Long-form Food Writing: Journalism You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

Non-regional discussions Food in the news & other media
92

Gustavo Arellano would be a terrible choice for an editor for the LA Times.

As the editor of the OC Weekly, he showed a concerning disregard for facts. When readers pointed out errors in the published articles, he would attack those readers. At one point, he actually responded that he didn’t care about facts because he was all about the page clicks.

Print is in trouble, but the direction he tried to take the OC Weekly never made sense and probably led to it shutting down sooner by driving away long time readers. Who would’ve known that insulting and berating your long time readers was not a good idea?

He wasn’t a good editor; he was a professional troll.

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"Kindra Arnesen’s middle school was a plot of marsh a hundred yards off the southern coast of Louisiana. At 12, after her mother lost her job, Arnesen began skipping school to walk to the harbor in Buras, a town near the mouth of the Mississippi River. A dredge boat ferried her to Bay Adams, where she met a crew of oystermen. They gave her a flatboat, rubber boots, burlap sacks and a hatchet. With a rope looped around her waist, she trudged through the marsh, between the mud banks and the tufts of saw grass, tugging the boat behind her.

“It was just beautiful out there,” Arnesen says today. “Serenity.”

It wasn’t hard to find oysters then — they were everywhere. She bent into the water, yanked out a cluster, shook off the mud, tossed it in the boat. When the boat was full, she climbed onto it. She cleaned the oysters, hacking off debris and dead shells, and fed them into the sacks. By the end of the day, she would have filled 10, earning about $100, the cash placed in an envelope with her name written on it that she picked off the hood of the foreman’s truck. She supported her entire family, with enough left over for Girbauds jeans, Z Cavariccis high-waisted pants and white K-Swiss Classics.

After oyster season, she fished for mullet, shoveled ice at Wet Willie’s Seafood or worked the deck on shrimp boats that left after dark and returned at dawn. The summer she turned 14, she and a girlfriend unloaded 100-pound sacks for aging Vietnamese oystermen. The girls hauled as many as 800 a day, for a dollar a sack.

“As a young girl in a port town, a lot of bad stuff could’ve happened to me,” she says. “Instead of getting in trouble, I worked on an oyster boat. The men and women I worked with taught me to stick up for myself. They saved me from the big bad world.”

Arnesen has since devoted herself to protecting those fishermen from that big bad world. She now runs her own fishing business, bringing amberjack, mullet, pompano, sheepshead and shrimp to distributors that service restaurants in New Orleans and ship up the East Coast. Most days, when not at sea, she drives between Venice, the last town before the Mississippi emptied into the gulf, and New Orleans, about 90 minutes north, buying parts for her fleet, signing paperwork and unloading thousands of pounds of fish from the back of her Chevrolet Silverado 3500 pickup. She has nevertheless found the time to become one of the most prominent national advocates for gulf fishermen. Since the BP oil spill, she has attended just about every public meeting or legislative session concerning the future of the Louisiana fishing industry, which provides about a third of all seafood caught in the continental United States."

Climate change. Community. Re-engineering nature.
What is lost, what might be gained.

In addition to this article, I strongly recommend reading Elizabeth Rush’s “Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore.”

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94

Loved this column:

This is the first article I read by this guy. Is he on FTC?

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95

That was excellent, thanks for the link. I share an awful lot of this guy’s opinions. Broadly, I think people who “don’t want everything to be about politics” are lucky they have the luxury to ignore politics. Some don’t, since politics has an inescapable impact on their lives.

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96

“This idea of prison foods—mainly, “What is good enough?”—requires a fair bit of philosophical reconciling. Constitutional scholars have argued the extent to which prisoners’ rights are afforded ever since the 13th amendment was adopted: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” These terms leave a lot of leeway for interpretation when it comes to deciding what’s for dinner in lockup.

