Food Essays

The COVID pandemic propelled many people to change their lives in ways large and small. Some adopted puppies. Others stress-baked. Peggy Orenstein, a lifelong knitter, went just a little further. To keep herself engaged and cope with a series of seismic shifts in family life, she set out to make a garment from the ground up: learning to shear sheep, spin and dye yarn, then knitting herself a sweater.

Why do we cook? Is it just to feed ourselves and others? Or is there something more revolutionary going on? In Small Fires, Rebecca May Johnson reinvents cooking—that simple act of rolling up our sleeves, wielding a knife, spattering red hot sauce on our books—as a way of experiencing ourselves and the world. Cooking is thinking: about the liberating constraint of tying apron strings; the transformative dynamics of shared meals; the meaning of appetite and bodily pleasure; the wild subversiveness of the recipe, beyond words or control.

Mark Kurlansky, winner of the James Beard Award for Excellence in Food Writing, leads us on a mouthwatering culinary tour around the world and through history and culture from the fifth century B.C. to the present day. This wonderful collection contains essays by Plato on the art of cooking, Pablo Neruda on french fries, and many other writers on the passions of cuisine.

"In almost any culture, at any time, you can find food writing,” writes guest editor Mark Bittman in his introduction. “Food means growing and hardship, and health and medicine, and work and holiday. In its abundance it is a gift and a joy, and in its absence a curse and a tragedy. If a culture has writing, that culture has food writing.” The stories in this year’s Best American Food Writing are brilliant, eye-opening windows into the heart of our country’s culture.

Ed Balls was just three weeks old when he tried his first meal: pureed roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. While perhaps ill-advised by modern weaning standards, it worked for him in 1967, and from that moment on, he was hooked on food. Appetite is a memoir with a twist: part autobiography, part cookbook, each chapter is a recipe that tells a story. Ed was taught to cook by his mother, and now he’s passing these recipes on to his own children as they start to fly the nest. Sitting round the table every year, the world around us may change, but great recipes last a lifetime.

As consumers become increasingly aware of the animal agriculture industry’s cruelty and environmental devastation, clever industry marketers are adapting with alternative “humane” and “sustainable” labeling and marketing campaigns. In the absence of accurate information, it has never been more important to educate people on the realities behind the industry lies, and people are hungry for the truth.