Search Results for: food

She Was a Soul Food Sensation. Then, 19 Years Ago, She Disappeared.

Longreads Pick

From the 1960s through the 1990s, Princess Pamela ran a thriving word-of-mouth restaurant inside her Manhattan apartment, and it attracted enough taste-makers to make her a legend. Then she abruptly closed shop and disappeared. Like many black culinary figures, her memory was nearly lost, until white celebrity chefs used their influence to revive it.

 

Author: Mayukh Sen
Source: Food52
Published: Feb 2, 2017
Length: 15 minutes (3,919 words)

Phones Over Food: Why Mobile Phones Are More Important to Refugees

Photo by MONUSCO Photos (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Economist reports on how refugees prize mobile phone connection — even over food. Phones are their primary way to stay connected with family at home as they enter “informational no-man’s land,” not knowing who to trust or where to go. Phones help them stay motivated with photos of family and successful migrants, and offer a means to contact smugglers to help them with their journey.

Sometimes Hekmatullah, a 32-year-old Afghan, has to choose between food and connectivity. “I need to stay in touch with my wife back home,” he says, sitting in a grubby tent in the Oinofyta migrant camp, near Athens. Because Wi-Fi rarely works there, he has to buy mobile-phone credit. And that means he and his fellow travellers—his sister, her friend and five children—sometimes go hungry.

Such stories are common in migrant camps: according to UNHCR, the UN’s agency for refugees, refugees can easily spend a third of their disposable income on staying connected. In a camp near the French city of Dunkirk, where mostly Iraqi refugees live until they manage to get on a truck to Britain, many walk for miles to find free Wi-Fi: according to NGOs working there, the French authorities, reluctant to make the camp seem permanent, have stopped them providing internet connections.

Phones become a lifeline. Their importance goes well beyond staying in touch with people back home. They bring news and pictures of friends and family who have reached their destination, thereby motivating more migrants to set out. They are used for researching journeys and contacting people-smugglers. Any rumour of a new, or easier, route spreads like wildfire. “It’s like the underground railroad, only that it’s digital,” says Maurice Stierl of Watch The Med, an NGO that tracks the deaths and hardships of migrants who cross the Mediterranean, referring to the secret routes and safe houses used to free American slaves in the 19th century.

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You Are What You Eat, Or, Haruki Murakami on Food As a Reflection of the Self

Photo by Katrin Gilger (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At The Awl, Elaheh Nozari explores food in the work of Haruki Murakami: how food not only offers comfort and nutrition, but about how what we eat speaks to our emotional state and who we are as people.

For Murakami, how we eat is a reflection of ourselves. In 1Q84, The Dowager is a wealthy septuagenarian widow who eats natural ingredients and French-influenced lunches like “boiled white asparagus, salad Niçoise, and a crabmeat omelet.” She eats small portions and drinks her tea, “like a fairy deep in the forest sipping a life-giving morning dew.” You get the sense from her diet and table manners not only that she’s well-bred and refined, but almost enlightened. Compare her to Ushikawa, a sleazy lawyer-turned-private-investigator whose family left him and who has no life outside of stalking people under the guise of work. He’s a self-loathing scumbag and he eats like one, too. Where the Dowager eats fresh vegetables, Ushikawa eats processed food like canned peaches and sweet jam buns, and goes days without having a hot meal. The Dowager treats her body like a temple, Ushikawa treats his like a garbage disposal. She is at peace with herself, he is not.

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Haruki Murakami’s Metaphysics Of Food

Longreads Pick

Elaheh Nozari explores food in the work of Haruki Murakami: how food not only offers comfort and nutrition, but about how what we eat speaks to our emotional state and who we are as people.

Source: The Awl
Published: Feb 3, 2017
Length: 9 minutes (2,264 words)

Longreads Best of 2016: Food Writing

Longreads Pick

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

Author: Editors
Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 16, 2016

Longreads Best of 2016: Food Writing

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

* * *

Rachel Khong
Former executive editor at Lucky Peach magazine; author of the novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, forthcoming in July 2017, and the cookbook, All About Eggs.

Citizen Khan (Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker)

I would read anything by Kathryn Schulz, and this story makes a perfect case why. Ostensibly it’s the story of a man named Zarif Khan, who in 1909 found his way to Wyoming from the Khyber Pass, and made a name for himself selling tamales (the name: “Hot Tamale Louie”). Khan was a recognizably curmudgeonly chef (God forbid you put ketchup on his burgers!) of the sort writers reliably profile today. But “profile” doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what this goosebump-inducing story is. Woven into this tale are captivating tangents—about Wyoming’s inclusive beginnings, the various histories of naturalization (and denaturalization), tamales, and Muslims in this country (a history that goes back so much further than Trump would have you believe)—that turn out not to be tangents at all: the heart of this story about tamales and burgers is a story about America, and the immigrants that make it. In Schulz’s hands it’s skilled and quietly hilarious. The story felt fitting when it was published in June; it feels even more essential now.

At Tampa Bay Farm-to-Table Restaurants, You’re Being Fed Fiction (Laura Reiley, Tampa Bay Times)

I read this story about food fraud slack-jawed. Laura Reiley’s basic premise is this: when you go to a restaurant advertising “local” or “farm to table,” it’s not only possible but highly likely(!) you’re being lied to. Years of working in restaurant criticism made Reiley rightly skeptical of menu claims, and suspicious that more was afoot than frozen cakes passed off as homemade. For her story she systematically investigates restaurants in the Tampa area that make declarations about their ingredients—sometimes embarrassingly high-mindedly—that they don’t exactly see through. A lot impresses me here, like Reiley’s persistence, guts, attentiveness, commitment, and spy moves (she kept ziptop baggies her purse to secrete away fish to lab-test later). The piece’s focus is on restaurants in Tampa, but it makes a broader statement about our convoluted food supply chains, and what it means to be an eater and consumer living in our increasingly weird world. Read more…

Big Food Strikes Back

Longreads Pick

Michael Pollan chronicles the Obamas’ promising early attempts to reform America’s industrial agricultural complex, the ways Big Foods’ lobbying muscle and money impeded progress, and America’s food movement needs to build a powerful presence in Washington.

Published: Oct 5, 2016
Length: 23 minutes (5,796 words)

Solving Climate Change With Beer From Patagonia’s Food Startup

Longreads Pick

The founder of the outdoor apparel company talks about its line of food, Patagonia Provisions, and their vision of sustainable, regenerative agriculture using a new food crop and wild grain called Kernza.

Source: Bloomberg
Published: Oct 3, 2016
Length: 18 minutes (4,630 words)