ROME — In the barns where the milk for Italy’s most famous cheese is produced, the fans have barely stopped whirring for two months. As temperatures across northern Italy push close to 40 degrees Celsius, cows stand almost motionless, tongues lolling, while automated sprinklers soak their backs.

Italy is now enduring its fourth major heat wave of an exceptionally brutal summer. The prolonged heat is piling costs on the €4 billion industry behind Parmigiano Reggiano, forcing farmers to spend heavily on cooling their animals while drought and dwindling water supplies make it harder and more expensive to grow the forage needed to feed them.

Farmers have received support from regional authorities, the EU and a producers’ consortium to help them adapt to the heat, but they say the funding falls short of the investment increasingly required.

For producers of the protected cheese, there is no possibility of escaping somewhere cooler. Under the strict rules governing Parmigiano Reggiano’s EU Protected Designation of Origin — that secures its added value on the market — the cows, their milk and the cheese must remain tied to a defined area of northern Italy. At least 75 percent of their forage must also be grown locally.

Dairy cows can begin suffering from heat stress at around 25C, depending on humidity, according to Giovanni Buonaiuto, a vet with the Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium, which defends producers’ interests. Their digestive system generates considerable heat as they break down food, while cows have relatively few sweat glands with which to disperse it. “It’s as if the cow has a radiator inside her,” Buonaiuto told POLITICO.

As temperatures rise, cows eat less and stand for longer to expose themselves to moving air. They rest and ruminate less, milk production falls and prolonged heat can also affect fertility.

Buonaiuto said milk production has fallen by about 10 percent on average during the summer, although the impact varies sharply between farms depending on their cooling systems.

Overheating herds

Federica Dall’Aglio, who raises 400 cattle on the plains near the city of Parma, said each cow was producing five to six kilograms less milk a day, a fall of roughly 20 percent, despite fans and water sprays installed to protect her herd.

The cows now spend much of their time beneath the fans and water sprays, she added, as they’re reluctant to move away from the cooling systems.

Outside the barns, farmers are reorganizing their working days around the heat too. Some now cut and collect hay at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., Buonaiuto said, before the morning heat causes the hay to crumble. By 8 a.m. or 9 a.m., it can already be too hot.

Keeping the cows cool comes at a high cost.

Luca Cotti, a sixth-generation dairy farmer and president of farmers’ association Coldiretti in the northern Emilia-Romagna region, said electricity consumption in barns can double or even triple during extreme heat as cooling systems run almost continuously.

He recalled worrying about winter 20 years ago, with the weather freezing drinking water and other systems in the barn. Now investment is directed toward surviving summer.

The new normal

Extreme summer heat was once exceptional and might last a week before temperatures eased, Cotti said. Now, he said, “it’s normal.” This year, “since June, it has never let up.”

For some smaller producers with older facilities, the question is whether the investment is still worthwhile.

Dall’Aglio’s family has been investing in cooling systems for around 15 years, recently adding solar panels to help offset their growing electricity needs.

Across the Parmigiano Reggiano supply chain, such technology is becoming commonplace. Around half of its dairy farms, responsible for 70 percent of its milk, have invested in advanced cooling systems, including fans, motion-sensitive water sprays and automated temperature monitoring, according to the consortium president, Nicola Bertinelli.

The remaining 30 percent of milk comes largely from farms in the cooler hills and mountains, he said.

With persistently high temperatures, insufficient rainfall and water levels in major Alpine lakes approaching historic lows, authorities in the Po River basin, which supports agriculture across northern Italy through a network of tributaries and canals, have declared a high level of drought severity.

Alfalfa, an important source of forage for the cows, is relatively resistant to drought because of its deep roots. But Dall’Aglio said her family had already been irrigating heavily to ensure a good hay crop this year.

When rivers run too low for irrigation, some farmers have to pump groundwater instead, which can make irrigation around five times more expensive because of the energy required to extract it, according to Lorenzo Catellani of farmers’ association CIA Agricoltori Emilia-Romagna.

Coldiretti is calling on politicians to treat water storage as infrastructure rather than emergency relief.

Cotti said regional and national authorities need to invest in reservoirs and other water-storage infrastructure, arguing that individual farms cannot solve the growing problem of water scarcity alone.

Paradoxically, Parmesan producers normally worry about producing too much, not too little — and had sought to curb output this year. “We always have the brake on,” Cotti said, adding that high prices mean farmers have little difficulty increasing production when needed.

Despite the strain, producers insist there is no danger of Italy running short of Parmesan.

The cheese’s strong global market gives farmers greater scope to invest than producers in more fragile agricultural sectors.

For now, those investments are keeping Parmigiano production stable, although smaller farmers with aging barns may eventually choose to close rather than spend the money needed to adapt. For now, there is little to do but wait for the temperatures to fall. “We keep going like this,” Cotti said. “We hope it ends as soon as possible.”

 

 

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If I see one more headline announcing that Gen Z has killed alcohol, I might just order another drink.

According to the internet, my generation doesn’t go to bars anymore. We don’t party. We don’t date. We’re all sitting at home sipping adaptogenic mushroom tonics, journaling our feelings and politely declining invitations to any event after 7 p.m. because we’d rather optimize our sleep scores than take a tequila shot.

There’s just one problem: I have absolutely no idea who these people are.

I was born in 2001, making me squarely Gen Z. My friends split bottles of wine over dinner. Our birthday party of choice is a bar crawl to our favorite hot spots. We can always be convinced to order another round of G&Ts with just a glance at each other. On any given Friday night, the restaurants around me are full of twenty-somethings lingering over drinks long after they’ve paid the check. Or getting in UberXLs to the night’s secondary location (i.e. the local dive bar). Even the sober Gen Zers I know still go out — they’ve just swapped negronis for mocktails.

So after reading what felt like the hundredth article declaring that my generation had abandoned alcohol, nightlife and socializing altogether, I started wondering whether I was missing something.

The statistics behind those stories are real: Younger adults are drinking less than previous generations did at the same age. But somewhere between “Gen Z drinks somewhat less” and “Gen Z is killing the bar industry,” something strange happened. A modest shift in consumer behavior hardened into a cultural stereotype. I wanted to understand what got lost in that translation.

I’m not questioning the data or trying to argue that the numbers are wrong. I’m questioning the story we’ve built around them. And if there’s one person who has spent more time thinking about that disconnect than almost anyone else, it’s Dave Infante.

The Kernel of Truth

Infante, who covers the beverage alcohol industry in his newsletter “Fingers,” has watched that distortion happen in real time. A few years ago, while reporting for VinePair, he interviewed roughly a dozen college students for a series on “the state of the modern keg party.” His findings weren’t especially dramatic.

Keg parties still existed. Students still drank. But packaged beverages — hard seltzers, canned cocktails and drinks like High Noon — were beginning to replace the giant communal keg that had become shorthand for college drinking culture.

At almost the exact same moment, another drinking trend exploded across the internet: BORGs, or “blackout rage gallons,” the customized gallon jugs of vodka, water, electrolytes and flavoring that briefly inspired a miniature moral panic in national media.

If you only followed the headlines, it was difficult to reconcile the two dominant narratives about Gen Z. Depending on the week, we were either frighteningly reckless or hopelessly boring.

Infante remembers watching that contradiction play out in real time.

“If anything,” he told me, “the story is maybe that youth were more interested in customizing the amount of alcohol they were drinking and the flavors they were drinking — or not drinking at all.”

Drinking differently is not the same thing as not drinking.

Infante has a phrase he likes to use when talking about stories like these.

“There’s usually a kernel of truth,” he said. Then that truth gets “wrenched through this…assembly line,” until what comes out on the other side barely resembles where it started.

That’s exactly what seems to have happened here. The original claim — that younger adults, on average, consume somewhat less alcohol than previous generations at the same age — is supported by plenty of evidence. But that’s not the story most people have absorbed.

Instead, we’ve somehow arrived at a version where Gen Z has collectively decided drinking isn’t fun anymore, bars are empty because nobody under 30 leaves the house and nightlife itself is quietly dying. Those are much bigger claims, and they’re far harder to prove.

Alcohol consumption statistics tell us how much alcohol people consume. They don’t tell us how often young adults see their friends. They don’t tell us whether restaurants are full, whether people are dating, whether house parties have disappeared or whether social life has migrated somewhere else entirely.

Every generation seems to inherit one cultural panic after another.

That pattern is something Corey Seemiller has spent years watching unfold.

Seemiller, a professor and one of the leading researchers of Gen Z, sees the pattern as generationally predictable. “Every generation gets blamed for everything,” she said. 

When Baby Boomers were young, they were reckless. When millennials came along, they were entitled. Now Gen Z has become simultaneously too online, too anxious, too health-conscious, too antisocial and, apparently, too sober.

The labels shift depending on what’s happening in the broader culture.

What doesn’t change is our impulse to explain complicated social and economic changes by assigning a personality to an entire generation.

Because the more Seemiller studies Gen Z, the more she finds a generation responding rationally to the world it inherited — not inventing entirely new values out of thin air.

Take socializing.

One of the most common assumptions underpinning the “Gen Z doesn’t drink” narrative is that young adults simply don’t want to go out anymore. Seemiller doesn’t buy that. Instead, she thinks we’re asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking whether Gen Z drinks less, she suggests: What does social life actually look like now?

“There are a lot of things that are going on all simultaneously,” she told me. Yes, the research consistently finds that Gen Z drinks less than previous generations. But that’s only one piece of a much bigger puzzle. “If they were to drink,” she said, “where are they drinking? Are they going to the grocery store and buying something and drinking at a gathering, or are they going to a bar?”

For decades, the bar occupied an almost uncontested position in American social life. It was where coworkers met after work, where first dates happened, where birthdays spilled into the early morning and where twenty-somethings figured out adulthood over cheap pitchers of beer. Going out and drinking were so tightly intertwined that they became almost interchangeable in the American imagination.

But Seemiller argues that’s no longer the landscape Gen Z inhabits.

Bars today aren’t simply competing with the bar down the street.

“They’re competing with boba tea houses,” she said. “They’re competing with coffee houses. They’re competing with thrift stores. They’re competing with a local park where you can just go sit down and talk to your friends.”

If you meet a friend for an overpriced matcha instead of an overpriced IPA, are you less social? If you spend three hours catching up over dinner instead of hopping between bars, are you participating less in nightlife? If you host friends at your apartment because no one wants to spend $90 before the Uber ride home, have you somehow opted out of social life altogether?

Or have the rituals simply changed?

Those questions kept resurfacing throughout my reporting, particularly when I stopped talking to experts and started talking to people my own age.

One of the first things I noticed was that almost nobody — drinkers or nondrinkers — recognized themselves in the version of Gen Z they’d been reading about.

Miranda Ferrante certainly didn’t.

Ferrante stopped drinking in July 2024 after alcohol began exacerbating her anxiety, stomach issues and sleep problems. The decision wasn’t part of some grand wellness movement. It wasn’t driven by social media. It was simply a realization that drinking no longer made her feel the way she wanted to feel.

But giving up alcohol didn’t mean giving up the rest of her life.

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When I asked whether headlines about Gen Z “killing alcohol” felt accurate, she didn’t hesitate.

“No, sober does not mean ‘not fun,’” she said.

She still goes out with friends. She still celebrates birthdays at restaurants. She still orders drinks — just without alcohol. Her friends make a point of choosing places with thoughtful mocktail menus and are quick to point out alcohol-free options when they’re available.

“I think we are changing the definition of what socialization means,” she told me. “I don’t think drinking or not drinking alcohol should have any impact on the definition of socialization.”

We’ve spent years treating alcohol as a proxy for social connection. Drink less, socialize less. Order fewer beers, have fewer friends. But those equations only work if alcohol is still the primary reason people gather in the first place.

The more people I interviewed, the less convinced I became that it is.

Gabi Bradbury, who has been sober for three years, described much the same life: bars, concerts, festivals and nights out with friends, only without alcohol in her glass. “Why do we need to drink to have fun?” she asked.

Neither spoke like someone opting out of social life. If anything, both described becoming more intentional about it.

That word — intentional — came up so often during my interviews that I eventually started circling it in my notebook.

Intentional about drinking. Intentional about friendships. And then Dave Infante gave me a much more practical explanation.

Money.

The $20 Cocktail

“I think that’s a huge part of it,” Infante said when I asked how much economics has shaped the narrative around Gen Z and alcohol. “I don’t think that’s the whole piece… but I certainly think that’s a substantial piece of the puzzle.”

“We are very much squarely in the era of the $20 cocktail,” he said. “$10 beer. $18 glass of wine.”

Infante pointed me toward research by Rabobank senior beverage analyst Bourcard Nesin that complicates one of the most common assumptions about Gen Z drinking habits. Younger adults are spending roughly the same share of their income on alcohol as previous generations did — but in raw dollars, they’re spending dramatically less.

If Gen Z is earning less while simultaneously facing higher housing costs, higher grocery bills and more expensive drinks, declining alcohol purchases start looking a lot less like a cultural rejection of drinking and a lot more like basic math.

“If you boil it down like that,” Infante said, “the intuitive idea that, ‘Oh, zoomers just don’t want to drink,’ becomes very hard to defend.”

