The Best American Food Writing 2021


Book Description

The year's top food writing, from writers who celebrate the many innovative, comforting, mouthwatering, and culturally rich culinary offerings of our country. Edited by Silvia Killingsworth and renowned chef and author Gabrielle Hamilton. "A year that stopped our food world in its tracks," writes Gabrielle Hamilton in her introduction, reflecting on 2020. The stories in this edition of Best American Food Writing create a stunning portrait of a year that shook the food industry, reminding us of how important restaurants, grocery stores, shelters, and those who work in them are in our lives. From the Sikhs who fed thousands during the pandemic, to the writer who was quarantined with her Michelin-starred chef boyfriend, to the restaurants that served $200-per-person tasting menus to the wealthy as the death toll soared, this superb collection captures the underexposed ills of the industry and the unending power of food to unite us, especially when we need it most. THE BEST AMERICAN FOOD WRITING 2021 INCLUDES - BILL BUFORD - RUBY TANDOH - PRIYA KRISHNA - LIZA MONROY - NAVNEET ALANG - KELSEY MILLER HELEN ROSNER - LIGAYA MISHAN and others




The Best American Food Writing 2020


Book Description

The year's top food writing from writers who celebrate the many innovative, comforting, mouthwatering, and culturally rich culinary offerings of our country. "These are stories about culture," writes J. Kenji López-Alt in his introduction. "About how food shapes people, neighborhoods, and history." This year's Best American Food Writing captures the food industry at a critical moment in history -- from the confrontation of abusive kitchen culture, to the disappearance of the supermarkets, to the rise and fall of celebrity chefs, to the revolution of baby food. Spanning from New York's premier restaurants to the chile factories of New Mexico, this collection lifts a curtain on how food arrives on our plates, revealing extraordinary stories behind what we eat and how we live. THE BEST AMERICAN FOOD WRITING 2020 INCLUDES BURKHARD BILGER, KAT KINSMAN, LAURA HAYES, TAMAR HASPEL, SHO SPAETH, TIM MURPHY and others




The Best American Food Writing 2019


Book Description

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER New York Times best-selling author and James Beard Award winner Samin Nosrat collects the year's finest writing about food and drink. "Good food writing evokes the senses," writes Samin Nosrat, best-selling author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and star of the Netflix adaptation of the book. "It makes us consider divergent viewpoints. It makes us hungry and motivates us to go out into the world in search of new experiences. It charms and angers us, breaks our hearts, and gives us hope. And perhaps most importantly, it creates empathy within us." Whether it's the dizzying array of Kit Kats in Japan, a reclamation of the queer history of tapas, or a spotlight on a day in the life of a restaurant inspector, the work in The Best American Food Writing 2019 will inspire you to pick up a knife and start chopping, but also to think critically about what you're eating and how it came to your plate, while still leaving you clamoring for seconds.




The Best American Food Writing 2022


Book Description

A collection of the year’s top food writing, selected by guest editor Sohla El-Waylly and series editor Silvia Killingsworth. Culinary creator, writer and community advocate, Sohla El-Waylly selects the best twenty articles published in 2021 that celebrate the many innovative, comforting, mouthwatering, and culturally rich culinary offerings of our country.




The Best American Travel Writing 2021


Book Description

A collection of the year's best travel writing selected by Padma Lakshmi




Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America


Book Description

A New York Times Editors' Choice pick Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Wall Street Journal, Food Network, KCRW, WBUR Here & Now, Emma Straub, and Globe and Mail One of the Millions's Most Anticipated Books of 2021 America’s modern culinary history told through the lives of seven pathbreaking chefs and food writers. Who’s really behind America’s appetite for foods from around the globe? This group biography from an electric new voice in food writing honors seven extraordinary women, all immigrants, who left an indelible mark on the way Americans eat today. Taste Makers stretches from World War II to the present, with absorbing and deeply researched portraits of figures including Mexican-born Elena Zelayeta, a blind chef; Marcella Hazan, the deity of Italian cuisine; and Norma Shirley, a champion of Jamaican dishes. In imaginative, lively prose, Mayukh Sen—a queer, brown child of immigrants—reconstructs the lives of these women in vivid and empathetic detail, daring to ask why some were famous in their own time, but not in ours, and why others shine brightly even today. Weaving together histories of food, immigration, and gender, Taste Makers will challenge the way readers look at what’s on their plate—and the women whose labor, overlooked for so long, makes those meals possible.




