Search Results for: food

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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The New Face of Hunger

Longreads Pick

One-sixth of Americans don’t have enough nutritious food to eat on a daily basis. Tracie McMillan talks to some of these families, while three photographers set out to different parts of the country to document what life looks like when you don’t know where your next meal is coming from.

Published: Jul 17, 2014
Length: 12 minutes (3,171 words)

The 'Serial Abuse' of Our Armed Forces

The intensification of the War for the Greater Middle East after 9/11 revealed unsuspected defects in America’s basic approach to raising its military forces. Notwithstanding the considerable virtues of our professional military, notably durability and tactical prowess, the existing system rates as a failure.

The All-Volunteer Force is like a burger from a fast-food joint: it’s cheap, filling and tastes good going down. What’s not to like? Take a closer look, however, and problems with the existing U.S. military system become apparent. It encourages political irresponsibility. It underwrites an insipid conception of citizenship. It’s undemocratic. It turns out to be exorbitantly expensive. And it doesn’t win.

Dishonesty pervades the relationship between the U.S. military and society. Rhetorically, we “support the troops.” But the support is seldom more than skin-deep.

In practice, we subject the troops we profess to care about to serial abuse. As authorities in Washington commit U.S. forces to wars that are unnecessary or ill-managed or unwinnable — or, in the martial equivalent of a trifecta, all of the above — Americans manifest something close to indifference. The bungled rollout of a health care reform program might generate public attention and even outrage. By comparison, a bungled military campaign elicits shrugs.

-Andrew J. Bacevich, in Notre Dame magazine, on the history of U.S. war in the Middle East over the past 30 years, and why there’s no end (or strategy) in sight.

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More military in the Longreads Archive

Photo: usafe, Flickr

‘Cooking Was My Mother’s Principal Weapon’

Born into the permissive Sixties, raised in the disillusioned Seventies, the third of three children, I came of age in a world where few rules were trusted, few applied. Of those that did, the rules contained in my mother’s cookbooks were paramount.

The foods of my childhood were romantic. Boeuf bourguignon. Vichyssoise. Salade Niçoise. Bouillabaisse. Béarnaise. Mousseline au Chocolat. Years before I could spell these foods, I learned their names from my mother’s lips, their smells by heart. At the time I took no notice of the gustatory schizophrenia that governed our meals. The extravagant French cuisine prepared on the nights my father dined with us; the Swanson TV dinners on the nights we ate alone, we three kids and my mother, nights that came more frequently as the Sixties ebbed into the Seventies. On those nights we ate our dinners in silence and watched the Vietnam war on television, and I took a childish proprietary delight in having a dinner of my own, served in its aluminum tray, with each portion precisely fitted to its geometrical place. These dinners were heated under thin tin foil and served on plates, and we ate directly from the metal trays our meals of soft whipped potatoes, brown gravy, sliced turkey, cubed carrots and military-green peas.

Had I noticed these culinary cycles, I doubt that I would have recognized them for the strategic maneuvers they seem to me in retrospect. Precisely what my parents were warring over I’m not sure, but it seems clear to me now that in the intricate territorial maneuvers that for years defined their marriage, cooking was my mother’s principal weapon. Proof of her superiority. My father might not feel tenderness, but he would have to admire her. My mother cooked with a vengeance in those years, or perhaps I should say she cooked for revenge. In her hands, cuisine became a martial art.

From E.J. Levy’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” which was featured in the 2005 edition of The Best American Essays, edited by Susan Orlean. When anyone asks me to name a favorite essay I’ve read, I often point to this one.

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First Chapter: Dave Eggers’ Novel, ‘Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?’

Dave Eggers | Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? | June 2014 | 23 minutes (5,800 words)

 

BUILDING 52

—I did it. You’re really here. An astronaut. Jesus.
—Who’s that?
—You probably have a headache. From the chloroform.
—What? Where am I? Where is this place? Who the fuck are you?
—You don’t recognize me?
—What? No. What is this? Read more…

All You Have Eaten: On Keeping a Perfect Record

Longreads Pick

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.”

Source: Lucky Peach
Published: Jul 7, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,009 words)

All You Have Eaten: On Keeping a Perfect Record

Illustration by Jason Polan

Rachel Khong | Lucky Peach | Spring 2014 | 20 minutes (5,009 words)

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Over the course of his or her lifetime, the average person will eat 60,000 pounds of food, the weight of six elephants.

The average American will drink over 3,000 gallons of soda. He will eat about 28 pigs, 2,000 chickens, 5,070 apples, and 2,340 pounds of lettuce. How much of that will he remember, and for how long, and how well? Read more…

Reading List: Summertime and the Reading Is Easy

“Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.” – Russell Baker

1. “Why Summer Makes Us Lazy.” (Maria Konnikova, The New Yorker, July 2013)

Productivity in the summertime is a delicate equation. Everything, from temperature hikes to sunny skies to humidity, affects how much work we do and how happily we do it.

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The Part of Culinary School Nobody Tells You About

Laurie Woolever, in The Billfold, on how she ended up becoming Anthony Bourdain’s assistant:

With my dad’s help, I took out a loan and did a 6-month professional course at the French Culinary Institute, while continuing to work part-time for the family for a few months. I soon learned that I was poorly equipped to be a restaurant cook. I’m rather lazy, I loathe noise, heat, and teamwork, bore easily, and crack under pressure. Months before starting school, I’d read that chefs could make up to $85,000 a year, but it became clear that I’d be lucky to make $25,000, working miserable 60-hour weeks. Having taken on a $24,000 debt (plus interest) on this professional training I suddenly didn’t want, while getting cash advances on my credit card to pay my rent, was stressful. I started breaking out in what I thought were hives, but later turned out to be bedbug bites.

Maybe I’d become a food writer.

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'Friendship': The Full First Chapter from Emily Gould's New Novel

Emily Gould | Friendship | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | July 2014 | 8 minutes (1,893 words)

 

Below is the opening chapter of Friendship, the new novel by Emily Gould, who we’ve featured often on Longreads in the past. Thanks to Gould and FSG for sharing it with the Longreads community. You can purchase the full book from WORD Bookstores

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