Search Results for: food

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…

The Best Food Is Somewhere Else

A handicapped Chihuahua dog is dressed up as a taco truck
A handicapped Chihuahua is dressed up as a taco truck that covers his harness. (Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images)

My favorite food truck in Austin was closed last Sunday.

This particular truck is a neighborhood mainstay. (DM me if you are wildly curious about my taste in trucks. I’ll reply in the form of a koan, like a fortune cookie. May we all selfishly hoard the best things in life for as long as we can keep them secret.) It’s open every day; it’s been there for years. It is usually up and running, rain or shine, weather be damned. But last Sunday it was closed.

Look, it’s a truck. It was purposely designed to drive off into the sunset. But this one is supposed to be a food truck only in name. It was present and closed, crucially, as opposed to absent and lost to time. (Although the window was boarded up, and the grain of the wood was ominous.) It could disappear, but it doesn’t. It’s been stationary for at least five years.

Did someone die? Was someone sick? It might’ve just been a peculiar forecast situation, but I just don’t really know. And the not knowing hurt.

Apparently, I metabolize (get it?) disappearing restaurants differently than people who know insider things about roving food options. If the limited-edition dishes at a truck or a pop-up are insanely good, I figure the foldable version was always intended to serve as a low-overhead test kitchen. If there are regularly lines snaking around the block, I just assume the plan is to size up locally, secure a larger space, and graduate gracefully into sustainability and permanence. Good food is good! I like good things to stay.

But no! This is only a thing sometimes! It’s true that a number of temporary dining operations start out as low-risk test runs to prove or disprove long-term viability, but now a great many more are specifically designed to flame out. There are city-block queues of eaters out there who live for limited time offers, for trick candle food that’s here one day and gone the next. They’re tickled by the vanishing acts that fill my stomach with so much dread.

The entire point of pop-ups is to expire. That limit then feeds into a ticking time-bomb of popularity that is as temporary as a wet nap at a hipster barbecue. To get to the bottom of this evaporating attraction, GQ sent Ryan Bradley to eat his way across Los Angeles to help us all digest why pop-ups and ephemeral dining experiences have become the fastest-moving craze in food:

As attention spans shortened and experiences became the new status symbols, disappearing restaurants gained more cultural capital than their stodgily static alternatives.

This shift has created entire multimillion- and even billion-dollar real estate interests (malls, mostly) with spaces devoted to pop-up restaurants at New York’s South Street Seaport, Platform in Culver City, and Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, among others. A company based in San Francisco, called Cubert, manufactures purpose-built pop-up stalls. High turnover is now a virtue. Which means the latest food trend isn’t an ingredient or a cuisine; it’s a length of time. The most successful pop-up operations are those that can burn brightly, then quietly (and quickly) disappear to make room for something new.

Chefs have adapted to the churn. Time was, an accomplished chef would rarely up and leave a restaurant for something else. Now it happens all the time. Michelin-starred chef Dan Barber decamped from his idyllic Blue Hill at Stone Barns in the Hudson Valley for an international jaunt making luxury meals out of food waste. Chad Robertson, of San Francisco’s cultishly loved bakery Tartine, has done so many collaborations that his sourdough starter is everywhere from New York to Stockholm, as iconic as a gurgling blob of yeast can be. René Redzepi has taken Noma (and its dedicated fans) on the road from Copenhagen to Sydney, Tokyo, and Tulum. At Lalito in New York, Gerardo Gonzalez hosts regular pop-ups that often turn into dance parties you see on Instagram the next day and wish you’d been at. I recently ate ramen from Oakland’s Ramen Shop without having to leave Los Angeles, which was honestly very convenient. A few years ago, Google hired a whole crew of chefs to run a “world” café pop-up for the tenth anniversary of Google Translate. And last summer, Jessica Koslow, of L.A.’s now iconic breakfast-and-lunch spot Sqirl, started cooking out of the Food Lab, that space in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport built specifically for pop-up restaurants. And eaters, well, we lined up around the block, flew halfway around the world, and paid premium prices just for a chance to say we were there.

Read the story

To Your Door: The Human Cost of Food Delivery

Getty Images

To earn money during a rough patch as a freelancer, Sam Riches worked as a bike courier, delivering food in Toronto during a six-month period. While the job lacked in pay, it offered one intriguing benefit: a crash course in human nature.

When you’re broke, your body becomes your last resort, a mostly reliable means to make money that also comes with great precarity. If you get injured in a low-wage job with no employment insurance, there’s nothing to fall back on. You pay with your health.

I feel this job in my body. My neck cracks, my shoulders pop, my ankles creak. Some nights, I ride until my legs turn numb and the wind whips tears in my eyes and the world becomes fuzzy at the edges. Then I have a choice. I can keep riding or I can stop and wait until my path becomes clear again.

You learn about human nature when you ride a bike through the arteries of the city. You see couples arguing in parked cars. Elderly ladies collecting beer bottles. Street performers whose routines become familiar. Guys on dates trying too hard. Guys on dates not trying hard enough. Old men falling over drunk. Good dogs. There are so many good dogs.

People are mostly good. That’s another thing you learn on this job. I deliver to downtown offices and suburban schools, to addiction-withdrawal centres and auditoriums, to pregnant mothers and hungover teens and elderly folks who are genuinely amazed they are able to summon bread pudding to their door.

