegrown style of Mexican food. Derided as cheese-covered food for white people, Tex-Mex gets overlooked or mocked for being more Tex than Mex. McCarron argues that the culinary establishment doesn’t treat Tex-Mex, both beloved and maligned, with the respect it deserves. Tex-Mex isn’t all frozen margaritas and fajitas, estúpido. This is a proper rural tradition, she says, and “the most important, least understood regional cuisine in America.”

Adding insult to injury, while corporate chains like Applebees serve bowls of queso and bland fajitas, the demand for low prices — and the white food media’s barbecue bias — threaten the family restaurants that serve fresh, scratch Tex-Mex. McCarron’s thoughtful, deeply researched call for canonization cannot be ignored.

What does barbecue have that Tex-Mex doesn’t? It has meat, it has fire, it has an aura of mastery — and, currently, it’s associated primarily with Anglos, and the area in and around Texas’s famously progressive, and also profoundly segregated city, Austin. The state has a robust tradition of black pitmasters; Franklin Barbecue is located in what was formerly Ben’s Long Branch Bar-B-Q, a black-owned business in a historically black neighborhood, originally created by Austin’s segregationalist 1928 city plan. Black pitmasters at restaurants like Sam’s Bar-B-Que and Hoover’s still smoke nearby. And Mexican pit-smoked barbacoa, a weekend staple in the Rio Grande Valley, existed before Texas was Texas.

But the “easy story” of central Texas barbecue, as Daniel Vaughn calls it, disseminated across the country, is about, and told by, people who are almost entirely white, and male. Each of these cooks and obsessives are individually passionate and often brilliant — and some, like Aaron Franklin, are downright leery of their own fame — but the aggregate effect is Texas barbecue being treated with almost comical importance, driven by a self-perpetuating cycle where tastemakers champion genuinely wonderful food made by people who look like them. (This isn’t an issue just in Texas barbecue, but that obsessive model kicked off our smoke-worshipping zeitgeist, and created a model for, say, the Ugly Delicious barbecue episode, which featured no black pitmasters).

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Are We Getting Ripped with Protein or Ripped Off?

Alexey Malgavko/Sputnik via AP

Carbs are good. Carbs are bad. Butter’s good. Butter’s bad. Coconut oil is a miracle. No, it’s evil. After decades of diet trends and conflicting information, protein’s upstanding reputation has remained unscathed in America. Of course, it isn’t just protein — it’s industrialized society’s engineered version of it, added to powders and bars, flavored and sweetened — and its popularity is more linked to convenience and perceptions of a “healthy active lifestyle” than to weightlifting.

At Eater, Casey Johnston examines the rise of protein and its most popular ready-to-drink delivery system: Muscle Milk. Wellness is a trillion-dollar industry, and what she calls the blurring of “the line between supplements and food” signals a lucrative future for protein drinks and powder. Many questions remain: Can the human body even process all this processed protein? What does protein do for us? Johnston visited Muscle Milk’s San Francisco headquarters to find out.

In the pre-supplement era, if protein had a downside, it was that it couldn’t be eaten isolated from other kinds of calories — milk has fat, beef has fat, soy has fat, and any substantial amount of plant-derived protein is high enough in carbs to make Gwyneth Paltrow faint. That left chicken breasts, eggs whites, and lean fish, but that was about it.

A few decades of engineering later, most non-meat forms of protein can now be drawn out from their sources and repackaged with a little sweetener or flavoring into whatever highly digestible and convenient food format you desire. Companies cram protein into their foods with the hope of splashing “good source of protein,” a term protected by the FDA, across the label — frozen pizzas with crusts made of chicken, whey-enhanced nut butters, whey-enhanced or even whey-based ice cream, soy-enhanced granola. Even foods that aren’t in the game are trying to play — I recently found a box of corn flakes boasting “2 grams of protein” per serving, a single-digits percentage of what any person needs in a day.

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Living That Early Bird Life, But Differently

AP Photo/The Winchester Star, Jeff Taylor

When Jaya Saxena and her husband visited his grandparents in their Florida retirement community, they found what the author calls “the early bird life.” Early bed time, inexpensive meals, look-alike housing, this was a land where predictability isn’t a dreary monotony to avoid. It’s a sign of success. For Eater, Saxena describes how they experienced this Florida by embracing its comforting routine, rest and the early bird special, the lifestyle’s affordable, predictable, culinary centerpiece. Surprisingly, they found a meal in decline. Once beloved by retirees, aging Boomers don’t take the same interest in this meal, or need to save money, or share previous generations’ visions of retirement, and their disinterest threatens this culinary icon. As diners pass away, will their early bird special go with them?

Whether rich, poor, or merely one of the declining middle class, though, few of the new Olds want to embrace their age. “Your generation is definitely not headed for bingo night,” the actor Dennis Hopper says in an Ameriprise ad about retirement investment for boomers, backed by a soundtrack of “Gimme Some Lovin.’” For boomers, a retirement of shuffling between kitchenless apartments and the local soup counter is hell, and you’re not going to drag them there yet. “The baby boomers who are coming of age these days, in part they’re healthier for longer into their lives, view old age in very different terms,” Haley said. “And don’t want to be seen as the men with the hiked-up pants and rolled-up cuffs, and the little old lady on a cane.”

Rosie Ross, a snowbird — though she prefers the term “sunbird” — who spends summers in upstate New York and winters in South Florida with her husband Bernard, told me that “the notion of early bird specials is something we attribute to older seniors, the same ones who sneak leftover rolls and sugar packets in their purses.” Though Bernard’s mother lives in North Miami, the Rosses didn’t want to live like she does. “We settled on a very cool active-adult community in the very cool city of Delray Beach,” Rosie said. The Rosses dine out multiple times a week, eat everything from Japanese to vegan, prefer to eat around 7 p.m., and “do not eat out based on early bird specials at all.” I could feel the pride emanating from her email.

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Longreads Best of 2017: Science, Technology, and Business Writing

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

Deborah Blum
Director of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT and author of The Poisoner’s Handbook

The Touch of Madness (David Dobbs, Pacific Standard)

A beautifully rendered exploration of the slow, relentless creep of schizophrenia into the life of a brilliant graduate student, her slow recognition of the fact, and the failure of her academic community to recognize the issue or to support her. Dobbs’ piece functions both as an inquiry into our faltering understanding of mental illness and our cultural failure to respond to it with integrity. It’s the kind of compassionate and morally-centered journalism we should all aspire to.


Elmo Keep
Australian writer and journalist living in Mexico, runner-up for the 2017 Bragg Prize for Science Writing

How Eclipse Chasers Are Putting a Small Kentucky Town on the Map (Lucas Reilly, Mental Floss)

Anyone willing to write about syzygy in the shadow of Annie Dillard’s classic 1982 essay “Total Eclipse” has balls for miles. Reilly’s decision to focus on the logistics faced by tiny towns preparing to be inundated by thousands of eclipse watchers was inspired. It brilliantly conveyed the shared enthusiasms that celestial events animate in us. Between these two essays, I’m convinced a total eclipse would be a psychic event so overwhelming I might not survive it. I’ve got 2037 in Antarctica on my bucket list — if it’s still there in twenty years.    Read more…