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“Nature Rarely Births Straight Lines” by Yixin Sun

On Karen Pinchin’s

Kings of Their Own Ocean

(Dutton, 2023)

The art of effective misinformation always contains a grain of truth.

Recently, I was listening to climate skeptic Anthony Watts spew off flaws in climate science methodology, attributing rising temperatures to changes in measurements. He explained that “weather stations have been slowly encroached upon by urbanization and siting issues over the last century, meaning that our urbanization affected the temperature… Anyone who’s ever stood next to a building in the summertime at night, a brick building that’s been out in the summer sun, you stand next to it at night, you can feel the heat radiating off of it.”1 While this is a true phenomenon called the Urban Heat Island Effect, he didn’t explain that climate scientists carefully correct for this in their measurements, and that places untouched by pavement, such as the middle of the ocean, are still experiencing increased temperatures; how is a listener supposed to contextualize his authoritative statements? 

In an age when information is shared at the speed of light, where fake news can be deliberately crafted to mimic the style and format of legitimate news sources, distinguishing between credible and misleading information is increasingly challenging. As a researcher myself, I feel compelled to defend the scientific method and uphold the value of expertise and credentials as pillars of reliable knowledge. But by nature of defining communities and defining the haves and have nots of expertise, there is the flip side that definition necessitates exclusion. 

The complex role of scientists is a touchstone in the book Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas. The king in question is the bluefin tuna, a sleek torpedo-like creature that can shoot through the water at speeds up to 40 miles-per-hour. They are also one of the ocean’s apex predators, influencing and controlling their entire food chain. In this book, journalist Karen Pinchin tells a specific but familiar story, taking a long view spanning several centuries, from the tuna’s initial abundance to the alarming decline and subsequent efforts to implement sustainable fishing practices in the face of growing sushi demand. Early in the book though, Pinchin already hints at the unique lens through which this story will be told: a story where the role of science is continuously challenged, revered, and redefined throughout the book, highlighting science’s ability to educate, whilst maintaining a critical eye to vulnerability to exploitation.

A prime example comes early in the book. Pinchin describes the monumental 1981 meeting in Spain, where scientists and policymakers gathered to respond to the heavy fishing pressures the sushi industry has put on the bluefin stock. Facing a stalemate between North Americans who wanted catch limits to preserve the tuna population and Europeans who refused quotas, the delegates agreed to draw a line at 45° west longitude. This line supposedly reflected scientific belief that bluefin tuna tended to stick to the coasts without significant migration, but nature rarely births straight lines. As early as the 1970s, there was growing evidence that the powerful bluefin tuna, a warm-blooded powerhouse with exceptional speed and vision, simply did not respect this imaginary boundary line and was highly migratory. Regardless, this line gave North American policymakers the claim that they could ostensibly control their half of the fish stock.  

I am an environmental researcher, albeit very different from the types described in the book (I’m mostly click-clacking on my computer rather than chasing magnificent sea creatures). But ultimately all researchers are like cold case detectives, interpreting clues to piece together a truth that no one will ever tell you is right or wrong. Acknowledging uncertainty is integral to the scientific process, but it doesn’t always make for a straightforward headline. Pinchin is keenly aware of this, of the scientific uncertainty that can slide easily into manipulation. As a researcher, I live with scientific uncertainty every day, but also fear the growing distrust of scientific expertise. How do we know if the policymakers in Spain were bad actors? They certainly feel far from the climate deniers running rampant today. How can I distinguish between scientific uncertainty versus scientific manipulation? 

Pinchin’s answer to this comes in the form of Rhode Island boat captain Al Anderson, lifelong fisherman and bluefin enthusiast. Enduring a difficult childhood and born with a clear hunger to learn, fishing offered solace and fascination. His love and curiosity for the bluefin tuna in particular led him to abandon the notion that to be a fisherman meant you had to kill. Al “extolled the satisfaction and karmic virtues of bluefin tagging” and eventually made a living taking clients out to catch, tag, and release fish. In his lifetime, Al managed to tag and release more than 60,000 fish, contributing immensely to early data on the bluefin population, and redefining the capacity of citizen scientists. At times, I felt his resolve approached the point of disorientation, illustrating a level of dedication akin to religious fervor. Al’s method embodies an Edenic vision of the scientific process: a yearning to understand the natural order and a collection of data in service of that curiosity—pure and untainted, an ideal of what we hope for in scientific endeavor. But inevitably, science must engage with bureaucracy, must swim through the social structures that often mire it in murky, politicized waters.

Zeroing in further, Pinchin’s book is woven around one particular bluefin tagged by Al, dubbed Amelia, who was caught three times. The first time in 2004 Narragansett, Rhode Island, by Al. The second time, Amelia was caught in Cape Cod by Molly Lutcavage, a scientist using advanced satellite tagging techniques to break open the data uncertainty that plagues fish science. Pinchin gives us a deeper look at Lutcavage’s career: in particular, her rivalry with Carl Safina, a conservationist. Whereas Lutcavage directly engages fishermen in her research, Safina aims to fight against the industry. Their rivalry encapsulates the difficult contradictions in science; even two people with good intentions can come to vastly different conclusions. 

