Search Results for: food

A Woman’s Search for Salvation, Love, and Family

Women reading the Holy Bible., reading a book.,reading

In a vivid personal essay for Kweli Journal, author Jodi M. Savage writes about growing up in New York City with her Pentecostal evangelist grandmother. The church gives their family a community to belong to and allows the narrator’s grandmother to build a life of leadership and influence.  But it could also be stifling and punishing for the women of its congregation. The author figures out how to honor her grandmother’s memory while bearing witness to the church’s limitations.

Granny raised me on mustard greens, hot water cornbread, and a super-sized portion of Jesus. Although I mastered the Rubik’s cube of rules for sanctified living, religion robbed me of my voice and left shame in its place. You could say that it all started with my teenage neighbor Bobby.

When I was a kid, I let Bobby paint my fingernails red. I knew it was a sin by Pentecostal standards, but my nails looked so pretty and shiny in the sunlight. A few days later, our street had our annual block party. Everyone had moved their cars off our Brooklyn street that morning; one end was blocked off with a Cutlass Supreme and the other with a Nissan Maxima. We played in the street all day until late into the night—volleyball, tag, double Dutch, hide-and-seek. Folks played spades and dominoes on the sidewalks; roamed from yard to yard sampling each other’s food; and blasted reggae, reggaeton, old school R&B, and hip hop from speakers all at the same time.

As I played across the street from my house, Bobby barreled into me on his bike. His front wheel and handlebars collided with my groin and stomach, sending me flying several feet away. I limped home to tell Granny what happened. She suddenly noticed my red fingernails for the first time. Again, we were Pentecostal, which meant we weren’t allowed to wear fingernail polish. Anything red was considered to be a special kind of sinful—carnality of the whorish variety. Instead of consoling me, Granny whipped me with an extension cord. That was the day I learned that one’s own pain is secondary to religious dogma. I learned to keep quiet when people hurt me, or else risk punishment for revealing something far worse—something sinful.

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A Frustrating Year of Reporting on Black Maternal Health

Danielle Jackson | Longreads | June 2018 |3370 words (14 minutes)

“It’s in fashion to talk about black women’s maternal care,” Bilen Berhanu, a Brooklyn-based full-spectrum birth doula told me recently. I’d asked her about the outpouring of news stories, from multiple national outlets, about infant and maternal mortality over the past twelve months.

The reporting has added flesh and aching detail to what I’ve come to think of as an embarrassing public health crisis in the United States. Among industrialized countries, our nation has the highest rate of infant deaths. We’ve had dramatic declines since 1960, but we have not kept pace with other nations we’d consider peers. New American moms face similar danger: The rate of maternal mortality in the U.S. has been rising since 2000 while falling for most other nations in our subset.

Deep, persistent inequality — access to safe neighborhoods and hospitals, functioning schools, healthy food — plays a part. But across family income levels and educational attainment, the infant mortality rate for black babies is more than twice than it is for whites, according to data from 2007-2013. Black mothers are also more imperiled than white ones — they are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes leading up to or within a year after giving birth. In New York City, black mothers are 12 times more likely to die than their white counterparts. Read more…

Anthony Bourdain and the Missing Piece

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Ian Frisch | Longreads | June 2018 | 7 minutes (1,683 words)

Ludlow House, a members-only club in the Lower East Side, is a catacomb of various bars, lounges, parlors, and restaurants. That night, the place was packed. I followed my friend Doug, a magician, from floor to floor, trying to find a place to sit. I had become used to Doug’s spontaneous offerings to go to fancy places — rooftop bars, underground speakeasies, esoteric clubs — and knew, whenever we went out, he couldn’t help but perform some magic to people we ran into. I learned quickly that, when you’re with magicians, something memorable is bound to happen.

There wasn’t a chair open in the house. Clusters of women in leather pants and high heels noshed on appetizers, finance bros in double-breasted suits sipped Manhattans, and rocker cliques in skin-tight jeans and chunky boots lounged in suede armchairs and on leather couches. Music rumbled through the building and waiters scurried about. There were four of us — Doug, myself, and our friends Chris and Xavior, also talented magicians —and, after some more scouring, we finally spotted a small couch with two tables occupied only by two middle-aged women.