One argument is the inmates broke societal law and deserve to be here, thereby forfeiting their right to complain about the mushiness of food. Another is that taxpayers foot the bill, so if they don’t like the watery goulash, well, tough shit. The counterargument is that the $3.717 spent on each prisoner covers not only food costs, but labor, paper towels, and cleanup supplies, plus equipment repairs. At that price, you cannot possibly provide sustenance resembling anything a free citizen would deign to call food.

But is being fed poorly inhumane? Should criminals be deprived of any pleasure from food? Isn’t that counterproductive if the purpose of imprisonment is rehabilitation?

Prisoner advocacy organizations exist in every state, in the form of religious groups and the ACLU, but getting substantive legislative reform for prisoners’ rights is perhaps the steepest of uphill battles. For one, making the voting public empathize with criminals is a hard sell.”

Originally published in Lucky Peach

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I found this to be an intriguing read:

As a white woman, raised in a very rural (and blindingly white) community, this glimpse into a new(ish)-to-me world is much appreciated - and gives me a better understanding of discussion in the thread @hanhgry started:

(If people feel this belongs on the Boba/Bubble Tea thread, I’m glad to move it!)

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98

Thanks for the article, @ElsieDee!

I can relate to a lot of what is in that piece. I grew up in the diverse suburbs of Washington DC, but bubble tea shops didn’t become a thing until the mid-2000s, when I was in high school and college. I had heard of it and knew it was an “Asian thing” but first tried some random bubble tea place in high school and got hooked along with my other Asian (and non-Asian! friends). Of course when you’re 16 you can down all sorts of sugary stuff. When I got to college there was an abundance of boba shops everywhere-- I’m sure the large number of Asian international students had something to do with it. I have fond memories of sitting in the giant Ten Ren right off campus, studying (haha yeah, actually studying) with my friends and ordering snacks and boba for hours. And then introducing my then-boyfriend (now husband) to boba for the first time and being happy that he actually liked it instead of being weirded out by it. :slight_smile:

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99

"Really, aguachile is a roadmap to Sinaloa, a state whose name is often tied to the drug war and the larger-than-life dons who have become its bombastic, public face. Aguachile, Valle explained to me on my first visit to Don Vergas, began in the hills, where chiltepín still grows wild between plantations of poppy and cannabis, then drifted west toward the sea. Along the way, it touched Sinaloa’s disappearing indigenous traditions, centuries of mestizaje , cultural and economic ties to the United States, and two of the major industries — shrimp and agriculture — that drive the Sinaloan economy.

On my first visit to Don Vergas, in April 2018, Valle told me that if I wanted to try the “original-original” aguachile, we could go look for it together in Sinaloa — on what he would later call our “super mega mission.” I told him I would love to go, only half expecting it to happen, as he slid a plate of aguachile across the counter. Crystals of Maldon salt cracked between my molars. The chiltepín blazed a trail of heat across my tongue. I’d eaten plenty of aguachile before, I told him, but nothing quite like this.

“ Verga ,” he exhaled with a Cheshire smile, using the word that gives his restaurant its name. Translated literally, it means “mast” (as in a boat). In this context, it meant something more like “dude” or “no way”’ Sometimes, it means “cool” or “good;” sometimes it means “shitty.” Mostly, though, verga means “dick.”

“That’s because you’ve never been to Sinaloa.”"

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100

This is a quite unexpected and intriguing list.

“… a list of state-specific cuisines, each based on a longstanding diaspora (like Vietnamese food in Louisiana), an Indigenous community (Abenaki in Vermont), or something totally endemic (New Mexican in New Mexico). Our goal was to highlight a cuisine worth traveling to each state for, much of which you truly can’t get anywhere else. In some cases, it was so hard to choose that we included an honorable mention. At a time when much of the travel we’re doing is domestic and road-trip-based, it feels apt to celebrate America’s varied food cultures—and maybe even discover a little something about our home states along the way.“

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101

wow, so interesting!