I’m hard-pressed to think of a single friend who’s ever said, “I’m not going out because I don’t believe in alcohol anymore.” I can think of dozens who’ve said, “I can’t justify spending $75 tonight.”

Those are not the same conversation, and yet we keep treating them as if they are.

“Young adults respond rationally to inflation and stagnant wages” doesn’t inspire quite the same existential panic as “Gen Z killed nightlife,” but it’s probably closer to the truth.

Infante sees that framing play out even inside the alcohol industry. As part of his reporting, he regularly listens to corporate earnings calls and began noticing a pattern: When publicly traded alcohol companies missed sales targets, executives often reached for the same explanation.

“Guess who’s to blame?” he said. “It’s those darn kids.”

Blaming a mysterious generation that simply doesn’t like alcohol is a much easier story than confronting rising prices, changing consumer behavior or whether people still feel they’re getting enough value from a night out.

“There’s this very strange frame that happens,” Infante said, “whether it was millennials with the avocado toast, or it’s zoomers who are too into weed gummies to do alcohol.”

The implication is always the same: If only young people behaved differently, the industry would be fine.

“But ultimately,” he continued, “that is not a zoomer problem. That’s a beverage alcohol firm problem.”

Consumers don’t owe industries their loyalty. If restaurants, breweries or liquor companies want people to spend money, they have to convince them the experience is worth the cost.

Some bars, Infante noted, are already experimenting with lower-priced cocktails and expanded happy hours after discovering there may simply be a ceiling to what customers will pay for a drink.

But price is only part of what has changed.

Longtime drinks writers Caroline Pardilla and Esther Tseng, who both started covering bars in the early 2000s, remember a pre-COVID nightlife landscape with later hours, more clubs and fewer alternatives competing for young people’s time.

Pardilla remembers bar hopping as a routine weekend activity.

“It was just what our idea of fun was,” she said. “You’re just being social and it made you feel good and you kind of loosened up and everything.”

Tseng remembers going to coffee shops at 10 p.m. and blogging into the early hours of the morning.

“What coffee shop do you know is open that long anymore?” she asked.

It’s a small question that points toward a much larger shift. People talk about Gen Z as though young adults collectively decided to stop going out, when the physical infrastructure of going out has changed around them.

“There were a lot of clubs,” Tseng said. “Stuff used to be open a lot later. People drank a lot more back then, and especially leading up to the pandemic, the hours just kept getting cut shorter.”

Restaurants changed. Hospitality changed. Consumers changed. Even years later, many cities still haven’t fully returned to the schedules they kept before 2020.

If last call happens earlier, if restaurants close sooner and if people got used to gathering in smaller groups during lockdown, of course the texture of nightlife is going to look different than it did in 2018.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s disappearing. It may simply be evolving into something else.

The Gen Z Era

When people describe Gen Z as uninterested in going out, I wonder what exactly they’re looking at. Because I don’t see empty nightlife.

I see neighborhood wine bars packed over one bottle, sold-out tastings and cocktail bars where people wait an hour for a seat. The drink still matters, but increasingly it’s part of something larger: the room, the menu, the DJ, the conversation.

If previous generations often went to bars because that’s simply where people went, Gen Z seems more likely to ask a different question first.

Is this worth leaving the house for?

Infante sees that selectiveness reflected in the marketplace.

“The motive is a little different,” he told me. “Zoomer’s interest is less driven by conspicuous consumption than seeking out specific experiences.”

When older generations describe Gen Z as drinking less, they often seem to hear less interested. But those aren’t synonymous. If anything, many of the Gen Z drinkers I interviewed sounded intensely interested in food, wine, cocktails and hospitality. They just weren’t interested in drinking indiscriminately.

Part of the reason that distinction gets lost may be simple nostalgia.

Corey Seemiller told me every generation tends to romanticize the version of young adulthood it experienced while quietly forgetting the parts that weren’t so glamorous.

“It’s how romanticizing works,” she said.

If you survived the reckless decisions, cheap beer and late nights and emerged with nothing worse than embarrassing stories, those stories become legends. The hangovers and genuinely bad decisions tend not to make the highlight reel.

To test how much of that nostalgia reflected an actual historical difference, I called alcohol historian Scott Martin.

Martin confirmed that alcohol really was more central to American social life.

“In terms of sociability, in terms of work cultures, it has been really central to sociability, particularly for men, and increasingly in the 20th century, I think, for women as well,” he said.

Drinking also functioned as a rite of passage, particularly as young adults reached legal drinking age.

But the social world surrounding that drinking was different, too.

“Our society has become much more of a surveillance society,” Martin said. Young people know that if photos or videos of a drunken night end up online, a future employer — or several million strangers — may eventually see them.

It’s one thing to wake up with a hangover. It’s another to wake up viral.

Add pandemic adolescence, expensive housing and stagnant wages, and different choices begin to look less mysterious than inevitable.

Martin described Gen Z as one of the first generations in recent memory to come of age facing markedly tighter economic circumstances.

“They’re just not going to do as well as their parents,” he said. Entry-level jobs pay relatively little, job security is tenuous and the math of going out matters. “If you’re going out and ordering those five drinks, some other bill is not getting paid, and that’s not sustainable.”

We often compare Gen Z’s present to older generations’ memories instead of their reality. That’s an impossible standard to meet.

“For younger people, they’re no longer living in the same kind of possibility that the older generations had,” Martin said. “I think they probably feel that the older generations just simply do not understand that, and perhaps they’re right, perhaps they don’t.”

In many ways, Seemiller told me, it’s more useful to think about the “Gen Z era” than Gen Z itself.

“Gen Z” implies something intrinsic about the people. “The Gen Z era” shifts the focus to the world surrounding them.

This is a generation that entered adulthood during a global pandemic after spending formative years online. We’re navigating historically expensive housing, student debt, inflation, stagnant entry-level wages and a social landscape with more entertainment options than previous generations had.

Spend ten minutes on TikTok and you’ll find creators dissecting natural wines, comparing probiotic sodas, reviewing coffee shops, ranking matcha cafés, explaining amaro, making elaborate cocktails and debating whether dirty martinis have finally replaced Aperol spritzes as the drink of the summer.

The curiosity is still there. It’s simply spread across a much wider landscape than alcohol alone.

When Pardilla was younger, drinking was simply folded into what being social looked like.

“Drinking was a sign of maturity, right?” she said. “That’s why a lot of college kids got wasted because you’re like, I’m able to drink now and you kind of go overboard.”

She thinks that idea has changed.

“I think [Gen Z] can be more selective and they have that opportunity to be more selective,” she said. “They’re more aware of the non-alcoholic options, so it’s not so much the getting wasted, but it’s more just having fun, not necessarily boozy fun. They’re just doing it for themselves.”

There have always been people who drank sparingly or didn’t drink at all. What’s changed, Pardilla said, is how visible and socially acceptable those choices have become.

Bars have responded. Many now treat their nonalcoholic menus not as an afterthought but as another place to show creativity.

“A lot of bars I’ve spoken to, they’re thinking very thoughtfully about how to create non-alcoholic cocktails that have a backbone,” Tseng said. “That have complex flavor profiles, that are not just juice and a splash of soda or a lime or something.”

I went down an Instagram rabbit hole looking at the work of Austin Hennelly at Kato, a Michelin-starred restaurant whose nonalcoholic drinks include things like a green strawberry daiquiri built with floral aperitif, wildflower honey, whey, oro blanco and lime.

Looking at it, I understood immediately why someone might happily pay cocktail prices for a drink without alcohol.

On the other hand, if your $16 “mocktail” is lemonade with soda and some mint leaves, we need to have a conversation.

Inside the beverage industry, Infante says one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding the explosion of nonalcoholic drinks is that they’re replacing alcohol altogether.

“The biggest buyer of non-alcoholic beverages,” he said, “are people who are drinkers.”

In other words, the people ordering N/A beer, spirit-free cocktails and alcohol-free sparkling wine are often the exact same people ordering IPAs, martinis and Champagne on different occasions.

They’re not abandoning one category. They’re moving fluidly between them.

Infante likes using a word coined by journalist H.L. Mencken nearly a century ago: omnibibulousness.

It essentially means someone who will drink anything: beer, wine, cocktails, coffee, sparkling water, nonalcoholic beer. Whatever fits the moment.

The modern beverage landscape has never offered more options, and consumers are responding accordingly. That isn’t evidence of alcohol’s demise. It’s evidence of abundance.

Gen Z isn’t refusing to socialize. We’re choosing among more ways to do it than previous generations had available.

Sometimes we’re drinking less because cocktails cost $22. Sometimes we’re alternating between alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks, prioritizing food over booze, training for a marathon or simply staying home because rent is due next week.

The data tells us what changed. The reporting tells us why.

Those aren’t the decisions of a joyless generation. They’re the decisions of people living in 2026.

 

 

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Canned sardines are hard to find in American supermarkets because of a fad diet. 

Corner of Fifth reports that the diet consists of tinned fish and water, black coffee, or plain tea. It spread on TikTok and YouTube and through keto communities, and Dr. — Read the rest

The post A viral diet and warm oceans emptied the canned sardine shelf appeared first on Boing Boing.

I’m standing in the produce aisle of my neighborhood supermarket, between the fresh vegetables receiving their bi-hourly overhead mist and a long refrigerated wall of salad kits. Lately, the store has been running sales on the Taylor Farms ones. The discount tags have been placed, carefully it seems to me, directly over the Taylor Farms logo, giving the display the slightly furtive quality of merchandise that has recently acquired an unfortunate reputation.

Nobody appears especially eager to buy them.

Thankfully, I’m not there to buy one either.

Instead, I pull out my phone and open an app called Taylor Detector, which is exactly what it sounds like. Scan the barcode of a grocery item and the app tells you whether it has a documented connection to Taylor Farms — including connections that may not be obvious from the package.

There really is, apparently, an app for everything.

Taylor Detector was created by programmer Jonathan Goldner, whose other projects include Air Aware, which tracks air quality, pollen and environmental health risks, and Friday Night Lights, which reminds users when it is time to light Shabbat candles. His portfolio, taken together, suggests a particular interest in the invisible forces governing everyday life: particulates, sundown, industrial produce conglomerates.

I start scanning.

One salad kit: no.

Another: no.

For a moment, Taylor Detector is an exceptionally boring slot machine. Then I round the corner toward the bagged vegetables and point my phone at a package of Earthbound Farm broccoli florets.

The screen turns red.

CONFIRMED.

“Oh,” I think.

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This is how I learn that Earthbound Farm is owned by Taylor Farms, as is Eat Smart. The company also supplies private-label and store-brand packaged salad greens and kits for numerous major retailers from Whole Foods to Kroger to Aldi. 

That small revelation — broccoli in hand, phone glowing red — gets at the gap Goldner says he built the app to address. Shoppers trying to identify Taylor Farms products themselves have occasionally been advised to look for packaging codes beginning with “TF” or similar letters. But there is no standardized public key for deciphering them; codes vary among plants and products, and the absence of an obvious “TF” is no guarantee Taylor Farms wasn’t involved.

In his FAQ, Goldner puts the problem plainly: consumers shouldn’t have to be “decoding packaging on the fly.”

Which, when you think about it, is an extraordinary activity to have entered the modern grocery-shopping repertoire.

But there is a reason people are trying.

Taylor Farms has spent much of the summer at the center of a strange and confusing food-safety story. And this week brought another recall: The company pulled prepared foods, including salsa and guacamole sold under brands such as Trader Joe’s and Walmart’s Freshness Guaranteed, after receiving jalapeños connected to a multistate Salmonella outbreak.

We have entered a moment when the government tells Americans to scrutinize their food, corporations operate supply chains consumers can barely see, and states and Washington are fighting over who gets to regulate them — and someone has responded by building an app so I can stand in the produce aisle and scan my vegetables to determine who, exactly, is behind them.

That’s somewhat funny.

It is also an awfully revealing picture of where American trust in the food system is right now.

When Taylor Farms went to the White House

In July, FDA traceback and epidemiological evidence linked shredded iceberg lettuce produced by Taylor Farms to a major Cyclospora outbreak. Then came a confusing correction: A product sample the agency had initially described as positive was later determined to be a false positive. Taylor Farms used the revision to push back on the idea that its lettuce had been definitively identified as the source; federal officials, though, maintained that the broader epidemiological and traceback evidence still pointed there.

As if that were not enough to make the average salad eater develop a mild interest in supply-chain forensics, the story soon acquired a political subplot.

Taylor Farms and its CEO, Bruce Taylor, have donated millions to conservative and Republican-aligned political groups, including a $1 million contribution to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. in 2025. In July, as scrutiny of the outbreak intensified, company executives and lobbyists met privately with the White House. Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, subsequently demanded answers about both the outbreak and the circumstances surrounding that meeting.

 

None of that establishes that political access changed the government’s response. But the optics are almost laboratory-designed to produce suspicion: A company tied to a sprawling foodborne-illness investigation, whose leadership has given substantial sums to the president’s political operation, gets an emergency audience at the White House while regulators and the company publicly disagree about what the evidence means.

