Writing about food since 2004.
Category
essays
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Are Food Blogs Over?
[Image from Roboppy’s Flickr via Slashfood.] In this week’s New York Magazine, there’s a story about a 27-year old who spends most of her life and her money eating out at trendy, of-the-moment restaurants. To be honest, I didn’t read the article—that’s the side of the food world I have zero interest in (fad-following)—but one…
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Knowing What To Eat
It’s funny: the smarter I get about the food, the harder it is to figure out what to eat. Eating didn’t used to be this hard. If I wanted a chicken club sandwich for lunch, I’d eat a chicken club sandwich for lunch. I didn’t worry about whether the bacon came from an industrial pig,…
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How Do You Not Weigh 500 Pounds?
If there’s one question I get asked all the time, whether in my blog comments or over Twitter, it’s: “How do you not weigh 500 pounds?” It’s usually in response to a post about a very decadent meal or a recipe that involves several sticks of butter (like Craig’s birthday cake). The question implies that…
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I Declare War on Frisée!
No one looks at a coil of barbed wire and thinks, “I would like to eat that.” Yet there are eaters among us who see a plate of frisée and think that very thought. Psychologists have a word for these people: masochists. How else to explain the inexplicable desire to consume razor-like stalks of pale…
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Our Brainwashed Bellies
The commercial goes something like this: a female college student unwraps a package sent to her from her mother, who’s on the phone, standing near a window where sunlight illuminates her smiling face. The girl’s face soon lights up too when she discovers the gift that her mother so thoughtfully sent her way: a jar…
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Is Anything Ever Really New In The Food World?
It’s that time of year again. First comes the “What To Do With Leftover Candy?” and the blood-tinted Halloween punch; then we’re in turkey month—just look at those glossies at your supermarket checkout—and, faster than you can say “hot buttered rum,” there’ll be the Bûche de Noëls, the potato latkes, and glasses of champagne to…
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10 Ways To Fix A Mistake in the Kitchen
[Image via RoboPencil] Everyone makes mistakes in the kitchen. Kim Kardashian got engaged in the kitchen and Justin Bieber fathered a baby in the kitchen. Look: it happens. Some people freak out when a mistake happens: “Oh my God! This is a disaster! I’ll never cook again!” Other people employ a series of tactics to…
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Let’s Not Be Paternalistic About Food
In all the debate that goes on in this country about what people eat and how we need to reform the American diet, it’s always taken as a given that people who attempt to nourish themselves and their children on fast food need to be educated, need to be reformed. There’s a sense that we…
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Does Food Writing Matter?
[Photo credit, Dallas Observer] By this point it’s old news that Sam Sifton, restaurant critic for The New York Times, has stepped down from his job after only two years. It’s a pretty short run for a restaurant critic, and his reasons for stepping down have been explained matter-of-factly: he’s going to become the Times’s…
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Let’s Talk About Lettuce
I started cooking seven or eight years ago, maybe even a little further back, and it was around the time that people stopped buying whole heads of lettuce and started buying lettuce, pre-washed, in those little plastic tubs. The tubs, which are now omnipresent, have labels like “Spring Salad Mix” and “Herb Salad Mix” and…