“We are waiting for a couple friends,” the women told Doug when he asked if we could sit with them. They must’ve been in their early 50s, well-dressed in that Madison Avenue type of way, their shoulders wrapped in sleek sweaters, legs sporting long skirts and leather boots, with fur-lined coats draped over the spine of the couch.

“We’re just going to sit on this side. We’ll find another chair,” Doug reassured them, waving for us to sit down. We crowded around the small table, on the butt-end of the couch, and ordered a round of drinks. We all took out a deck of cards, eager to fiddle a bit. A few minutes after our drinks came, two men walked over to our couch and the women stood up to greet them—a peck on each cheek, hands resting on their shoulders. Both guys had a full head of silver hair, short but swept back, with a glowing tan, as if they’d just gotten back from somewhere tropical. One guy was shorter and more full in the face than his counterpart, who was lithe and sinewy, dressed in black. The taller man took off his suit jacket, revealing a shallow, v-necked T-shirt underneath. Tattoos fell down his arms.

It was Anthony Bourdain. He had rolled in with restaurateur and fellow television personality Eric Ripert, the owner of Le Bernardin. My friends and I looked at each other and smiled. Read more…

Fairy Scapegoats: A History of the Persecution of Changeling Children

A Glimpse of the Fairies by Charles Hutton Lear/Getty Images

Richard Sugg | Fairies: A Dangerous History | Reaktion Books | June 2018 | 19 minutes (4,969 words)

Fairies were dangerous. Not to believe in them was dangerous. Not to respect them or take them seriously was dangerous — hence all the carefully euphemistic or indirect names one used in speaking of them, from “the Gentry” to “the Good People,” “Themselves,” “the fair folk” and “the people of peace” through to the charming Welsh phrase bendith û mamme, or “such as have deserved their mother’s blessing.” Fairies stole your children. They made you or your animals sick, sometimes unto death. They could draw the life, or essence, out of anything, from milk or butter through to people. Their powers, as we have seen, were almost limitless, not only demonic but even godlike in scale and scope.

While ordinary people still believed this less than a century ago, the educated had also believed it in the era of the witch persecutions. Witches did these kinds of thing, and fairies or fairyland were quite often referenced in their trials. Although Joan of Arc was tried as a heretic, rather than a witch, the latter association naturally clung to such an unusual woman, and it is notable that in 1431 her interrogators took an interest in the “fairy tree” around which Joan had played in her childhood in Domrémy. In the Protestant camp, Calvin later emphasized how “the Devil works strange illusions by fairies and satyrs.” In early modern Sicily one distinct type of witch was the female “fairy doctor,” the phrase donna di fuori (“woman from outside”) meaning either “fairy” or “fairy doctor.” Here Inquisitors encouraged people, including suspected witches, to equate fairy and witch beliefs. In 1587 they were especially interested in one Laura di Pavia, a poor fisherman’s wife who claimed to have flown to fairyland in Benevento, Kingdom of Naples. Read more…

Could South Africa’s Drought Help Deconstruct the Divisions of Apartheid?

Photo by Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor

Lately, we read a lot about the wealthy one percent building bunkers and buying land to insulate themselves from future natural disasters. But natural disasters can also level people in different socio-economic classes, because when you’re clawing your way out of rubble after an earthquake or scavenging for food, it doesn’t matter if your Bill Gates or Bill from around the way.

For the Huffpost’s Highline, Eve Fairbanks takes us to drought-stricken Cape Town, South Africa, where the white elite and residents of poor townships have taken austerity measures: washing dishes in recycled water; letting bodies go unshowered; even leaving turds in the bowl to reduce the number of flushes. Fairbanks talks with government officials, visits a spring and stays in a friend’s water-wise apartment to make sense of the drought’s effects. One surprising effect: By undermining the ability to have a pool, a long shower, a vast decorative yard, and deconstructing what Fairbanks calls the “infrastructure of privilege,” the drought has forged alliances between many white and black Cape Town residents. What remains to be seen is whether this expanded Cape Town community will last once the drought ends.