This is also an administration that very much wants Americans thinking harder about their food.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who recently added cooking-show host to his duties at HHS, presiding over salmon cakes and homemade vinaigrette on “The Real Food Show” — has made distrust of the conventional American food system one of his signature themes. The show promises to teach Americans how to eat “real food,” presenting recognizable ingredients and home cooking as an antidote to a processed-food culture portrayed as artificial, addictive and imposed from above.

This week, Kennedy carried that project further, promising the federal government’s first official definition of ultra-processed food. Scientists do not currently agree on exactly what belongs in that category, a problem Kennedy summarized with characteristic bluntness: “If you can’t define a problem, you can’t solve it.”

Fair enough.

But the ideal MAHA consumer occupies a curious position. She should be discerning. She should read labels, mistrust mysterious additives, interrogate old nutritional orthodoxies and learn to distinguish “real” food from whatever came before it. She should, perhaps, even become a little suspicious.

Just not indiscriminately so.

Because once that skepticism travels backward through the supply chain — past the emulsifiers and dyes, toward corporate ownership, political donations, private meetings and the government agencies charged with keeping food safe — the questions become rather less tidy.

Discernment is encouraged. Distrust is curated.

When the recalls blur

Back in the produce aisle, the app has done exactly what it promised.

I now know that the broccoli florets in my hand have a documented connection to Taylor Farms.

What I do not know is whether that means I should put them back.

I have not received a recall alert for broccoli. There is no red banner telling me this particular bag is unsafe. And Taylor Farms is hardly the only name appearing in food-safety notices lately: Recent recalls have involved tomato bisque soup over possible Listeria contamination, a Chinese-style spice mix over possible Salmonella and blueberries over possible E. coli.

At a certain point, the alerts begin to blur together.

Taylor Detector can tell me who is behind the package. It cannot tell me what level of risk I should assign to that fact.

That part is still mine.

Which may be the strangest feature of this new age of food vigilance. Americans are being encouraged to become sharper, more suspicious consumers — to read more closely, question more aggressively and demand to know what is really in their food. But information arrives in fragments: a barcode result here, a recall notice there, a corrected FDA finding, a corporate statement, a congressional inquiry.

The broccoli remains broccoli.

I am simply standing in front of it with considerably more information than I had five minutes ago, and no corresponding increase in certainty. So I make the decision myself — and leave it behind.

Maybe I’ll have better luck at the farmers market.

The post We’re all amateur food safety inspectors now appeared first on Salon.com.

Ukraine’s normally copious grain exports are stuck in the country — caught between Russian attacks in the Black Sea, drought on the Danube and distrust among Kyiv’s closest allies. 

It’s bad news for global food prices.

“If it keeps going like this, you’ll have once again a global price increase of at least 25, 30 percent, with all the consequences we had in 2022 for world food inflation,” Ukraine’s Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi said.

With missile strikes keeping cargo ships away from its ports, Kyiv is scrambling, yet again, for a way out via Europe. But its fallback routes run overland through EU countries, including Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, where previous waves of Ukrainian grain left governments facing a fierce domestic backlash.

The last surge of Ukrainian agricultural exports through Eastern Europe unleashed mass protests from farmers, particularly in Poland, who complained that cheap Ukrainian produce that was meant to merely pass through the region was instead ending up on their domestic markets. Poland imposed a ban on Ukrainian grain in 2023, alongside similar measures in Hungary and Slovakia, defying EU trade rules and souring relations with Ukraine.

Kyiv’s fresh pleas — and insistence that the grain would only transit through its EU neighbors — have prompted Warsaw to reassure its own farmers that none of it will end up in Poland. 

“We are doing everything to keep the embargo,” Polish Agriculture Minister Stefan Krajewski told Radio ZET on Monday, referring to Poland’s ban on Ukrainian grain imports.

Blocked bounty

One of the world’s largest grain producers, Ukraine typically sends more than 90 percent of its agricultural exports by sea. The disruption of that trade after Russia’s 2022 invasion helped drive global food prices to record highs. This summer, Russia and Ukraine have intensified attacks on each other’s ports and shipping across the Black Sea. 

Ukraine exported just 463,000 metric tons of grain in the first nine days of August — about one-third of the usual pace, said Vysotskyi. By November, when the new harvest comes in, the country risks running out of storage for grain it cannot export.

Kyiv asked the European Commission for €220 million last week to help its farmers weather the disruption.

The non-repayable grant would subsidize bank loans, allowing small- and medium-sized farms to hold on to their grain until shipping resumes rather than sell at a loss. A Commission spokesperson confirmed receiving the request but did not say whether Brussels would provide the money.

But money can only buy time. The bigger problem is getting ships back into Ukraine’s ports.

No grain vessel has entered the ports around Odesa since late July, even though they remain open. That month, a Russian missile struck a corn carrier leaving port, killing 10 people aboard. The vessel sank a week later.

Since the attack, crews have refused to sail, and shipping companies have suspended service.

“Ship owners and crews are just afraid. They are not ready to send the ships at all,” said Vysotskyi. “It’s not that it’s impossible to make it. They are just not ready to.”

Back to the border

With the Black Sea route stalled, Ukraine is negotiating with Romania, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Moldova to move more grain overland.

But those routes cannot simply replace maritime exports.

Moving grain by rail and road costs $50 to $70 more per ton, said Vysotskyi. When grain prices soared after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, exporters could absorb that premium. At today’s prices, they cannot.

“It’s nonprofitable,” said Vysotskyi.

Ukraine’s main alternative route, through Romania, is also running into constraints. Low water levels on the Danube are limiting the amount of cargo that can reach the Black Sea port of Constanța.

And moving more grain overland revives another problem for Kyiv: the political backlash in its EU neighbors.

Polish farmers blockaded crossings with Ukraine in 2023 and 2024, turning agricultural trade into one of the most politically explosive issues between Kyiv and one of its strongest wartime supporters.

But Ukraine, said Vysotskyi, is not asking for greater access to the EU market.

EU quotas now cap Ukrainian wheat sales to the bloc at 1.3 million tons a year, which, according to Vysotskyi, makes a repeat of the earlier influx “legally impossible.” Kyiv would seek a larger quota only if the EU itself proposed one, he added.

“There should be consensus inside the EU, with EU farmers,” he said.

Warsaw has been adamant that its grain embargo will stay. But while Ukrainian grain can’t be sold in Poland, the government has been working with Kyiv to help pass it through.

Talks with Kyiv “concern exclusively the smooth transport of Ukrainian grain to third countries, not its export or admission to the Polish market,” said Polish Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maciej Wewiór, adding that Ukrainian grain remains critical for many countries in Asia and Africa.

Trust deficit

For Polish farmers, assurances that the grain will pass through the country uninterrupted are not enough, with farm groups arguing that some shipments supposedly bound for other countries never actually leave Poland.

Gustaw Jędrejek, head of the Lublin Chamber of Agriculture and one of the leaders of the border blockades, alleged that shipments are recorded electronically as delivered abroad while the grain itself is sold inside Poland.

“Documents travel to Lithuania, the Czech Republic or Slovakia — and the grain stays in Poland,” he said. The Polish government has consistently denied such allegations.

Asked whether he trusted assurances that additional Ukrainian grain would simply pass through the country, Jędrejek was unequivocal.

“I absolutely don’t believe it.”

Perhaps it is because I’ve been nursing a slight and recent obsession with zany detective movies of the 1960s — prompted by “The Pink Panther,” then by following the Peter Sellers trail to “A Shot in the Dark” and “After the Fox” — but when I first heard that President Donald Trump had reportedly escaped Turkey in an “airport catering cart,” the scene arrived in my mind already blocked and costumed: a white-tableclothed trolley, steered by a nervous waiter in a bow tie, perhaps topped with a silver cloche. Beneath the linens, taking care that his shoes did not give him away, Trump crouched while he was wheeled past a succession of unfriendly eyes, their owners somehow oblivious to the president concealed at knee height.

The reality was, of course, considerably less cinematic.

The cart was not really a cart at all, but a truck: a large white box fitted with a hydraulic lift, the sort of airport machinery designed to rise neatly to the door of an aircraft. No tablecloth. No cloche. No perspiring waiter trying to look casual. Trump could, essentially, simply walk inside.

And, according to reports, that is more or less what happened. The BBC described footage from July 8 showing Trump boarding the presidential jet at Ankara airport; according to the Washington Post, he was then secretly transferred, by way of an elevated catering truck positioned on the aircraft’s far side, to a smaller C-32A military plane — a modified Boeing 757 more commonly used by the vice president. The operation was reportedly prompted by an Iranian assassination threat. 

The internet, however, wasn’t particularly interested in this version. 

Within hours of the original Washington Post report, social media had begun supplying its own: AI-generated images of Trump hunched in a cramped compartment over a small mountain of McDonald’s hamburgers; jokes that the operation was going to require “a bigger catering cart”; and, in perhaps the fullest realization of the bit, a mock announcement that, for the president’s “food truck extraction operation,” a team of top operatives had been assembled, all uniquely suited to the task. The operatives were Chef Boyardee, Ronald McDonald, the Burger King and Colonel Sanders.

It is worth considering why this particular image struck such a chord. In another context, a president being quietly transferred between aircraft in a service vehicle might register as little more than a piece of security choreography — unusual, perhaps, but hardly ready-made for farce. Trump in a catering truck was different. For years, he has made food part of his political stagecraft: something to display, serve, pose beside and use as shorthand for abundance, familiarity and a particular vision of American life. 

The exquisite comic reversal of the Turkey episode was that, this time, he was no longer directing the tableau. He had been swallowed by the scenery.

Consider the hamburgers. 

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One image from Trump’s first presidency still looms especially large for me. In the middle of the 2019 government shutdown, he filled the White House State Dining Room with McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King to celebrate Clemson’s national-championship football team, telling the players that he had ordered roughly a thousand hamburgers — “everything that I like, that you like.” The photographs were almost absurdly theatrical: silver serving pieces and candelabras, the gilt-and-cream grandeur of the White House, and, arrayed beneath it all, mountains of branded fast-food packaging. The incongruity was the point. Trump stood behind the spread as host and Quarter Pounder impresario. 

Five years later, he took his relationship with McDonald’s a step further. During the 2024 campaign, Trump appeared at a franchise in Feasterville-Trevose, Pennsylvania, where the restaurant had been closed to regular customers for the occasion. Instead of bringing McDonald’s into his political theater, as he had at the White House, Trump stepped into McDonald’s theater: apron on, fries in hand, leaning through the drive-thru window. The staging was unusually literal. The restaurant had become a set, the counter a stage, and Trump had given himself a part.

Even the strange little culture war over Cracker Barrel’s logo found Trump acting as something like both dramaturg and producer. When the chain’s 2025 redesign set off a backlash, Trump urged the company to restore its old logo and immediately translated the controversy into the language of show business: Cracker Barrel, he wrote, had received “a Billion Dollars worth of free publicity” if it knew how to use it. “Make Cracker Barrel a WINNER again,” he advised. Restore the old set. Bring back the familiar character. Capitalize on the attention. Trump wasn’t merely offering an opinion about restaurant branding; he was giving notes.

The White House soon made the conceit almost embarrassingly literal. Its official X account posted a doctored version of the familiar Cracker Barrel logo in which Trump had replaced the old man beside the barrel. The barrel itself now read “America First”; beneath it: “America is back.” Trump had not simply inserted himself into a debate over the restaurant’s iconography. He had been cast inside it.

There is, of course, nothing inherently funny about a catering truck, much less about the security concerns that reportedly put Trump inside one. But political imagery is not entirely under the politician’s control. Spend enough years standing behind pyramids of hamburgers, posing at fry stations and inserting yourself into the iconography of American restaurant chains, and eventually the props begin to accrue meanings of their own. McDonald’s becomes not merely something Trump eats or campaigns beside, but part of the visual vocabulary through which people understand him.

Which may explain why, when news broke that Trump had been spirited between planes in a catering truck, the internet required almost no time to dress the scene. The hamburgers were already there. So were Ronald McDonald, Colonel Sanders and the Burger King. Trump has spent years directing the food theater. The catering truck was funny because, for once, he disappeared backstage.

The only thing missing, really, was my nervous waiter in the bow tie.

The post Trump’s catering-truck farce appeared first on Salon.com.

Fancy a morning coffee, orange juice or blueberry pancakes for your Sunday brunch? Prepare to fork out more for those items if Brussels’ plan to get foreign growers to align with the bloc’s pesticide rules holds.

An analysis by the European Commission’s in-house researchers confirms what non-EU farmers have been saying for months: A plan to prohibit any trace of some of the “most hazardous” pesticides banned in the EU for health and environmental reasons would lead to fewer and more expensive products.

Under a worst-case, hypothetical scenario — in which the non-EU producers don’t adjust to the rules — you’d have to pay 332 percent more for coffee and 82 percent more for citrus fruit, the Joint Research Centre said in an analysis published on Tuesday. The EU’s agricultural imports would decline by 41 percent and livestock farmers would also be hit with higher feed costs.

Even under more plausible scenarios envisioned by the researchers, in which external growers get on board to varying degrees, consumer prices would rise and EU agricultural imports decline. Though that would in turn boost domestic production, with exact numbers depending on producers’ willingness to adapt.

