Definitely trying one of those next time I’m in France, even if they’re diectétiquement incorrect.
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Different types of truffle, different dangers involved in gathering, and a long history:
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At the H Mart on Broadway at 110th Street in Manhattan, the lights are bright on the singo pears, round as apples and kept snug in white mesh, so their skin won’t bruise. Here are radishes in hot pink and winter white, gnarled ginseng grown in Wisconsin, broad perilla leaves with notched edges, and almost every kind of Asian green: yu choy, bok choy, ong choy, hon choy, aa choy, wawa choy, gai lan, sook got.
The theme is abundance — chiles from fat little thumbs to witchy fingers, bulk bins of fish balls, live lobsters brooding in blue tanks, a library of tofu. Cuckoo rice cookers gleam from the shelves like a showroom of Aston Martins. Customers fill baskets with wands of lemongrass, dried silvery anchovies, shrimp chips and Wagyu beef sliced into delicate petals.
For decades in America, this kind of shopping was a pilgrimage. Asian-Americans couldn’t just pop into the local Kroger or Piggly Wiggly for a bottle of fish sauce. To make the foods of their heritage, they often had to seek out the lone Asian grocery in town, which was salvation — even if cramped and dingy, with scuffed linoleum underfoot and bags of rice slumped in a corner.
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Nice piece.
The introduction sort of gives the impression that H Mart and Mitsuwa are pan-Asian, like 99 Ranch, which isn’t at all true for the ones I’ve visited.
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A relevant topic when a restaurant has just opened with a menu category called “The Golden Experience”.
Famine, Affluence, and Morality
by Peter Singer, 1972
This is not commentary on any user here. Just food for thought and an invitation for further discussion if anyone is interested.
Edit: Here is a popular opposing point of view from John Kekes:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3752161?seq=1
He had kind of a narrow focus there.
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Feel free to substitute the East Bengal situation for your crisis du jour.
Thanks for sending the Ginsberg song (poem?). I hadn’t heard it before.
Kind of a bizarre amount of detail in this story (supposedly for subscribers only). The weirdest part to me is not that the exaggerated his role in the development of Flamin’ Hot products but that they’re making a movie about it.
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https://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/features/the-famous-recipe/
the author discovers a cookbook with a recipe supposedly written by his mother, but his mom never cooked a day in her life.
both deeply funny and profoundly sad, we get a real picture of the author’s mom as a woman trapped by culture and class.
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a beautiful memoir piece about growing up in america to the parents of recent immigrants and reconciling those two different cultures. specifically about the child’s desire to fit in and eat the food of their new country no matter how strange or confusing it is for the parents.
“My mother will lift out fat squares of the casserole, the fine strings of cheese banding across the table; I scissor them with my fingers and flinch at the tiny-striped burn. We feast. Only my sister can eat just one. Who cares that it’s too rich for us to handle, who cares that our family affliction of mild lactose intolerance will surely lead to guffaws and antic hand-fanning during the Friday-night repeat of the “Million Dollar Movie.” Here is the meal we’ve been working toward, yearning for. Here is the unlikely shape of our life together—this ruddy pie, what we have today and forever.”
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a harrowing article about a “jail diversion program” that was just a program to send slaves to process chickens.
most of us don’t think enough about the implications of our food systems, about the costs of cheap food. this article really shows the intersection between food, profit and criminal justice and it ain’t pretty.
" Men in the CAAIR program said their hands became gnarled after days spent hanging thousands of chickens from metal shackles. One man said he was burned with acid while hosing down a trailer. Others were maimed by machines or contracted serious bacterial infections.
Those who were hurt and could no longer work often were kicked out of CAAIR and sent to prison, court records show. Most men worked through the pain, fearing the same fate.
‘They work you to death. They work you every single day,’ said Nate Turner, who graduated from CAAIR in 2015. 'It’s a work camp. They know people are desperate to get out of jail, and they’ll do whatever they can do to stay out of prison.”
A lot of similar memories for me growing up. Flash backs. I’ve read all of Chang Rae Lee’s novels. He is an excellent writer.
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an idyllic article about a winemaker with a wild vineyard who buries their wine in the ground and lets it ferment naturally.
after reading this I had a short term mania about tearing up my backyard and devoting it to grapes.
That’s disgusting
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Good lord, that was about 5X as long as it needed to be.
What do you find disgusting? Lots of wineries do basically the same thing only on a larger scale with vats and cellars.
I was responding to his rehab scam post
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I like it