The Best American Essays 2021


Book Description

A collection of the year's best essays, selected by award-winning journalist and New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz "The world is abundant even in bad times,"guest editor Kathryn Schulz writes in her introduction, "it is lush with interestingness, and always, somewhere, offering up consolation or beauty or humor or happiness, or at least the hope of future happiness."The essays Schulz selected are a powerful time capsule of 2020, showcasing that even if our lives as we knew them stopped, the beauty to be found in them flourished. From an intimate account of nursing a loved one in the early days of the pandemic, to a masterful portrait of grieving the loss of a husband as the country grieved the loss of George Floyd, this collection brilliantly shapes the grief, hardship, and hope of a singular year. The Best American Essays 2021 includes ELIZABETH ALEXANDER - HILTON ALS - GABRIELLE HAMILTON - RUCHIR JOSHI - PATRICIA LOCKWOOD- CLAIRE MESSUD - WESLEY MORRIS - BETH NGUYEN - JESMYN WARD and others




The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021


Book Description

New York Times best-selling author and renowned science journalist Ed Yong compiles the best science and nature writing published in 2020. "The stories I have chosen reflect where I feel the field of science and nature writing has landed, and where it could go," Ed Yong writes in his introduction. "They are often full of tragedy, sometimes laced with wonder, but always deeply aware that science does not exist in a social vacuum. They are beautiful, whether in their clarity of ideas, the elegance of their prose, or often both." The essays in this year's Best American Science and Nature Writing brought clarity to the complexity and bewilderment of 2020 and delivered us necessary information during a global pandemic. From an in-depth look at the moment of the virus's outbreak, to a harrowing personal account of lingering Covid symptoms, to a thoughtful analysis on how the pandemic will impact the environment, these essays, as Yong says, "synthesize, evaluate, dig, unveil, and challenge," imbuing a pivotal moment in history with lucidity and elegance. THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING 2021 INCLUDES - SUSAN ORLEAN - EMILY RABOTEAU - ZEYNEP TUFEKCI - HELEN OUYANG - HEATHER HOGAN BROOKE JARVIS - SARAH ZHANG and others




The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2021


Book Description

Steph Cha, a rising star who brings a fresh perspective as series editor, takes the helm of the new The Best American Mystery and Suspense, with best-selling crime novelist Alafair Burke joining her as the first guest editor. "Crime writers, forgive the pun, are killing it right now creatively," writes guest editor Alafair Burke in her introduction. "It was difficult--painful even--to narrow this year's Best American Mystery and Suspense to only twenty stories." Spanning from a mediocre spa in Florida, to New York's gritty East Village, to death row in Alabama, this collection reveals boundless suspense in small, quiet moments, offering startling twists in the least likely of places. From a powerful response to hateful bullying, to a fight for health care, to a gripping desperation to vote, these stories are equal parts shocking, devastating, and enthralling, revealing the tension pulsing through our everyday lives and affirming that mystery and suspense writing is better than ever before. The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2021includes JENNY BHATT- GAR ANTHONY HAYWOOD- GABINO IGLESIAS- AYA DE LEÓN- LAURA LIPPMAN DELIA C. PITTS- ALEX SEGURA- FAYE SNOWDEN- LISA UNGER and others




The Cooking Gene


Book Description

2018 James Beard Foundation Book of the Year | 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award Winner inWriting | Nominee for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction | #75 on The Root100 2018 A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry—both black and white—through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom. Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. From the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields, Twitty tells his family story through the foods that enabled his ancestors’ survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and travels from Civil War battlefields in Virginia to synagogues in Alabama to Black-owned organic farms in Georgia. As he takes us through his ancestral culinary history, Twitty suggests that healing may come from embracing the discomfort of the Southern past. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep—the power that food has to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together. Illustrations by Stephen Crotts