The findings lay out an unpalatable political choice for Brussels: Keep angry farmers’ tractors off the streets, or hit consumers’ wallets as they fulfill basic needs at the grocery store.

The proposed residue ban, which is part of the food and feed safety simplification package, is popular with European farmers seeking a level playing field with foreign growers — after all, it was partly designed to appease their ire over the EU’s trade deal with the Mercosur bloc of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. In order to avoid leaving any residue on fruits and vegetables, producers would essentially have to stop using the substance in question.

However, critics say it clashes with global trade rules, as it essentially imposes EU rules on foreign producers, which is known as a mirror clause.

A wide range of international producer groups argue that the proposed ban goes beyond existing health protections in order to push a one-size-fits-all approach, ignoring the reality that growers around the world face different pests, climates and farming conditions.

“The choice is between berries that are available all year round — healthy, safe and at a fair price — or limited production at a high price,” said Amine Bennani, president of the Moroccan Association of Red Fruit Producers.

What Brussels calls an “alignment of standards,” he said in an emailed statement, amounts in practice to “a trade barrier.” Bennani also complained that the association has never been consulted, even though the legislation will affect 250,000 Moroccans working in the sector.

The concerns are not unique to Moroccan berry growers. South African fruit farmer association Hortgro and the South African Table Grape Industry argued that country’s grape exports are critical to livelihoods of thousands of people working in the sector.

Similar points were also raised by other producers, including the Canadian grains and pulse sector, Honduran melon agro-export sector,  Brazilian livestock and agriculture union and California’s almond sector.

The Commission said its aim is to prevent the most hazardous substances — banned for use in the bloc — from re-entering the EU through imports altogether by lowering their residue limits to a technical zero.

Both the Commission and the global producers agree on one point: Residue limits are already set to ensure safe levels of consumption for human health. Critics argue, though, that the EU executive wants to go well beyond existing safeguards for human health as it looks to block traces of substances banned for broader health and environmental threats.

Europe’s “very high standards” for safety “need to be adequately controlled,” said Elisabeth Werner, director-general of DG AGRI, at the POLITICO Sustainable Futures Summit just ahead of the proposal’s debut last year.

Adding further uncertainty for growers, the Commission has yet to specify which banned pesticides would be covered by the measure. The JRC study identified 18 active substances that could be subject to the residue ban, affecting 235 commodities and 86 countries.

The EU will make those decisions case-by-case, using impact assessments, said Commission spokesperson Eva Hrnčířová.

In an emailed statement, Hrnčířová did not directly address concerns about higher prices or reduced availability. Yet she stressed that any action “would take into account the importance of preserving the EU’s food security and possible international implications.”

The EU has reason to be concerned about international implications. Several countries, including Australia, Canada, Paraguay and the U.S., have challenged the measure at the World Trade Organization level, while the International Fresh Produce Association argues that existing global food safety standards already protect consumers while facilitating trade.

Some EU countries support mirror clauses as a way to be more fair to European farmers, who fear free trade deals like Mercosur allow competition from abroad that isn’t subject to the same restrictions. Paris has been especially vocal, already imposing national-level bans earlier this year on products with residual levels of some pesticides whose use is forbidden in the EU — restricting some potatoes and avocados from entering the country. So much for avocado toast.

Our table at Cuatrolatas never stood a chance.

My glass of vermút sweats down to the turquoise tabletop. Standing room only among wine glasses, water glasses, sunglasses, juice glasses. A platter of summer tomatoes, tuna-belly conserva, shaved onion, and punchy olives arrives where it cannot possibly fit.

We lift glasses. Shift glasses. Angle plates. Borrow a few inches from the precarious ledge beside the table. Then Lola sends more food. We shift the impossible again.

Pericana lands dark and red and glistening with oil, a spread for bread made with sun-dried tomatoes, peppers, and cured fish. Two creamy ensaladillas come next. One riff includes krab stick. The other follows the familiar Russian formula. A meat board carries half a butcher shop in sausage form. Pork cheeks nestle into a steamed bao. Barbecue flatbread arrives piled with chicken, cheese, and sauce, as though California Pizza Kitchen had taken up Spanish.

Nobody objects. There is no space to clear. Plates lean on plates. Glasses get relinquished. Appetite takes over. Snug becomes a footnote. Outside, Alicante performs the same trick on a larger scale.

Cars vanish from streets. Neighborhood party tents, barracas, occupy half-blocks. Restaurants lucky enough to face freed asphalt push their patios past the curb. Roadways become dining rooms, dance floors, bars, and parties. Alicante finds space, fills it. Then finds more.

This is Hogueras de San Juan, Alicante’s annual festival of fire. Across Spain, San Juan welcomes summer with infernos and midnight rituals. Alicante makes it monumental. Enormous sculptures rise in intersections and plazas. Some intricate. Some cartoonish, satirical, wonderfully strange. People stop to photograph details destined to disappear in the cremà, when the monuments go up in flame.

Alicante does not ease into celebration. It engineers it. Neighborhoods commission the monuments, build the barracas, prepare the food, and turn valuable public space into temporary headquarters. Then they welcome everyone in.

More glasses. More tapas. More elbows. More appetites.

From Cuatrolatas, I hear a saxophone. A tuba. A brass band works down the block and stops at the park outside. Percussion underneath, horns above, their rendition of  “Tequila!” with a ska spirit. I leave my plate and pop into the street.

There is no room to dance. People still try with whatever parts still fit. Feet first. Shoulders when possible. At the end, the entire block shouts the only lyric required. “Tequila!” The band moves on. Another block has another band. Brass woos one crowd. Percussion shakes the next.

Women in lace mantillas and gold jewelry pass on their way to somewhere ornate. Men dressed as pirates follow along in their own finery. Another band carries the flower procession, ceremonial now but no less insistent. Alicante has music for lunch, music for dancing, music for parades. Silence is not part of the program. The city is precise about its chaos. It is also hungry.

Alicante is a city of paella. Yes, Valencia, I said it. This afternoon, rice asks too much. It wants a chair and thirty quiet minutes. Hogueras wants another beer and somewhere louder to be. So the city eats on the move. Tapas. Charcuterie. Salty things. Sandwiches. Paella gets a rain check.

We leave Cuatrolatas, catch up, and follow the music. The genre or at least the loudest instrument shifts every couple hundred feet until we reach the fireworks. The streets are shoulder to shoulder. We slip into a packed barraca beside the traffic circle. As close to the pyrotechnics as we can get. Then we look up. 

The sky detonates. The loudest noise I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. “Keep your jaw open,” someone yells, “it helps.” I may disagree.

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Smoke swallows civilization while sparks fall around the baroque column of the Fuente de los Luceros. The tower somehow survives the booming chaos. Stacked balconies on surrounding apartment buildings are packed with celebrants, drinks, fireworks scorecards. Mostly 10s. A few 9s to keep the ignition crew humble.

The open-jaw guy Jaime helps keep this barraca organized. He calls Hogueras the most important celebration of the year. Tourism, commerce, and visibility matter, he suggests. Then he finds the word beneath all of that. “It’s pride,” he says. “We’ve been burning our bonfires and our traditions for like forever.”

The fireworks end. The crowd does not. It wriggles back into the streets aiming for friends, tunes, food. Preferably all three. Inside another barraca, there is no room for another person. So I go in.

Long tables run beneath temporary walls, temporary roof. White plastic chairs press together. Red shirts, straw hats, beer bottles. Bodies fill nearly every gap. Another somehow appears when someone needs it. Another band plays next to the entrance. Feet answer beneath the tables. 

Then a smiling man walks in carrying another tray. The tables are full. More food fits. Somehow.

Cold beer. Catalan sausages. Olives. Black figs. Soft, jammy in the heat. Then coca de tonyina, icon of Hogueras. The golden slab loses a few crumbs over the tablecloth when cut and grabbed. Inside, tuna and onion cooked slowly until savory hits sweet, almost caramelized. A little anise. It travels well, and leaves one hand free for beer.

A cartoonish monument depicting a certain oafish world leader dominates the intersection outside. In here, the art seem almost secondary. Though funny. 

Artists spend months crafting these monuments that will burn to ash two nights from now. The temporary walls and roofs, the tables and chairs, the music. They all disappear or duck behind a curtain for another year. The people begin again.  

I head for another feast, another set of fires. The route carries me north toward Valencia. We pause in Benidorm. 

We sit high above the city at La Terrasse in the Port Benidorm Hotel just before sunset. Skyscrapers line up against the Mediterranean. A DJ checks the sound and bartenders shake their elevated work while Benidorm turns to gold below. Sea, sand, spiked skyline, and mountains meet in one widescreen. 

Rarefied air with room to breathe it. And the hospitality and the menu have changed clothes.

A foie gras “emerald” comes first. A squat little gem painted gold, filled with vermouth jelly, surrounded by blueberry toast. Crimson beet and avocado tartare, mango vinaigrette. Aged picanha peeks beneath tonnata, goat cheese. Croquettes draped in jamón. A plump shrimp concoction that reminds me of a lobster roll. Wrong coast. 

The plates are polished, precise, a bit of theater. Proper wine stems. Soft seats. Enough empty space to recognize as luxury. Glasses fill. Plates multiply. Music drifts through the warm air. 

Down the coast in Alicante, the monuments wait for their flame. From this height and with the southern horizon glowing orange it feels like a preview. Or someone lit the fuse a day early. 

A friend joins for dinner. Adriana distills the season’s arrival into one sentence: “Summer here is experienced collectively.” Across the Comunitat Valenciana, that communal arrival changes shape. Alicante gives it ill-fated monuments and exuberant crowds. Benidorm gives it height and panache. Valencia goes to the beach. 

At L’Alegria de l’Horta on the Malvarrosa Beach promenade, I sit in pressed clothes and drink fine Valencian wine. White, cold, a touch tart. My free hand dangles close enough to touch the sand. I resist. 

Bread comes with alioli and grated tomato. Anchovies shine like silver blades over toast and spiced aioli. Hearty slices of calamari singed on the plancha gleam in the fading sunlight.  Baseball-sized salt cod fritters arrive golden and hot. Garlic oil erupts from the middle. 

Then my lubina arrives. A whole fish split open direct from the grill. Smoky. Simply dressed with oil. A lemon wedge. Crispy fries. No sauce. None needed. I work from the tail toward the head until my plate holds just a frame, some skin, one or two fries I’m saving for no good reason.

From my perch I see thousands of revelers pour from the tram, cars that magically found a parking spot, bikes, and buses. They carry blankets, coolers, and totes with dinner. Each group branches off as they meet the sand with enough equipment to establish a civilization for one night. Small fires start within each pod. Smoke begins to rise.

My fish is a buttery memory. My glass is dry. I step off the restaurant’s orderly little terrace and make a slow serpentine path past makeshift dinner parties. The night grows darker. The beach grows brighter as fires multiply from Malvarrosa down toward the port. I stop counting at 175. 

A sausage spits over open flame. Meat skewers hiss when fat reaches flame. Corn cobs char and pop. Shellfish, bread, beer circulate around firepits dug into sand. A blanket becomes seating. A cooler becomes a table. And a fridge. A plastic crate holds more wood in waiting.

My friend Felipe had explained the ritual back in Alicante. Make a big fire, jump it several times, then jump several waves. “That will welcome summer,” he told me, “and will give you strength and good luck for the whole of the year.” 

On this beach, interpretations vary. Some make deliberate, careful hops. Some leap over flame as friends raise phones and cheer. Some perform feats of strength, flips, aerial dance moves, head-first dives. Possibly singed and mostly sandy, they storm the Mediterranean and return to their grills wet, steaming, and triumphant. 

Children thin out before midnight. The club crowd grows afterward. Elbow room becomes a luxury. Groups become amorphous. Firepit boundaries dissolve. Shoes, bottles, hats, towels, coolers migrate. Blankets become rumpled communal flooring. Jumpers still jump. With increasing altitude and inventiveness and shrinking landing space.

Someone asks me to send a photograph I’ve just taken. We trade Instagram handles. Someone has me hold their phone while they dive through shorebreak. Trust abounds. Someone begs me to jump the fire. I jump. Gingerly. For several minutes, I belong to the beach and to no particular party. It seems a common feeling. 

Alicante builds upward. Monuments, balconies, barracas, fireworks, towers of smoke. Valencia spreads outward. Blanket beside blanket, grill beside grill, body beside body, fire beside fire. The beach becomes one long temporary table. 

By night’s end, campfire settles into my clothes. My dinner had servers, collars, and wineglasses. Beach dinners have coolers, flame, and daredevils. The smoke makes no distinction.

At Cuatrolatas, there was no room for another plate. Another plate arrived. In the barraca, there was no room for another chair. Someone sat down. On Malvarrosa, there was no room for another blanket, another fire, another wet body running back from the sea. They made room.

The monuments burn. The embers go cold. The tents get broken down. The beach empties. What remains is the promise beneath all that food and flame.

Bring everyone back. We will squeeze in.

The post In Spain, summer begins with thrills and feasts appeared first on Salon.com.

The smell hits first, garlic and char on skewered meat, chiles brushed over buns, oyster sauce mingling with the syrupy edge of black vinegar on sizzling noodles. Then comes the sound, clams tossed in hot pans, cleavers pounding roast pork, a Cantonese rock ballad barely rising above the crowd. At Temple Street Night Market, steam rises, neon buzzes, just like the guidebooks promised. 