After the coming of democracy, though, both rich and middle-class South Africans did build fortresses: high, spike-topped walls went up around houses. Many of these houses don’t even have a bell, discouraging unknown visitors. Instead, they display ominous plaques depicting a skull or the name of the security company the owners have paid to answer their panic buttons with teams wielding guns.

Spend even a little time with the wealthy or white, though, and you’ll understand how aware they are that such fortresses can’t—or even shouldn’t—hold. One friend of mine near Johannesburg mused to me recently that both he and his wife know “deep down” that white people in South Africa “got away with” hundreds of years of injustice. His wife almost never admits this, or reveals any ambivalence about their four-bedroom house and self-isolating lifestyle, for fear of making herself “a target for retribution”: In other words, that ceasing to defend the goodness and justice of the white lifestyle might legitimize crime against whites or the expropriation of their land. Privately, my friend suspects “the opposite”—that keeping mum and apart is what inflames black anger. His wife’s view generally wins out, as it seems the more prudent. But what if there were a nature-made excuse to tear down those walls and try out a different kind of life? Would it really be so bad?

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For Me, With Love and Squalor

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Lauren Markham | Longreads | June 2018 | 23 minutes (5,790 words)

One recent day, when it was raining and I was feeling particularly blue, I decided to visit my local bookstore. Though bookstores were once among my favorite places to spend time, ever since my own book was published eight months ago, trips into bookstores have mutated into sordid affairs. I’ll walk in the door, feign cool, casual, just your average browser, then drift over to the shelves in the way someone might sidle up to the bar with a good-looking mark in sight. I’m not really browsing, not just refilling my drink — I’m searching, quite shamefully, for my own book on the shelves.

When it’s there, with its beaming burnt-orange cover jammed somewhere near Norman Mailer, Stephane Mallarme, Katherine Mansfield, Javier Marías, I feel a blush of glee. But more often than not, it’s not on the shelves at all.

It turns out that just because you wrote a book doesn’t mean the bookstores will sell it. No matter what accolades my book has received, each visit to the bookstore feels a new test of my book’s worth — and my own.

That rainy day, I was sure that finding my book on the shelves would release me from my blueness. On the other hand, in the likely event that my book wasn’t there, I would have permission to sink lower, reclining into the indigo bleak. I stepped inside the store, delivering flecks of rain onto the floor. As I suspected — as I feared — my book was nowhere to be found. Read more…

Cheese and Macaroni Do Not a Mac and Cheese Make

Photo by Steven Guzzardi (CC BY-ND 2.0)

People of a certain age might remember a distinctly late-nineties and early-aughts culinary fad: the fancy mac and cheese. It involved taking a cheap, slightly embarrassing, nostalgia-laced standby of industrialized 20th-century food, and mixing in a couple of common-denominator markers of luxury, like lobster meat or truffle oil. (Yes — the truffled-lobster mac and cheese was a thing. I lived to tell the tale.)

As veteran cheesemonger and food writer Gordon Edgar shows in his Zocalo essay, macaroni and cheese is an American staple with a history that stretches back to colonial times. As such, it repeatedly finds itself in contested territory. Who does it belong to? How (and through whose labor) did it become, well, mac and cheese? And how far can you stretch and — Food-Network-speak alert — “elevate” it before it stops being itself?

Being a judge at a macaroni and cheese competition in San Francisco taught me a lot about American food. The competitors were mostly chefs, and the audience—the online tickets sold out in minutes—was soaking up the chance to be at a “Top Chef” kind of event, but more urban and cool. The judges included a food writer, an award-winning grilled-cheese-maker, and me, a cheesemonger.

We awarded the win to a chef who made mac and cheese with an aged Vermont cheddar. The audience, however, chose another contestant. When he arrived at the winner’s circle, he made a stunning announcement: His main ingredient was Velveeta.

Amazement! Shock! Betrayal! The audience clutched their ironic canned beer but didn’t quite know how to react. Was it a hoax? A working-class prank against elitism in food? Was this contest somehow rigged by Kraft? In the end it turned out to just be a financial decision by the chef: In great American tradition, he bought the cheapest protein possible.