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102

grin I had absolutely no idea about the history of aguachile, @aaqjr - as a veg, it’s not something I’ve eaten, but I see a lot of FTC folks talking about it so I had some idea of how it’s made/served now.

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Someday, @hanhgry, I shall venture into one of these bubble tea shops and try a glass of it: I am curious!

I love that there’s a whole culture/history around the shops - I hadn’t a clue!

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104

" New Orleans, as the old line goes, is a city of a thousand restaurants but only one menu. Its celebrated dishes—gumbo, jambalaya, catfish, crawfish étouffée, po’boy and muffuletta sandwiches, red beans and rice—are the products of a glorious culinary sfumato, blending the techniques and ingredients of Spanish and French colonizers, enslaved Africans and their free descendants, Italian immigrants, and Native Americans. The flavors are cayenne and black pepper, toasty roux, smoked meats, the slick deep-greenness of okra, the muscular brine wallop of a Gulf oyster. Perhaps more than anywhere else in the United States, New Orleans boasts its own rich regional culinary tradition, one that is integral to the city’s sense of itself—and famously resistant to change. “For three hundred years, it’s been kind of the same,” Emeril Lagasse, one of the most influential ambassadors of New Orleans gastronomy, lamented in an interview in 2000. “There are restaurants in New Orleans that the menu hasn’t changed in a hundred and twenty-five years, so how is one going to change or evolve the food?”

By the time the chef Nina Compton arrived in New Orleans, in 2015, the city’s cuisine was no longer so rigidly set in amber. What loosened it was one of the most catastrophic disasters in modern American history: the federal levee failures that followed Hurricane Katrina, in August of 2005, killing an estimated eighteen hundred and thirty-three people, displacing seven hundred and seventy thousand residents, and devastating entire neighborhoods. In the years after, as the city slowly recovered, an influx of outsiders arrived, drawn by cheap rents and by the romance of rebuilding. Among them was a new generation of chefs proudly cooking the foods of their places of origin. Before the storm, restaurants that cooked outside of the city’s Creole vernacular rarely landed on tourists’ must-visit lists. Now New Orleans was earning attention for new Middle Eastern and Latin American restaurants, farm-to-table cafés, a flurry of serious pizza joints. Compton’s first restaurant, Compère Lapin, opened in mid-2015, in a hotel in the city’s trendy Warehouse District, showcasing the food of the Caribbean, and of her native St. Lucia in particular: seafood pepper pot, cow-heel soup, jerk fish. Her dishes were threaded through with the islands’ smoke and spice and with the ambrosial sweetness of tropical fruit, but they also borrowed freely from France and Italy, the American South, and from the flavors of New Orleans itself."

History, New Orleans, BLM, Covid-19, Katrina …

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105

“Bic Camera looked like many of the other loud, brightly colored electronics stores I’d seen in Japan, just bigger. Mostly, it was a respite from the cold. The appliances and electronics that jammed its interior gave no indication of its dizzyingly good liquor selection, nor did the many inexpensive aged Japanese whiskies hint that affordable bottles were about to become a thing of the past, or that I’d nurture a profound remorse once they did. When I found Bic Camera’s wholly unexpected liquor department, I lifted two bottles of high-end Japanese whisky from the shelf, wandered the aisles studying the labels, had a baffling interaction with a clerk, and put the bottles back on the shelf. All I had to do was pay for them. I didn’t.

Commercial Japanese whisky has been around since at least 1929, so during my first trip to Japan (and at home in the U.S.), there was no reason to think that all the aged Japanese whiskies that were readily available in the early 2000s would soon achieve holy grail status. In 2007, there were $100 bottles of Yamazaki 18-year sitting forlornly on a shelf at my local BevMo. One bottle now sells for more than $400 at online auctions; some online stores sell them for $700.