My first bite of Hong Kong is a fried soup dumpling, filled with truffled pork and that holy trinity, garlic, ginger, scallion. Crisp-bottomed, soft-topped, doused in soy. I eat it standing, careful not to scald my tongue. It’s divine. It’s street food. A memory made to be eaten. But something’s different.

Temple Street Night Market grew after World War II, a “nightclub for regular people,” says the woman beside me, also eating soup dumplings carefully. She remembers when the blocks up to Tin Hau Temple brimmed with food carts, trinkets, and the occasional fortune-teller. COVID changed that. Now food stalls are limited, corralled onto a single block. The rest? Brick-and-mortar, cleaned up, regulated. “It’s a performance,” she says. Still, this is one hell of a dumpling.

I’m not satisfied. Something as embedded and sentimental as street food doesn’t just vanish. I call on two friends, industry insiders at Lee Kum Kee. Yes, that Lee Kum Kee, the ones that invented oyster sauce. Ki Tang and Park Ng are locals, insatiable eaters. If anyone knows where Hong Kong’s old street food pulse still beats, it’s them.

We walk Sham Shui Po, once among the city’s densest working-class food neighborhoods. The differences here are sharp. “Sure, the hygiene issue moved some sellers into shops,” she says,” but Hong Kong-style street foods, they haven’t changed.” We stop at a popular shop, newly under a roof, for cheung fen, rice-flour rolls dressed in sesame, soy, and chile, and eat standing up, like before.

These rice rolls, siu mai dumplings, egg waffles, and curried fish balls, the classics remain. The two agree, the scene’s adapting to keep the favorites around, just in more refined settings. Ki adds, “Many Chinese styles have also come to Hong Kong.” Chinese brands with deep pockets are creatively moving in. Hot and dry noodles with seafood, Beijing crêpes filled with satay beef, Sichuan pancakes stuffed with char siu pork. On food, the mainland is fusing with Hong Kong.

We stop at a northern-style dumpling chain, a new import that’s caught on fast. I try the pork and corn pot-stickers with XO scallop sauce, plump, garlicky, fast. A walkable bite of New Hong Kong. Next, crispy fish-filled siu mai on a stick from a nearby shop. Old-school Hong Kong, salty and hot. The street food menu is expanding. 

QR codes are everywhere we see food. “People are ordering and picking up later,” Park explains, “queues are shorter… delivery apps also help.” A trend that predated COVID, but the pandemic cemented it. Takeaway meant survival for most vendors. The old crowded wait has become a couch scroll until your green bean skewer and brisket noodles appear by e-bike.

Ki and Park peel off, and I continue to walk south toward Tsim Sha Tsui, A long slog, enough to digest and think. I recall correspondence I had with Virginia Chan, founder of Hong Kong’s “Humid with a Chance of Fishballs” food tours. She romantically contends that street food is an “impulse buy – you pass by it, and it smells good, so you buy it to eat quickly.” True. But it does strike a blow to eating-by-app. She also mentioned something I hadn’t considered: Malls.

“The younger generation goes to malls that have a ton of ‘street food’… The plus is that there is air conditioning.” Right again. As rents rise and street-level spots vanish, street food culture perseveres. A/C replaces gritty urban ambiance. Eaters stay cool. Vendors move up.

Walking through the neighborhood, I see take-out windows everywhere. Pandemic innovation or just smart business? Especially at bakeries and cha chaan tengs, Cantonese diners. You don’t have to sit anymore. You walk. Grab a pineapple bun stuffed with ham and butter, a corned beef egg tart, a sourdough one, even pistachio. (Egg tarts—once a humble snack—have gone global and experimental. And they’re good.) You’re off to work in sixty seconds flat. I watch office workers walk off mid-bite, sipping from paper cups of milk tea. 

And that’s the truth I walk away with. Street food isn’t just hawker carts and smoke-filled alleys. Not anymore. It’s not about frenetic, but it is about motion. Food that moves and moves people. To borrow the dim sum moniker, it touches the heart.

It’s still here. Just in new clothes. And still damned delicious.

 

The post Hong Kong street food moved indoors appeared first on Salon.com.

Cornell University has clarified that its dorm kitchens are for cooking food — not butchering bears.

The upstate New York university has now banned students from processing wild animals in shared residential kitchens after two students brought a legally hunted black bear into a dorm last fall and skinned it in a communal cooking space.

The incident occurred in September 2025, when students living in Ganędagǫ Hall reported seeing two classmates processing a black bear in the residence hall’s communal kitchen. Photos circulated among students and eventually reached Cornell University Police.

The students at the Ivy league university had legally hunted the bear off campus and brought it back to the dorm to process the meat, according to the Cornell Daily Sun. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation investigated but determined that no hunting laws had been violated, and no charges were filed.

The legality of the hunt, however, wasn’t the only issue.

Cornell temporarily closed the kitchen following the incident and had the space professionally cleaned before allowing students to use it again. Handling wild game can pose food-safety risks: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that raw or undercooked wild game, including bear meat, can carry trichinella parasites, which cause trichinellosis.

Nearly a year later, Cornell has made its position considerably clearer.

Under updated housing rules, students are prohibited from “skinning, butchering, or otherwise processing wild game animals” inside residential buildings. However, the policy still allows students to store and cook legally obtained game meat.

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The bear incident became something of campus legend in the months afterward. The Cornell Daily Sun even published a satirical guide in April titled “How To Skin a Bear in Your Dorm’s Kitchen” and an sardonic commentary how people have “spotted the ghost of a bear” haunting campus.

There is one final bit of irony: Cornell’s longtime unofficial mascot is Touchdown the Big Red Bear, a tradition dating to 1915, when the football team once adopted a live black bear. Its current incarnation is a student in a big red bear costume performing at sporting games.

More than a century later, Cornell apparently still has bears turning up on campus — though university officials would now prefer students not butcher them in the dorm kitchen.

Cornell’s new dorm policy means students hoping to recreate the episode will now have to take their bear elsewhere. For everyone else sharing the kitchen, that’s probably one less thing to worry about when making dinner.

The post Cornell has a new dorm rule: Don’t butcher bears appeared first on Salon.com.

When Netflix announced the first-ever Chef’s Table Food Festival, bringing 70 internationally acclaimed chefs to Park City for four days of dinners, demonstrations and excursions, I felt something between excitement and apprehension.

The series changed the way I understood food. I wasn’t yet sure whether a festival built around it could preserve the reason why.

If you asked me to name the greatest piece of modern food media, I would hesitate. Without missing a beat, I would say Season 1 Episode 1 of “Chef’s Table.” 

And that answer has been the same for a decade. 

It’s not because I think Massimo Bottura is the greatest chef alive. It wasn’t only the breathtaking cinematography or the immediate fantasy of booking a flight to Modena and a table at Osteria Francescana. 

I’ve returned to it so many times because it permanently changed the way I think about food.

Yes, food media should make you hungry. But the very best examples also make you care about something greater than what’s on the plate. 

I was initially drawn in by Italy. Like so many Italian Americans, I grew up seeing pieces of my family’s history reflected in its food and had an insatiable desire to learn as much as I could about the country my grandparents grew up in. Watching Bottura reinterpret the flavors of Emilia-Romagna felt familiar, even comforting, but that’s not why the episode stayed with me. 

I still think about it and watch it over and over again because it beautifully articulates something I’ve always believed but struggle to find the words to explain.

“Chef’s Table” showed me that food could be a lens through which to understand culture, grief, resilience, identity, and community. It showed me that restaurants weren’t simply places to eat. They were living institutions capable of preserving history, supporting entire local communities, and bringing people together in moments of crisis.

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Looking back now, I can trace so much of my own career back to that realization.

For years, I’ve found myself gravitating towards stories about neighborhood restaurants, family businesses, local farmers, and food traditions — not because they’re quaint or nostalgic, but because they’re windows into something larger. These people have tangible passion and intoxicating energy for what they do. “Chef’s Table” helped open my eyes to the fact that that’s the story. Not the rare ingredients or celebrity guests, the pure, genuine joy for cooking and sharing that with others. 

One moment from Bottura’s episode has lingered most. 

After earthquakes struck Emilia-Romagna in 2012, warehouses collapsed around hundreds of thousands of wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano, threatening the livelihoods of the cheesemakers who depended on them. Bottura responded by creating a recipe for riso cacio e pepe and inviting people around the world to cook it with him. Nearly 40,000 participated, and all 360,000 damaged wheels were sold.

In Bottura’s hands, Parmigiano was never merely an ingredient. It represented years of labor, centuries of knowledge and an entire community’s economic survival.

One of Bottura’s most famous dishes from his three-star Michelin restaurant is the Five Ages of Parmigiano Reggiano, featuring the PDO product at five distinct aging points (24, 30, 36, 40, and 50 months). He manipulates the physical form of the ingredient to showcase different temperatures and textures: souffle, cream, biscuit, foam, and air. 

The dish isn’t about the cheese. It’s about tradition and craftsmanship and protecting your community. 

As Bottura says in the episode, “Cooking is an act of love.” 

It’s not a love expressed through expensive ingredients or elaborate techniques just for the sake of it. It’s expressed through responsibility — to your producers, neighbors, and the place you call home. 

Years after I first watched Bottura’s episode, I read Ruth Reichl’s “Why Food Writing Matters” and felt the shock of recognition. Food writing has been dismissed as frivolous or shallow — as if writing about restaurants somehow exists outside the realm of “real” journalism. Reichl had found the language for something I had understood only emotionally: food journalism belonged in the larger conversation about labor, politics, culture and power. Every person needs to eat, which means every person has a relationship with food that extends beyond the plate.

“Food touches everything we do. And that it is definitely a political issue,” she says, “Every election analyst has pointed to rising food costs as a major concern for voters. Yet despite the evolution of food writing over the last thirty years, consumers still have very little understanding of the forces that drive those costs.”

For the first time, I felt as though I had discovered the tradition I wanted to join.

A cohort of people who pursued and brought light to all genres of food stories. That feeling has become harder to find these days. 

In today’s media, there is simply so much food content competing for our attention. Social media has democratized food storytelling in remarkable ways, but it has also created an endless stream of restaurant rankings, viral menu hacks and “must-try” lists that reward speed over substance. 

Thankfully, there are still creators proving that audiences are hungry for something deeper. Nicholas Nuvan reminds me that thoughtful food storytelling hasn’t disappeared—it has simply adapted. His videos don’t stop at recommending where to eat. They introduce viewers to the people, histories and communities behind a dish, proving what the best food journalists have always known: people don’t just fall in love with dishes, they fall in love with stories.

When Reichl first took over the food section at the LA Times, she got a lot of pushback for covering international restaurants and including recipes for things like goat soup, sea slugs, and eel. She received dozens of letters lamenting the “good old days” of “American” recipes like cola-soaked pork chops, but she didn’t listen.

And isn’t that really what it’s all about? Reichl had the courage to dig deeper and show people a different side of food writing in a time when most people only read the food section for the ads. Not only were readers interested in what she had to say, she helped show people and restaurants of all cultures and styles that their food and their story matters just as much as any Michelin restaurant.  

That’s why I felt a genuine sense of cautious optimism when Netflix announced the Chef’s Table Food Festival. On paper, it’s easy to dismiss it as another celebrity chef event, many of which have become exercises in exclusivity — expensive tickets, buzzy names and Instagrammable bites. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it isn’t what made “Chef’s Table” resonate in the first place.

The series never asked us to admire chefs simply because they were famous. It asked us to understand them. To understand why they cooked, where they came from and what they were trying to preserve. Fame was a byproduct of that curiosity, not the goal.

“I see [the festival] as a celebration of why we come together to eat, why we go to restaurants,” “Chef’s Table” creator David Gelb told Bon Appetit, “That’s paramount and one of the most important things that makes us human. We come together around a hearth, we tell stories, and we eat.”

It wasn’t Bottura’s technical brilliance that changed me. It was his belief that food could be an act of service. That a restaurant could strengthen a community. That a wheel of Parmigiano could represent thousands of livelihoods. And that writing about those things wasn’t frivolous at all.

“Chef’s Table” didn’t convince me to become a food writer, but it convinced me that food could be the vehicle through which I wrote about everything else. 

If the festival can capture even a fraction of that spirit — if it asks us to understand not only famous chefs, but the farmers, artisans, workers and communities behind them — it will be more than another stop on the culinary calendar. It will be a reminder of what food media can offer when it chooses to nourish more than our appetites.

 

 

The post Why “Chef’s Table” still matters appeared first on Salon.com.

This spicy sun-dried tomato pasta salad recipe is our new go-to for summer BBQs, potlucks, picnics, and easy summer lunches. It is incredibly simple to make, with just 7 basic ingredients. Somehow though, it is crazy addictive!  Inspired by a Local Deli We have this deli here in North Jersey that makes awesome sandwiches, but […]

At the end of the debut episode of “The Real Food Show,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spears a single bite of salmon cake and brings it to his lips. “Amazing,” he says, giving chef Andrew Gruel a slack thumbs-up. The salad on the plate — arugula, white beans and sliced apple — remains untouched. Kennedy does not go back for another bite.