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We Are Scientists

(AP Photo/Saurabh Das)

Kirtan NautiyalBoulevard | Spring 2018 | 25 minutes (6,903 words)

In 1969, my father traveled alone from India to Boston so that he could enroll in the master’s program in geophysics at MIT.

I don’t know whether he flew or came by boat, so when I try to picture him setting foot in America for the first time, I don’t know what to imagine. I’ve tried to find the photographic evidence, but there aren’t any pictures of the fifteen years he spent in this country before he married my mother. Maybe he just threw out the tattered albums when we were moving between houses, but it’s more likely that he never took any photos at all. He’s never been a sentimental man.

I also don’t know why he chose to come in the first place. He has never had any great fascination with money; despite his making a good living, we lived in shabby rentals for most of my childhood, and my mother shopped for us from department store discount racks. I never felt that professional success was what he was after either. He never advanced past middle management, and except for one late-night discussion in which he made clear that he felt there was a glass ceiling for people with our skin color, I never heard one word of frustration from him about work. Maybe it was to help his family – along with his brother who came to Kansas State University earlier in the 1960s, he supported his parents in India for years with the money he earned. When trying to make us feel guilty about our second-generation lassitude, which is often, he tells us of how at MIT he had to work all hours of the night in the cafeteria and library while keeping up a full courseload, so maybe we need to be a little more appreciative that he helped with the room and board during our own time in college. Read more…

Exodus in the Ozarks

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Pam Mandel | Longreads | June 2018 | 10 minutes (2,441 words)

 

“Well, what are you doing all the way out…here? How’d you find this place?”

The question wasn’t fair. Billygail’s Cafe is only ten miles outside Branson, Missouri. Sure, it’s on a country road, and sure, it feels like you’ve found something special, but it’s listed on Trip Advisor and USA Today and showed up on an episode Man vs. Food on the Travel Channel. Use Yelp to find breakfast while you’re in Branson and you’ll get Billygail’s.

The real question was not what I was doing at Billygail’s. The answer to that was easy: I was there to muscle my way through a gorgeous 14-inch plate-obscuring sourdough pancake. The bigger question was, what was I doing in Branson?

The short answer is I was in Branson for a conference and to see a place I’d never been before. There’s little I like more than going somewhere new and finding out I’m wrong about it — and for a writer, no surer way to find a great story. My previous exposure to Branson was limited to a 1996 episode of The Simpsons. Bart, Milhouse, Nelson, and Martin take a road trip, detouring through Branson to catch a performance by Nelson’s unlikely hero, Andy Williams. I didn’t buy the Simpson’s vision wholesale. I looked at Google, too, and found plenty of references to the show scene — and to country music. I’d baked extra time in my trip to explore — and to catch at least one country music show.

“Yeah, you could do that,” said the conference organizer who helped me plan my travel. “And yeah, there’s music here, but there’s this… other thing.” She pointed me to the website for Sight and Sound, a 2000 seat theater that stages multimedia spectacles based in the Bible. The current production? Moses.

A bad West coast Jew, I know little of my inherited theology. But like many of my Jewish friends and family, I know three or four things about the story of Moses — kind of the cornerstone story of the Jewish faith. Plus, Passover — the holiday where we eat matzoh ball soup and recount how Moses led “the chosen people” out of Egypt into the Promised Land — happens to be my favorite holiday. So, while Dolly’s Stampede is the most popular attraction in Branson, and there’s plenty of wholesome country western cabaret, I couldn’t resist this opulent retelling of the history of the Jewish people.

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A Vor Never Sleeps

Garrett M. Graff | Longreads | June 2018 | 20 minutes (5,086 words)

Razhden Shulaya maintained a diverse business empire, like a Warren Buffet of crime. By age 40, from his base in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, he had a cigarette smuggling operation, a drug ring, a counterfeit credit card scheme, an extortion racket, an illegal gambling establishment, and teams devoted to hacking slot machines. According to prosecutors who have been building a case against him, Shulaya’s associates provided gun-running, kidnap-for-hire, and the fencing of stolen jewelry. Plans were in place for what authorities came to call the “romance scam”: use an attractive woman to lure a target down to Atlantic City, knock him out with chloroform, and steal his money. They’d take his Rolex, too.

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