Food Essays

From cameraman to chef, musician to food scientist, Alton Brown has had a diverse and remarkable career. His work on the Food Network, including creating Good Eats and hosting Iron Chef America and Cutthroat Kitchen, has resonated with countless viewers and home cooks. Now, he shares exactly what’s on his mind, mixing compelling anecdotes from his personal and professional life with in-depth observations on the culinary world, film, personal style, defining meals of his lifetime, and much more.

Culinary creator, writer and community advocate, Sohla El-Waylly selects the best twenty articles published in 2021 that celebrate the many innovative, comforting, mouthwatering, and culturally rich culinary offerings of our country.

A is for Aronia, berry member of the apple family, clothes-stainer, super-fruit with reputed healing power. D is for Durian, endowed with a dramatic rind and a shifting odor - peaches, old garlic. M is for Medlar, name-checked by Shakespeare for its crude shape, beloved by gardeners for its flowers. In this work of unique invention, these and other difficult fruits serve as the central ingredients of 26 lyrical essays that range from deeply personal to botanical, from culinary to medical, from humorous to philosophical.

For Diana Henry's many fans, her evocative writing about places, people and food brings just as much pleasure as her delicious recipes. Around the Table is a selection of some of Diana's very best essays, handpicked from over two decades of her beloved cookbooks. This vivid and nourishing collection of essays on the joys of good food is an utter delight for the senses.

In Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein recounts her struggle with disordered eating alongside the stories of other women: historical figures, pop culture celebrities, and the girls she’s known and loved. Through the story of her own sickness, the raw recollections of interview subjects, and dispatches from social media rabbit holes, Clein challenges stereotypes and renders statistics and science deeply personal and urgent.

Now more than ever, the lure of Nordic lifestyles demand engagement from thoughtful consumers. This updated edition contains additional content and commentary curated by alert, astute observers of the Nordic scene

A classic of reportage, Oranges was first conceived as a magazine article, but John McPhee kept encountering so much irresistible information that he wrote a book. It is perhaps the last word on the subject (the first came in 500 BC and is attributed to Confucius). McPhee writes about the botany, history, and industry of oranges, from the great orangeries of European monarchs to a fascinating profile of Ben Hill Griffin of Frostproof, Florida, who may be the last of the individual orange barons.

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.

A mouthwatering testament to the healing power of food, My Place at the Table is a moving coming-of-age story of how a gay man emerges from a wounding childhood, discovers himself, and finds love. Published here for the first time is Lobrano’s “little black book,” an insider’s guide to his thirty all-time-favorite Paris restaurants.

Classification essay about the five primary food groups vegetables, fruits, grains, proteins, and dairy.

Exploring issues from the #MeToo movement, gender bias in division of labor and the workplace, and the underrepresentation of women of color in leadership, to cultural trends including food and travel shows, the intersection of fashion and food, and the evolution of food writing in the last few decades, Women on Food brings together food's most vital female voices.

"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.

Everyone knows the parlor game question asked of every chef and food personality in countless interviews: What is the last meal you'd want to eat before you die? But what does it look like when you pose the question to bartenders? In Last Call, James Beard Award-winning author Brad Thomas Parsons gathers the intriguing responses from a diverse range of bartenders around the country.

The Yummish Faith is a small, but growing movement. You may have noticed Yummish people in your community – holding hands, eating ice cream cones, petting fluffy dogs, stopping to smell the roses... or the doughnuts. Perhaps you're interested in pursuing your own path to The YUM. Or maybe you're just looking for a collection of quirky, funny, occasionally inspiring essays to read in your all too brief moments of downtime. The Yummish Faith aims to give readers a new way of approaching the chaos of everyday life, with a more open, tolerant, and cookie-centric worldview. Wine and chocolate ...

I grew up in a family where we wrote one another love letters. We put them on pillows, in lunch bags, by bedsides. So it was only natural that when my niece Katie asked me to compile some family recipes for her upon the occasion of her marriage that I would place those recipes alongside all the love letters I had been wanting to write and had written in the form of essays that were published in a variety of magazines and newspaper periodicals before their decline. Eating supper hasn’t declined, however, and love letters to brides and nieces have a kind of perennial value if not to the ...

Helen Thorpe, author of a trio of award-winning books about the experiences of immigrants, refugees, and veterans, has turned her writerly lens on her own family, neighborhood, and ethnicity. In Finding Motherland, Thorpe shares seven essays she has written on the related themes of family, food, and migration, sharing observations about race and privilege.

Essays to entertain smart people, without excessive effort Entertaining, bite sized essays on business, fashion, science, words, and other caffenation derived topics This tiny book includes random essays from history, philosophy, business and science. Bill Yarberry, CPA, chemist, statistician, auditor, history buff, and curious person, explores topics ranging from loud shoes to captain obvious. Get new and powerful ideas by reading across multiple disciplines. Tiny Brain Snacks boosts your thinking skills by enhancing long-term neural potentiation growth via novel ideas. In other words, ...

Of all the essentials for survival: oxygen, water, sleep, and food, only food is a vast treasure trove of memory and of sensory experience. Food is a portal to culture, to times past, to disgust, to comfort, to love: no matter one's feelings about a particular dish, they are hardly ever neutral.

Khabaar is a food memoir and personal narrative that braids the global journeys of South Asian food through immigration, migration, and indenture. Focusing on chefs, home cooks, and food stall owners, the book questions: What does it mean to belong, and what does belonging in a new place look like in the foods carried over from the old country?

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.