“Thank you,” Gruel replies. “First time I’ve cooked for a dignitary.” Kennedy pats him quickly on the back, then turns to the camera. “We’re here today to teach Americans how to eat real food, high-quality food at affordable prices,” he says, “and we’ll see you next time.” 

The bite, it turns out, was less a culmination than an exit cue.

This is the central uncanniness of “The Real Food Show,” which contains all the familiar furniture of a cooking program — the studio kitchen, the chef, the recipe, the price graphics, the ceremonial final bite — but almost none of the curiosity or pleasure that ordinarily gives the form life.

Food is everywhere, but appetite is nowhere.

Officially, “The Real Food Show” is a new HHS cooking series intended to bring the Dietary Guidelines for Americans to life through affordable recipes, easy techniques, practical nutrition advice and special guests preparing their “healthy signature dishes” alongside Kennedy.

(Kennedy is not, apparently, the only member of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet to have recently heard the siren call of the web series. In May, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced “The Great American Road Trip,” a family travelogue starring Duffy, his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, and their nine children. It was supposed to premiere in June; as The Bulwark’s Will Sommer noted this week, August arrived without a single episode. Kennedy may, for now, be the only Cabinet host who has actually managed to get his show on the air.)

The premiere opens with Kennedy standing inside a low-budget digital cornucopia. A red cartoon hunk of steak, a bronzed turkey, a few shrimp, a tub of unsweetened yogurt, an apple and a bag of frozen peas cascade alongside him. The show keeps insisting on “real food” while representing it through some of the fakest, cheapest-looking imagery available.

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Thanks to President Trump, Kennedy announces, “we’ve flipped the food pyramid and put real food back where it belongs, at the center of the American plate.” He plans to travel across the country showing families how to cook delicious, nutritious meals with real ingredients at affordable prices. At the word “affordable,” a blizzard of dollar bills begins to fall behind him.

The digital collage gives way to a more familiar cooking-show fantasy. Kennedy joins Gruel — a chef, restaurateur and prominent opponent of COVID-19 restrictions in 2020 — in a bright white studio kitchen. They wear matching “The Real Food Show” aprons. Behind them, cookbooks line the shelves, fruit has been arranged decoratively across the counters and every surface gleams with aspirational domestic ease. The set, at least, knows exactly what a cooking show is supposed to look like.

Gruel begins with an entirely reasonable proposition. The ingredients will be familiar to home cooks, he says, but he will introduce a few “cheffy tricks” along the way. 

Before much cooking can occur, however, Gruel explains that many Americans are addicted to processed foods because those foods have been chemically engineered to be addictive. With a few whole ingredients, he says, they can make something just as delicious. This, too, is familiar enough advice. What is strange is the air of grim discovery around it, as though the pleasures of cooking with recognizable ingredients had only recently been recovered from a hostile laboratory.

Gruel selects seafood, one of what he calls the country’s “bounty items,” and announces that they will make salmon cakes. The recipe calls for a pound and a half of frozen salmon; an on-screen graphic prices it at $8.99, without naming a retailer or indicating that the fish is on sale. When I checked my local Mariano’s in Chicago, the same amount, even at its sale price, came to about $12. The difference is not ruinous, but it is the first indication that the show may be playing loosely with its promise of meals costing less than $5 per serving.

Gruel notes that home cooks can use another kind of fish, even canned fish — useful, flexible advice that is also so broad as to become generic. Rather than explain how a leaner fish or one packed in oil might change the cake, the recipe simply expands to encompass nearly anything.

There is a brief detour about frozen salmon. Gruel explains that freezing fish kills parasites. Kennedy listens attentively. Given the secretary’s own much-discussed brain-worm story, the moment lands like a joke no one on set appears to notice.

The salmon goes onto a sheet pan. In the kitchen, Gruel recommends rubbing it with avocado oil, salt and fresh herbs. The accompanying graphic quietly offers two additional fats: olive oil and beef tallow, the latter a favorite within the administration’s anti-seed-oil discourse. Viewers are then instructed to roast the fish at 400 degrees for eight minutes. There is no meaningful guidance about the thickness of the fillets, the temperature they should reach or how to tell when they are done.

Yet, the salmon reappears cooked and cooled. Before the hosts can begin flaking it, however, the show pauses to consider why Americans eat so little fish compared with people in Japan.

Kennedy suspects the difference is cultural: In the United States, he says, people tend to think of meat when they think of protein.

It is a curious diagnosis from an administration whose senior officials have lately been swapping notes on a regimen nicknamed the “sauerkraut diet.” Kennedy and several other Cabinet members have reportedly embraced versions of the plan, which emphasizes grass-fed meat and fermented foods while eliminating alcohol and sugary foods. The physician behind it advertises direct consultations costing as much as $18,000. The show, meanwhile, suggests that ordinary Americans priced out of meat try fish — any fish, even canned.

The advice is useful. The asymmetry is difficult to miss.

Then, at last, they cook together. Kennedy flakes the cooled salmon into a metal bowl while Gruel adds an egg, panko, Dijon mustard, chopped red onion, chives, nutritional yeast and avocado-oil mayonnaise. Small price graphics pop up beside the ingredients as they go: 25 cents for the egg, another modest sum for the breadcrumbs. Gruel talks Kennedy through the mixture, offering the kind of loose, adaptable instruction home cooks have received from television chefs for decades.

The recipe proceeds in the key of perfectly fine. The ingredients are accessible, the substitutions sensible, the salmon cakes plausible weeknight fare. The show’s strangeness does not arise from strange cooking advice, but from the ideological burden placed upon it: An ordinary fish cake becomes evidence that Americans might eat their way toward a healthier, more fiscally disciplined nation.

It’s time for a side. 

First, however, Kennedy pauses to relitigate the federal government’s recent nutrition policy. The Biden administration’s dietary guidelines ran 453 pages, he says, with the number offered as self-evident proof of their absurdity. His department threw that work “in the trash,” assembled a new group of nutritionists and, he jokes, locked them in a room for 11 months to produce recommendations actually grounded in science. For decades, Kennedy says, the government has lied to Americans about saturated fat.

When the cooking resumes, several salmon cakes have already been shaped and set aside. Gruel explains that resting allows the panko to absorb moisture, though he does not say how long that takes. The finished cakes are browned and appealing.

 

The side dish is a salad of apples, white beans and greens with a simple vinaigrette. Gruel recalls growing up in what he calls the “microwave generation,” in a house stocked with cereal, pasta, refined carbohydrates and premade salad dressings. He describes himself as having been “addicted” to them. Making your own dressing, he says, is one of the easiest ways to improve your cooking.

He is right. Homemade vinaigrette is quick, inexpensive and generally much better than the bottled kind. But “The Real Food Show” cannot recommend a salad dressing without first convening a tribunal. Pleasure is never quite sufficient justification for cooking something yourself; the viewer must also understand that the old version was artificial, addictive or imposed upon them by a corrupt system. Even the vinaigrette arrives as evidence in a case.

That moral framing has consequences beyond the kitchen. “The Real Food Show” never explicitly argues that a salmon cake can replace a social safety net. Some viewers, however, appear ready to complete the thought. “Exactly the type of videos a HHS secretary should be posting,” one commenter wrote. “Good food = Good health = Drastically reducing healthcare budgets.”

It is only one comment, not an official statement of policy. But it articulates the logic hovering around the episode: If Americans can be taught to eat correctly, perhaps they will require less care — and perhaps the government can spend less providing it. That implication is particularly grim after Trump and congressional Republicans enacted legislation projected to reduce federal Medicaid spending by nearly $1 trillion over a decade and leave over 10 million more people uninsured in 2034. The same law is expected to cut federal SNAP spending by roughly $187 billion through expanded work requirements, narrower eligibility and new costs for states.

None of this makes the show’s basic proposition false. Nourishing food can support good health, and learning to cook can make daily life cheaper, easier and more pleasurable. But nutrition instruction cannot substitute for the money, time, access and medical care required to follow it. The kitchen can do many things. It cannot absorb the obligations of the state.

Back in the studio, the final stretch is the show at its most conventionally useful. Gruel demonstrates a knife-sharpening technique, assembles the salad and plates the salmon cakes. Even with Kennedy looming over the counter more than sous-cheffing beside it, “The Real Food Show” briefly becomes the cooking program it has been dressed to imitate.

Then comes the first and final bite. Kennedy takes a stab at the salmon cake, brings one bite to his mouth and calls it “amazing.” He offers Gruel a lazy thumbs-up, accepts the chef’s joke about cooking for a dignitary and immediately turns to the camera to recite the show’s mission statement.

After an episode filled with warnings about addiction, government deception, processed food and discredited fats, the meal itself receives one adjective and one bite. Kennedy does not remark on its flavor or texture. He does not try the salad. He does not return to the plate.

The food has already performed its function. Nobody has to want a second bite.

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The mind keeps a strange little pantry of its own.

It shelves a photograph you paused over, a dish you ate three summers ago, a flavor combination you praised enthusiastically in public and then apparently continued discussing with yourself in private. Later, it sends an idea forward as though it has arrived whole.

Mine was miso-butter tomato toast.

A friend had recently posted photographs from Barcelona, including several enviable angles of pan con tomate. In one, it sat on a tiny plate beside a chilled vermouth cocktail garnished with a pearl onion on a spear. In another, it occupied an outdoor café table next to an exceptionally good pair of cat-eye sunglasses. I wanted the toast, the cocktail, the sunglasses and, presumably, whatever version of myself knew how to arrange all three so casually.

I had also recently waxed poetic about compound butter during a live discussion on summer entertaining. And after several weeks of 90-degree days, I had become devoted to grating tomatoes, an activity especially suited to weather in which chewing can seem like an unreasonable demand.

The name arrived before the instructions did. I knew it would involve sourdough. I knew the bread would be toasted in the oven, where its entire surface could become evenly crisp rather than merely acquire a few handsome skillet stripes. I knew I wanted unsalted butter and mild white miso. And I knew the finished thing would require some crunch.

It had, in other words, the certainty of a craving and the vagueness of a dream.

Toast is forgiving of this kind of thinking. It is the food of pantry rummagers and refrigerator foragers, and it exists on a curious emotional spectrum. One person says, with defeat, “All I managed today was beans on toast.” Another announces, with delight, “I made these incredible marinated white beans and put them on toast.” I am firmly in the latter camp. Toast is what happens when three unrelated things in the refrigerator agree to become lunch.

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This particular toast only looked improvised. Beneath its casual, slightly rumpled appearance was a specific bit of flavor logic: salt, fat, sweetness, acidity, glutamates upon glutamates.

There is a quiet kitchen principle I return to often: What wants to hold hands?

Spend enough time cooking — or leafing through cookbooks in bed — and you notice certain ingredients keep reaching for one another. Tomato already knows butter from ghee-rich curries, grilled cheese dipped in tomato soup and Marcella Hazan’s famously spare sauce. Miso and butter are just as comfortable together, whether in mashed potatoes or chocolate-chip cookies. The combination needed little persuasion. I only had to decide what shape it would take.

I considered whipping the miso into cold butter, making a compound butter to scrape over oven-hot sourdough before adding tomato slices and crystalline hunks of salt. But I wanted the miso butter to seep into the bread, not merely sit on top of it. I considered basting the tomatoes in butter and stewing them down with miso until soft and glossy. That version sounds wonderful, but it belongs to the first day the temperature slips below 70 degrees.

This was summer. The tomato needed to remain itself.

I melted the butter and miso together until fragrant and faintly nutty, then brushed it over sourdough and baked the slices until deeply golden. I grated a ripe tomato into a bowl, an operation I find disproportionately satisfying. When the skin has collapsed into your palm like a deflated balloon, you lift the box grater and discover an almost implausible amount of ruby pulp underneath it. Apparently, when it comes to shreds and zest, I possess the object permanence of a baby. Every time, the reveal delights me.

I seasoned the tomato with salt and a little garlic powder, which supplied savory warmth without the acridity fresh garlic can bring. I spooned it over the hot toast and finished it with scallions, sesame seeds, black pepper and olive oil.

I had my notebook open beside me, ready to catalogue the toast’s faults. Recipe development has trained me to distrust a dish that works on the first try; it is like meeting someone wonderful on a first date and spending the evening scanning for red flags. I have to be missing something, right?

Perhaps it needed acid. White balsamic, maybe, or a splash of the regular kind. Then I tasted it.

I took another bite before picking up my pen.

“This is a good toast,” I wrote.

Another bite.

“I’m glad I didn’t add vinegar.”

 

 

The post The better way to make tomato toast appeared first on Salon.com.

It’s a $16 disappointment every time.

These days, the airport sandwich tends to emerge from a fluorescent-lit vending machine with a name like Farmer On-the-Go or Nutrition Inc. The machine is usually white, decorated with soothing green or blue iconography meant, I suppose, to conjure grass and sea in one of the least pastoral spaces on earth. Through its glass door, you can survey the foods generally understood to be “healthy,” at least compared with the Panda Express and Cinnabon farther down the concourse: yogurt parfaits with thin geological strata of berries; Caesar and chef salads in plastic clamshells; a few juices and smoothies; wraps, usually Caesar; and sandwiches, almost invariably ham or turkey.