Read the story

It’s Hard to See Seafood As a Healthy Choice After Reading This

Rex Features via AP Images

Canadian aquatic physiology researcher Laura McDonnell quit eating fish, but not for the usual environmental reason like protecting endangered stock or because of the taste. She’s too aware of fraud and plastic pollution to put herself at risk.

At The Walrus, McDonnell explains how mislabeled fish makes it onto our dinner plates, and how mislabeling a mackerel for a tuna, say, can have health consequences. She doesn’t dislike fish or want to quit it, but there are just too many players in the supply chain to identify the culprits in frauds. Worse yet are the pollutants: with the staggering amount of microplastic now floating in the Earth’s aquatic systems, she doesn’t believe there is any natural body of water pure enough to produce a safe, edible fish, so she quit. Even to a diehard fish-eater like me, who eats canned saury for breakfast and sardines for lunch, she makes a convincing case.

As much as I love fish, I can’t pretend that they’re wise animals with refined palates. Researchers have found that when given the choice between natural and microplastic food items, fish tend to choose the plastic. For most aquatic animals, finding food while avoiding predators is a struggle, so being picky or discerning is not evolutionarily beneficial; most species grab their desired snack quickly and head right back to their hiding place. As a result, aquatic animals often ingest floating bits of plastic, either by confusing colourful microplastics for something else, or by ingesting plastic-contaminated prey. Filter-feeding animals such as clams, oysters, and mussels obtain their nutrients by sucking in water, trapping small floating particles within in it, and then spitting the water back out. Mussels are so efficient at this process that they’ve been used to clear up polluted waterways. Unfortunately, much of what they trap these days is plastic: a recent study estimated that the average European could ingest about 11,000 microplastics per year just by including mussels and oysters in their diet.

Due to bioaccumulation (when a substance’s concentration increases in an animal over time) and biomagnification (when a substance’s concentration increases as it moves up the food chain), the concentration of microplastics in larger, older, and predatory fish such as tuna is likely to be higher than in smaller species or younger individuals. So what happens to other top predators—humans—who eat a seafood-rich diet during their lifetime? Even though current research shows we do not absorb most plastics, it’s possible that a small amount (about 1 percent) can still accumulate in our bodies over time.

Read the story

Spies, Dossiers, and the Insane Lengths Restaurants Go to Track and Influence Food Critics

Longreads Pick

When a glowing review can catapult a restaurant into stardom and a bad one can spell its doom, owners increasingly resort to a mainstay of political campaigns: opposition research.

Source: Washingtonian
Published: Dec 6, 2017
Length: 13 minutes (3,413 words)

Longreads Best of 2017: Food Writing

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

Mayukh Sen
Staff writer, Vice

Can Local Food Help Appalachia Build a Post-Coal Future? (Sarah Jones, The Nation)

Jones has been one of my favorite writers to emerge from the shitstorm that is the Trump presidency, so I was quite happy to see The Nation’s Food Issue publish her look at Appalachian food: the baggage it’s so unjustly carried, where it’s headed, and who’s doing the work to steer it in that direction. She interrogates the language of “trash” that has followed the region’s people and what they eat, and she does so beautifully. Her voice is clear, engaging, and tempered with compassion. The vast majority of food writing is fearfully not much further than center-of-left, which makes Jones’ piece extremely refreshing. It’s a marvelous piece and a reminder that some of the most exciting, relevant food writing will live outside food publications unless they step up their game.

Read more…

Business Is Booming for America’s Survival Food King

Longreads Pick

By capitalizing on the growing unease about our unstable world, Wise Co. is expanding its business to average Americans and stores like Walmart. The logic: if you have a flashlight and first-aid kit, shouldn’t you stockpile some Mylar food pouches, too?

Published: Dec 22, 2017
Length: 12 minutes (3,167 words)

How Food Can Be a Platform for Activism

Shakirah Simley | “How Food Can Be a Platform for Activism,” from Feed the Resistance: Recipes and Ideas for Getting Involved | October 2017 | 6 minutes (1,351 words)

Over the course of her career, chef and cookbook author Julia Turshen has made a habit of combining her passion for cooking with her desire to help. She’s volunteered at food pantries, with hunger relief initiatives, and with organizations like God’s Love We Deliver, which provides meal for people with HIV and AIDS. Still, she was a bit taken aback earlier this year when Callie McKenzie Jayne, a community organizer for the Kingston chapter of Citizen Action of New York, tapped Turshen to be “Food Team Leader” just upon meeting her. It didn’t take her long to get on board, though, and to then translate her new appointment into an opportunity to do what she does best: put together a book that’s about making the act of cooking healthy, delicious food easy and accessible to everyone. The result is Feed the Resistance: Recipes and Ideas for Getting Involved, which is equal parts cookbook, handbook for political action, and essay anthology. Proceeds from the book will be donated to the ACLU. Below is an excerpt by Nourish|Resist co-founder Shakirah Simley. — Sari Botton

Read more…

How Big Business Got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food

Longreads Pick

Companies like Nestlé and PepsiCo are aggressively marketing their processed food products in developing nations like Brazil and India. The result: a global epidemic of obesity-related illnesses, where instead of malnutrition and hunger, more people are now obese than underweight.

Published: Sep 16, 2017
Length: 18 minutes (4,553 words)