Yoichi 10, Yoichi 12, Hibiki 17 and 21, Taketsuru 12 and 17 — in 2014, rare and discontinued bottles lined store shelves, reasonably priced compared to their current $300 to $600 price tags. Those were great years. I call them BTB — before the boom. Before the boom, a bottle of Yamazaki 12 cost $60. After the boom, a Seattle liquor store priced their last bottle of Yamazaki 12 at $225. Before the boom, Taketsuru 12 cost $20 in Japan and $70 in the States. After the boom, online auctions sell bottles for more than $220.

Before the boom, Karuizawa casks sat, dusty and abandoned, in shuttered distilleries. After the boom, a bottle of Karuizawa 1964 sold for $118,420, the most expensive Japanese whisky ever sold at auction, until a Yamazaki 50 sold for $129,186 the following year, then another went for $343,000 15 months later.

Before the boom, whisky tasted of rich red fruits and cereal grains. After the boom, it tasted of regret.”

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106

So i guess this falls in the category of future long term food writing! But i thought of you follow this thread it might interest you :slight_smile:

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107

“The meal cost $400 and came with rules. No. 1: No using cellphones, except to document the dinner and the chefs preparing it. “Please do the Instagram, the Facebook, the Twitter; give me the fame, I need the fame,” said Gaggan Anand, whose restaurant bore the same name. Clad in black, with a booming voice that suited his hulking figure, he stalked between a vast kitchen island and an L-shaped table for 14. “Those of you with good cameras, if you can take a photo of me scratching my ass, you get a bottle of Champagne.”

Rule No. 2: “If this is on your ‘Things to Do in Bangkok’ list, you’re in the wrong restaurant.” Anand wore his hair in a messy bun; he sounded like a principal scolding a group of wayward adolescents. “If you are here to judge me, you are in the superwrong restaurant, because we are [expletive] judging you.” He went on: “This is not a, what do you call it?” — his fingers curled into air quotes — “ ‘fine-dining experience.’”

More rules preceded each dish. (There would be 25.) No smoke breaks. “I’m not antismoking,” he said, “but my nose is very particular, and your smoke will change my nose.” Limits on trips to the bathroom. “The first hour is all belted in,” he said. “After that, we will not give toilet breaks” — the meal would last the usual five hours — “but if you have to, just go quickly and come back. Think of this as a nonsmoking flight with no Wi-Fi, no network, and it’s an Indian airline, so nothing works and it’s very turbulent. You might be crashing soon, so you’d better enjoy.””

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108

Thank you, @aaqjr! I had read about this project in Australia - no idea where or how I stumbled on it - hadn’t heard it was coming to LA!

According to the site, Kato is the first restaurant in the series; needs 100 orders to print and details are here:

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109

Nice! and I love that Ken from Now Serving is picking the places. Such a nerve wracking way to finance a book but hopefully that means we’ll get a good diversity of content.

22$ I didn’t realize the price was so reasonable. I was on the fence about getting one but at that price point it’s worth it for me

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110

“Randy Shields looked out at a sea of cattle at the sprawling Wrangler Feedyard — 46,000 animals milling about in the dry Panhandle air as a feed truck swept by on its way to their pens.

Mr. Shields, who manages the yard for Cactus Feeders, knows that at its most basic, the business simply takes something that people can’t eat, and converts it into something they can: beef. That’s possible because cattle have a multichambered stomach where microbes ferment grass and other tough fibrous vegetation, making it digestible.

“The way I look at it, I’ve got 46,000 fermentation vats going out there,” Mr. Shields said.

But this process, called enteric fermentation, also produces methane, a potent planet-warming gas that the cattle mostly belch into the air. And with about 95 million cattle in the United States, including more than 25 million that are fattened for slaughter each year at feedlots, the methane adds up.”

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doesn’t really belong here but didn’t know where to put it

I enjoyed the two recipe club episodes he did on the the Dave Chang show. Hopefully it holds up to weekly content, especially since he’s doing two other episodes a week for DCS.

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