The last time I bought one, I was flying from Louisville to Chicago. It was early, and I was travel-day queasy enough that whatever Smashburger considered a breakfast sandwich seemed unwise. A turkey sandwich and a pack of mint gum appeared to be the more prudent option.

I accepted the disappointment the moment I tapped my debit card: this was not a $16 sandwich.

It came in a rigid plastic triangle sealed with peel-and-stick film—a transparent reliquary for something nobody revered. Condensation had gathered beneath the lid, suggesting freshness, or at least recent contact with the natural world, but when I peeled it back there was a suspicious lack of smell.

The bread was stale. One piece of lettuce was limp; another was somehow entirely lettuce rib. The turkey was fine, and the cheese was technically cheese, though the sandwich had achieved the improbable condition of being simultaneously refrigerator-cold and slightly melted. There were packets of Hellmann’s mayonnaise and mustard at the counter, which helped, but only so much.

This felt particularly insulting because I really, really love sandwiches—not merely as lunch, but as a form. Watching “Scooby-Doo” as a child, I came away with two clear ambitions for adulthood: a side gig solving mysteries and a refrigerator always full of sandwich ingredients. The towering versions assembled by Shaggy and Scooby embodied abundance, customization and the exhilarating possibility that nearly anything could be made better by placing it between two pieces of bread.

The airport sandwich represents the betrayal of that promise. It has presumably been engineered by a team, calibrated for refrigeration and focus-grouped into broad acceptability, yet it feels made by no one. Its chief ambition is endurance: it must survive transit, uncertain demand and an unknowable stretch between gates. Endurance is the full extent of its imagination. 

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Its true opposite is not the restaurant sandwich, constructed by a chef and eaten promptly under ideal conditions. 

It is the beach sandwich: made by everyday people with a zest for life and brine, then carried some distance before being eaten with an appetite sharpened by sun, swimming and the lugging of chairs across hot sand.

Building one brings out the latent chef in nearly everyone. Italian-American shore moms know this. So do dads carrying old-school Igloo coolers, each of whom, I suspect, has strongly held beliefs about bread density, condiment placement and whether tomatoes are worth the risk. These people may never use the phrase “moisture barrier,” but they know where the cheese belongs.

A good beach sandwich is designed not merely to survive the wait but to improve during it. The bread grows slightly more tender. The cheese softens. The sauces settle into the meat and greens. It becomes a little compressed, a little messier and somehow more itself.

Though the Scooby-Doo towers would never make it across the dunes, there are better ways to build a sandwich for adventure. Let me show you.

The beach sandwich blueprint 

Bread is the first and last defense against sogginess, which is why sturdy loaves — focaccia, baguettes, bâtards, Italian bread — shine in beach-sandwich applications. They can take a generous smear of sauce, withstand several hours of compression and still emerge recognizably bread-shaped.

For this sandwich, I wanted ciabatta because it is perhaps the most pillowy of the sturdy breads. It has enough backbone for the journey without requiring the determined chewing that makes lunch feel like a mandibular endurance event. Its open crumb absorbs just enough sauce to become more flavorful as it sits, while the soft crust remains easy to eat on a towel without showering your lap in shards.

Next come the condiments. I am an avowed condiment hound, especially when two sauces are doing different jobs. Double sauce is not necessary, but I like a little indulgence underscoring the practicality of a packable meal.

On one side goes lemon mayonnaise, our acid-fat lever: rich enough to keep the turkey lush, sharp enough to wake it up. On the other goes a coarse, olive-bar-inspired romesco made with jarred roasted peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, salted roasted almonds and smoked paprika. It brings vegetal sweetness, salt, smoke and nubby creaminess without requiring anyone to roast and peel peppers before packing the cooler. Marcona almonds are lovely if you want an amusing high-low dialogue with the potato chips that appear later, though any salted roasted almond will do.

I initially considered Manchego. Its saltiness and nuttiness made perfect sense with the romesco, but I realized I wanted foldiness rather than crystalline hunks. Muenster is less assertive but more accommodating: its mild butteriness stands beside the sauce without competing, and it softens agreeably in summer warmth without becoming stringy or oily. The best beach-sandwich ingredients have promising future states.

Then there is the turkey.

Like all good beach sandwiches, some of this comes down to pure personal desire. I could eat a turkey sandwich every day of my life. I maintain a running ranking of the best ones in Chicago, from the version at my local bánh mì counter—resplendent with pickled daikon and carrots, Vietnamese mayonnaise and soy sauce—to the one at my neighborhood café, served on crackly oat bread and actually worth its fifteen-dollar price tag.

I considered prosciutto, roast beef, cured meats and even a pickle-heavy chickpea salad. All would have worked. But good sandwich architecture is not the same thing as bloodless optimization. At some point, desire gets veto power.

Turkey, baby.

For greens, I turn to arugula. Crisp-head lettuces have their place — I love them on summer sandwiches destined to be eaten immediately — but given enough time, crunch becomes limpness.

Arugula knows how to wilt gracefully. Its peppery bite survives the wait, while the leaves soften into the sauces rather than collapsing into wet ribbons. It also lends the sandwich the air of something procured from a real cute deli, perhaps one with handwritten menu boards and expensive sparkling water.

Finally, the salt-and-vinegar chips go inside.

This is partly whimsy, but also practicality. Their crunch interrupts the softness of the turkey, cheese and sauces; their salt seasons the sandwich; and their pucker sharpens the lemon mayo and smoky-sweet romesco. Tucked against the arugula, they function almost like an extremely unserious vinaigrette.

They will soften somewhat as the sandwich waits, but not entirely. That slightly crushed, partially melded state is the point. A good beach sandwich should not remain frozen in the moment of assembly. It should settle into itself.

How you wrap it matters, too. I prefer parchment paper for the first layer, which allows the bread to breathe and avoids recreating the clammy condensation routine of the airport sandwich. Wrap it snugly enough to hold everything together and encourage a little beneficial compression.

If it is headed into a cooler, place the parchment-wrapped sandwich inside a resealable bag or hard-sided container. The inner layer remains breathable; the outer one protects it from the ice pack and the inevitable little lake at the bottom of the cooler. You are not trying to preserve the sandwich in suspended animation. You are creating the conditions under which it can improve without becoming waterlogged.

And improve it does.

It is delicious fresh. It is better after the walk to the lake and an hour in the water, when the ciabatta has grown slightly more tender, the Muenster has relaxed, the romesco has settled into the turkey and the crushed chips have become one with the peppery greens.

By then, the sandwich has changed, but so have you. Your appetite has been sharpened by sun, distance and swimming, and what you unwrap tastes less like something that survived the journey than something that has been quietly getting ready for you.

That is the true art of the beach sandwich: building something not merely to endure the wait, but to meet you at the other end of it.

 

 

The post The art of the beach sandwich appeared first on Salon.com.

Organic chicken costs on average more than twice as much as conventional chicken, and people buy it in part because they believe that the animals are given a much better life. 

If you’re one of those people, maybe you envision a small farm where flocks of healthy birds split their time between green pastures and spacious barns. When a chicken gets sick or injured, you might picture a veterinarian tending to them, and if they can’t be saved, they’re humanely euthanized. While the chickens aren’t pets, you’d assume that they’re at least not abused.

These are reasonable expectations, given how organic farming is marketed. And organic chicken certification does, on paper, legally require better animal welfare than conventional rearing: more space, fresh air, outdoor access, and other improvements.  

But a new undercover investigation reveals that these expectations may often be far from reality.

Earlier this year, an investigator with the nonprofit Mercy for Animals worked at an organic North Carolina farm that raises chickens for Pilgrim’s Pride, a major supplier of conventional and organic chicken. Pilgrim’s Pride then slaughters the chickens and sells them to Costco and other brands. The farm is also certified as humane by the nonprofit American Humane Society. (Disclosure: I worked at Mercy for Animals prior to joining Vox in 2020.) 

During his roughly 2.5-month stint at the farm, the investigator documented unsanitary living conditions, along with severe neglect — like birds with twisted necks and open wounds — and disturbing cases of outright abuse, including the farm manager leaving birds to die slowly in deadpiles, and euthanizing birds by bludgeoning them with PVC pipes and rakes.

“It was every day that the manager would be bludgeoning chickens to death or burying them alive,” the investigator, who goes by the pseudonym Sam due to the covert nature of his work, told me. 

But many of those in the industry don’t seem to want to talk about it. The farm could not be reached for comment. Hiland Global Certifications, a certifier of organic foods that audits the farm, declined an interview request for this story and did not respond to detailed questions. Costco didn’t respond to an interview request and detailed questions. Pilgrim’s Pride declined an interview request and didn’t answer specific questions. 

In a statement, a spokesperson for Pilgrim’s Pride said that it is “deeply disturbed by the conduct” at the farm, that it has dropped it as a supplier, and that it will initiate additional third-party audits at its supplier farms. 

However, when chicken companies — or supermarkets, for that matter — drop farms as suppliers, they shouldn’t expect that whatever farm they supply from instead will be extraordinarily different; such cruelty has been found over and over and over again in the US poultry industry, including numerous past investigations of farms that supply Pilgrim’s Pride.

What’s notable about this new investigation is that it exposes problems within two beloved, and supposedly more ethical, institutions in American life: Costco — with its higher employee wages and stated commitments to progressive causes — and organic farming, which has long been perceived as a more moral sector of the food industry. 

The investigation also reveals the immense shortcomings of governmental oversight, corporate animal welfare guidelines, and third-party inspectors, because at each step of the supply chain — from the farm, to the chicken supplier, to the organic certifiers and American Humane Society auditors, and finally, to Costco and other corporate buyers — severe animal cruelty appeared to slip through the cracks. 

Organic may not mean what you think (for animals)

The USDA launched its organic certification program in the early 2000s, a time when consumers were increasingly hungry for alternatives to America’s highly industrialized food system. 

When it comes to crops, organic farms can’t grow genetically modified plants or spray their crops with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Organic livestock operations must give their animals organic feed and are also required to give them outdoor access, more barn space, cleaner air, and other higher welfare standards than conventionally raised animals. Euthanasia must also be humane.

The investigated farm at the center of this latest Mercy for Animals investigation has about 100,000 or so live chickens on its premises at any given time, and it does give the birds more room in their barns than a conventional farm.  

Among the main welfare requirements in the USDA organic program, though, this was the only one it appeared to follow. Mercy for Animals alleges that it uncovered numerous organic standard violations at the farm, including:

• Outdoor access: While the farm did have outdoor space for the birds, Sam said he never saw them have access to it. (He said the manager told him Pilgrim’s Pride had a temporary exemption on this rule for farms in the area due to inclement weather that winter and spring, though “there were no major weather events during my employment,” Sam told me.) 
• Safe ammonia levels: Chicken waste emits a lot of ammonia, which at high enough levels can cause respiratory issues and even blindness for the birds. Levels must remain below 25 parts per million, but Sam recorded it reaching up to at least 100 ppm in one barn, which was the highest his reader went.
• Darkness: Organically raised chickens must be given a minimum of eight hours of continuous darkness per day so they can sleep. However, the manager said she only gives them three to four hours (she also told Sam she planned to increase it to eight hours on the day an employee from Pilgrim’s Pride was scheduled to arrive). Chicken producers restrict darkness in order to increase profits, as more light makes the birds eat more and grow faster.

Sam said he documented more than 70 incidences of improper euthanasia, with the farm manager regularly euthanizing sick and injured chickens by bludgeoning them with PVC pipes and rakes. In one instance, the farm manager crushed a bird with a bucket, and in another, slammed a chicken against a wall.

Sam also recorded instances of chickens kicked and thrown. Many birds suffered from severe injuries, like torticollis (twisted neck), leg deformities, and lesions on their bodies and feet, while others were too weak and sick to even stand and walk. 

The investigation illustrates that organic and even basic welfare standards are only as good as their enforcement. The USDA requires organic farms to be inspected yearly, which means that for the vast majority of a given year, farms that flout the rules likely won’t have any meaningful repercussions.  

A spokesperson with the USDA said it is unable to comment on investigations. “Upholding organic integrity and protecting organic producers and consumers is a core mission of NOP [the National Organic Program],” a spokesperson wrote in a statement to Vox. “Part of that mission includes providing due process under the law and allowing certified organic farms to come into compliance when problems occur.” 

Investigations into other organic-certified animal farms have also found organic standard violations and animal neglect and abuse.

The farm is also certified as humane by the nonprofit American Humane Society, which is known to have relatively low standards that are similar to the industry’s own general guidelines. The American Humane Society declined an interview request for this story and didn’t respond to detailed questions. “We have zero tolerance for animal cruelty and abuse,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement to Vox. “We are aware of the video and have launched an independent investigation.”

How to make organic chicken better

Mercy for Animals alleges that the farm in question violated several USDA organic standards. But it’s also important to look at what organic standards don’t include in the first place, like more humane slaughter methods and better breeding. 

Breeding may sound dull and unimportant, but it’s by far the most pressing welfare issue in chicken farming, including on organic farms. The modern chicken has been bred to have abnormally large breasts, which consumers most prize. That makes it hard for their tiny legs to support their top-heavy bodies, and as a result, many have trouble walking and standing, as Sam documented. 

They also grow incredibly fast, which causes some chickens to die prematurely on the farm from painful lung and heart conditions; some die from dehydration or starvation because they can’t stand and walk to reach food and water. Even the president of the World’s Poultry Science Association has acknowledged that chickens’ “existence is painful.”

So many chickens die prematurely on farms that collecting and disposing of them is a primary responsibility for chicken farmhands. “My main job duty was mostly collecting the dead,” Sam told me.

In the wake of these investigations, it’s not uncommon for companies to condemn the cruelty and drop the farm as a supplier. Similarly, many consumers vow to boycott the companies affiliated with an investigated farm.

These instincts are understandable, but they ultimately won’t result in much change for animals. That’s because 80 percent of all chickens in the US are factory-farmed by just 10 companies, they all generally use the same fast-growing chicken breeds and management practices, and most have been investigated only to find cruel treatment and abysmal living conditions. 

To reinforce that point, Sam said that what he witnessed wasn’t exclusive to this one farm or meat company but is rather emblematic of the overall industry’s culture: “Every time we go into a [farm], we find the same things; it’s always animal abuse, animal cruelty.”

In a formal complaint, supported by an affidavit with photo and video evidence, Mercy for Animals is demanding the sheriff’s department in Lee County, North Carolina, to investigate and pursue criminal charges against the farm’s manager for animal cruelty and false advertising based on the many documented organic violations. But the organization’s bigger goal is to push large companies like Costco and its competitors to adopt higher animal welfare standards — and make sure they stick to them.

“This isn’t really about one investigation. … It’s about whether companies with enormous influence are willing to take responsibility for the systems that they create,” Arash Yomtobian, president and CEO of Mercy for Animals, told me. “Costco has the power to reduce suffering for more than [an estimated] 250 million chickens annually through proven reforms, like slower-growing breeds and improved living conditions, yet the company continues to choose profit over accountability.” 

In 2021, Mercy for Animals released an investigation into Costco’s conventional chicken line that found many of the same welfare problems as the latest investigation. Months later, Costco said it gives its birds a little more space than the industry standard and that it was experimenting in giving birds environmental enrichment. The company didn’t follow the group’s urging to use slower-growing breeds that have less painful existences by way of fewer leg deformities and fractures, and lower rates of metabolic disorders. 

Several European countries are moving away from fast-growing chicken breeds, though the US poultry and grocery sectors have largely resisted activist pressure.

Costco says animal welfare is a “moral and ethical obligation.” Pilgrim’s Pride says providing safe and high-quality chicken housing is a priority. The American Humane Society says its standards ensure humane treatment. The USDA says its organic standards strive to align with consumer expectations on animal welfare. These are the nice things companies that sell meat, and the institutions that certify the meat, say. But Sam’s investigation — and more than 200 other ones — prove that reality rarely matches corporate platitudes. 

The most foolproof solution to this systemic cruelty is for consumers to simply eat fewer animal products. But animal advocates and organic food proponents have also proposed a number of solutions to reduce animal suffering on farms, which include:

• Setting higher organic animal welfare standards.
• Passing basic federal welfare laws for conventionally raised livestock (currently there are none for animals on farms and ranches).
• Unannounced, frequent, and thorough organic farm audits; stricter penalties for violators; and making audits free (currently, farms pay certifier companies, which could incentivize certifiers to minimize violations and penalties in order to maintain their clientele).
• Installing CCTV cameras on farms and inside slaughterhouses.

Some groups even want to see the federal government create a dedicated animal welfare agency.  

There is no shortage of ideas on the table to reduce animal suffering on farms and bring more integrity to the many “humane” claims on meat, milk, and egg packages. The question is whether lawmakers and regulators have the courage to implement them.  

The water was at our backs, but everything still looked blue.

It was a Saturday, and the sky above the lake was shockingly clear. The breeze hurried the fluffy clouds along like an invisible, impatient dog walker trying to jostle a pack of Pomeranians past the more interesting signposts and fence posts: a brief stall, then a fluid push forward.

Usually, all that blue would have felt like a gift. That day, walking home from a particularly sad documentary interview, I wasn’t sure it was helping.

Outside of writing this newsletter, I work on radio documentaries with my partner, Stephen. They are creative projects with the sneaky ability to hollow you out sometimes, especially when the story requires you to watch someone move through a series of the hardest days of their life. Not every documentary I’ve worked on has gone that way. This one has.

I carried my messy notes as we walked slowly. Stephen carried a neatly packed bag lined with recorders, headphones and batteries. We were quiet, as we typically are after interviews that heavy, letting our thoughts jostle and cure until we reached a coffee shop — always a coffee shop — where we could log the tape and our first responses to it.

That was when I spotted the Little Free Library.

It stood outside a brick six-flat, also fittingly painted blue, and decorated with a few stickers: “Protect Native Plants,” a rocket ship from a regional space camp, several iridescent birds. Inside, wedged among some children’s CDs—the kind I imagine hip parents buy, with sock monkeys and mandolins on the covers—a book about angel investing and a sweet, self-published chapbook of nature poems, was a copy of “The Secret Garden.”

Eerily, I had made a note only a few days earlier to see whether the real library had it.

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As we dug through the shelves, one of the building’s residents emerged from the front door with the stride of a woman on a mission. She wore no-nonsense sneakers with pink swooshes and carried two FedEx boxes.

“That is very good!” she called as she breezed past.

I couldn’t tell whether she meant the jazz CD Stephen was holding or “The Secret Garden,” but I took it as permission nonetheless and slipped the book into my purse. I’ll return it to another Little Free Library when I’m finished.

At home, I put it on my bedside table, pausing to start the rice cooker on my way. 

I could say that lately I’ve been regarding the things I find nourishing with renewed appreciation. But that sounds more composed than I actually feel. What I really mean is that, in my downtime, I’ve been steeping myself in things I already know will bring me comfort.

This morning, I actually squealed when the library emailed to say my hold on “The Wind in the Willows”—a book I first read in sixth grade—was ready for pickup.

And, more nights than not lately, I’ve been making rice and eggs.

The bowl first entered my regular rotation in 2023, during the great feta-fried-egg boom, though I suspect its staying power has less to do with TikTok than with the state I was in when it found me. I was badly burned out: singed and shaky, waking so often with heart palpitations, sweaty palms and a vague sense of catastrophe that I became intimately acquainted with the way my apartment looked at 3 a.m. Every familiar object — the chair, the laundry basket, the glass of water beside the bed — seemed to acquire a slightly accusatory moonlit outline.

Getting better took a while. The thing that helped most was finding my own secret garden, a nearby bird sanctuary that crags out over Lake Michigan. Each day, I made the three-mile round trip to inspect the warblers, chipmunks and generally mysterious rustlings of the underbrush.

On my recent rereading of “The Secret Garden,” I was delighted by the moment when Mary, initially pale and peevish and uninterested in her breakfast, begins wandering the grounds with a jump rope in hand. The exercise and fresh air work their plain Victorian magic; soon she is ravenous for the porridge waiting at Misselthwaite Manor.

I understood completely. I would come home from the sanctuary hungry and make rice and eggs—if not that evening, then the following morning. Millennial porridge.

It’s funny, my mother used to look at me with an expression that was neither mocking nor exasperated, merely seasoned, and say, “Baby, not everything needs to be a production.”

This applied to rearranging my childhood bedroom furniture after reading about feng shui in a magazine, redoing my makeup when we were already late and, eventually, cooking. Once I learned what a roux was, I wanted every meal to have one. There was a period when dinner seemed to require a mother sauce, three pans and a 45-minute drive to the crunchy health-food store for microgreens that wilted almost immediately.

My mother, an excellent cook, understood repetition better. For years, I would come home from figure-skating practice bruised from falling, exhausted from trying not to fall and tender from the ambient heartache of being a teenager. She would make bowties in a light Parmesan sauce with peas, ham and an indecent amount of black pepper.

Surely she fed me other things. But when I remember that stretch of my life, I remember that bowl arriving again and again. What I failed to appreciate then was that familiarity was part of the offering. Having something good to return to is not a failure of imagination. Traversing the same landscape does not make it less beautiful.

My rice and eggs began with a feta-fried egg over steamed white rice. The rest accumulated slowly and, for the most part, logically: lemon zest for brightness, bacon for savory crunch, avocado for cool richness. Scallions and soy sauce arrived because I add them to almost everything, occasionally without proper cause. Red pepper flakes and everything bagel seasoning cover the remaining territory — heat, funk, nuttiness, crunch — in a few economical shakes.

At some point, the bowl was finished.

Naturally, I continued to interfere with it.

I swiped chili aioli over the top. I added enough hot sauce to drown out the lemon. I became overly generous with the bacon and avocado. I stirred miso butter into the rice, which was delicious but made the entire meal feel as though it had changed its name and moved to another neighborhood.

None of these were bad ideas. They simply were not my bowl.

There is a popular idea that good cooking is a matter of building flavor, and often it is. But it is also the quieter skill of noticing when the building is complete and putting down the hammer.

In my perfect version, the yolk breaks over the hot rice and mingles immediately with the lemon zest, becoming a kind of lazy hollandaise. The soy sauce deepens it; the bacon crackles; the avocado cools everything down. It costs only a few dollars a bowl, even with the avocado behaving like an avocado, but I feel rich when I eat it: nourished, complete and relieved that dinner did not need to become a production before it could take care of me.

Here is exactly how I make it.

This story originally appeared in The Bite, my weekly food newsletter for Salon. If you enjoyed it and would like more essays, recipes, technique explainers and interviews sent straight to your inbox, subscribe here.

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New Zealand’s Māori people often say that food is a feeling, a memory. It talks to your stomach.

Everything in Māori culture is tied to Papatūānuku, Mother Earth, especially its food. Located at the bottom of the world, it’s hard to imagine a place more closely connected to nature, where New Zealand’s Māori communities have long lived in symbiosis with the land. 

“Māori food (kai) concepts acknowledge an interconnectedness with living cycles, which renew and sustain us,” says Michael Venner, director of Kora Tours NZ.

The pristine farms, forests, ocean and rivers serve as the country’s pantry, where Māori food is regional, and ingredients are harvested based on seasonality and availability. 

“By understanding nature’s cycles and natural rhythms. Māori understood the connection between moon, sun, tides and seasons, the way all animals behave,” says Venner. “For example, if you know the correct moon cycle to go fishing on, lay your nets on the right tide, at the right place, you will have a higher success rate.”

A common everyday dish is a hearty stew or a “boil up,” made of pork bones, puha (an indigenous herb) and seafood like mussels, oysters and crayfish, alongside rēwena bread, a sourdough made with a fermented potato starter or a fried bread.

But Hāngī is arguably the most famous Māori cooking technique. Veneer describes it as, “A hot stone oven which cooks food layered inside baskets, covered by a wet cloth. Once partially buried for a few hours, it has roasted and steamed the food, infused notes of forest herbs, earth scents, smoked tea tree, Manuka honey and banana leaf.”

Veneer says if you get the chance to go to a traditional hāngī, do it. These special gatherings are often linked to special community events, like funerals, weddings and ritual occasions.

At Rosewood’s three hotels located throughout New Zealand, the chefs honor this ethically sourced ethos, working with local purveyors and farmers to source indigenous ingredients like beach spinach, fern fronds and abalone. 

During dinner, each guest is given a traditional koha, meaning gift or offering, between the starter and main course. “It’s an opportunity for our chefs to share a thoughtful expression of place, often drawing inspiration from Northland’s rich coastal environment and Māori culinary traditions,” says JT Mulry, Culinary Director at Rosewood Kauri Cliffs.

At Rosewood Kauri Cliffs, they periodically serve a Māori-inspired, multi-course meal. “This dining experience celebrates the traditions, ingredients, and stories of Aotearoa. Traditional techniques, such as hāngī, are paired with native ingredients and locally harvested produce, creating food that is both simple and deeply expressive of place. At its heart, it’s about sharing stories, culture and hospitality through food,” says Mulry.

When European colonizers came to New Zealand in the 1800s, it changed the indigenous food. “Settlers arrived with national foods, preparation and cooking methods,” says Venner. “As more people came, food influence evolved and mixed; rural and urban food traditions, tastes and trends merged into the modern era.”

In Auckland, the Hāngī Master, Rewi Spraggon, honors his ancestors with his traditional hāngī catered cooking. The stones he uses have been passed down through the generations to create staples like a Hāngī Tuturu, a plate of pork, chicken, potato, kumara (New Zealand sweet potatoes), pumpkin, cabbage, stuffing and watercress salad. At his Queenstown food truck, more modern, European-influenced offerings include a chicken Hāngī burger, served with a potato spread, grated apple and watercress salad on a sweet potato bun.

Today, New Zealanders are proud of their food culture. “As New Zealand’s demographics changed, new traditions emerged. Since the 1980s, when people returned from overseas, they added to the menus and our palates changed with them,” says Venner. Now, it’s known for incredible lamb, cheese, wine and fruit inspired by the natural, high-quality, hard-working traditions of generations of Māori.

 

 

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