A decade later, Amelia is caught a third and final time, all the way in the Mediterranean—a testament to the strength of the bluefin whilst directly challenging the 45° line. But as much as this is a story about the fallibility of science, it is also a case study of a messy, nonlinear scientific process that is working. The true test of the scientific method is not how often it gets things right, which is inherently unknowable. The true test is the ability for our social structures to take in new evidence and reincarnate existing knowledge. Amelia’s journeys and Al’s obsession were part of a reincarnation of bluefin expertise, pushing shifts in fisheries’ management policy. 

Pinchin nicely summarizes this idea in her last chapter, writing that, “Science doesn’t hold abstract authority. It is a practice and a profession incrementally built by trial and error over generations, and I am always wary when any one person or institution claims power or authority over its gradual, deeply human process.” Her final thoughts offer comfort for our present predicaments, reminding us that just because there are climate deniers does not mean science is not working; rather, it underscores that science is functioning in a society fraught with power struggles. We should listen to scientists because they do have specific expertise, but in the wrong hands, expertise can look a lot like a power grab. Amelia and Al are a reminder that scrutinizing expertise and expanding the pool of knowledge creators leads to a richer catch of insights. 

  1. “Why the Global Warming Crowd Oversells Its Message,” Spencer Michels with Anthony Watts, PBS News Hour, September, 2012. ↩︎

Yixin Sun is an environmental researcher, currently pursuing a PhD on environmental and development economics at the University of Chicago. She loves a good story and a good dataset, and especially loves it when you combine the two.

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Non-Fiction

“S’more” by Brett Ortler


A combination of a campfire-toasted marshmallow, chocolate, and Graham crackers, the s’more tastes like scary stories, sticky fingers, and summer vacation. But it should come as no surprise that this summertime standard isn’t exactly a light dessert. One s’more is around 200 calories—but it packs up to 20 grams of sugar. That’s the equivalent of eating nearly five teaspoons of raw sugar.

What is surprising, though, is this: all the ingredients that go into a s’more were once considered health foods—and some have even been sold as medicines relatively recently. 

Marsh-mallow

It is hard to imagine a processed puff of sweetness having roots throughout history, and roots in the earth. 

The marsh-mallow plant, Althaea officinalis, is native to Europe, Asia, and Africa, but has been introduced widely, including in the United States and Canada. Fresh leaves are edible and were prized, among others, by the Ancient Romans—who cooked its leaves with garum (a fermented fish sauce), but its roots were also a famine food. 

Throughout much of history, it was arguably better known as a medicine, typically a cough suppressant.

The plant, specifically its root, comes recommended by some of the earliest, best-known sources in Western medicine. Hippocrates recommended mallow in his work On Ulcers, written around 400 BCE. Dioscorides discussed the medicinal plant in his famous Materia Medica (written in the first century BCE), and just a few years later, Pliny the Elder expounded on it at length in book 20 of his Natural History. He reported several uses, some quite similar to benefits often described today “[mallow] leaves dried and boiled down in milk cure very quickly the most racking cough” but others were more unexpected (“a leaf placed on a scorpion paralyzes it”). Perhaps the most wonderful: a claim that whoever swallows half a cyathus (approximately ~1.5 tablespoons) of the [root] juice daily will be immune to all diseases. 

“Marshmallows,” 1751. Courtesy of George Arents Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Once you sort through the hyperbolic reports that Pliny passes on, you get more bits of truth: “It is remarkable that water to which this root has been added thickens in the open air and congeals.” The mucilaginous properties of marshmallow root—it basically turns to an oozy mucus upon contact with water—would eventually lead to its culinary star turn.

Marsh-mallow’s reputation as a healing plant was echoed for centuries. 

It is mentioned in herbals and other lavishly illustrated natural history books from the 17th century, and herbals and gardening books in the 18th. By the 19th-century in the US, the plant was still in demand enough for druggists and pharmacists to advertise it alongside morphine and cocaine.  Marsh-mallow even appeared in the first iteration of the venerable Merck Manual, Merck’s 1899 Manual of Materia Medica.

The marsh-mallow’s oozy goodness eventually caught the eyes of chefs, who discovered that its mucus had a tendency to “fluff up” when aerated—somewhat similar to egg white turning into meringue. As the plant’s healing reputation began to fade with the birth of pharmacology, it became popular as a confection—going from a cough medicine to a treat sold at drugstores and soda fountains in relatively short order. 

It didn’t take long for the candy’s name to become misleading. Just as root beer is no longer made from the sassafras root, confectioners quickly found cheaper, and better-tasting ingredients (the actual plant root had something of an acquired taste). Over time, the primary ingredient in marshmallows changed, first from mallow root, then gum Arabic, and followed not long after, and to this day, by gelatin. Along the way, a host of innovations occurred—from the development of marshmallow molds to contemporary marshmallow extrusion technology.

Marshmallows today do not contain any part of a marsh-mallow plant. Though some people still make them the old-fashioned way, it’s a lot cheaper and (less slimy) to use sugar, gelatin, and cornstarch.

Chocolate

Long before the invention of the chocolate bar, chocolate was a medicine, a sometime-currency, a status symbol, and a sacred substance. 

Its source plant would likely go unrecognized by many who enjoy it. The large, orange, ovular pods of the Theobroma cacao tree contain the bean-like cacao seeds that, when fermented and dried, can be processed into a constellation of products, including chocolate, cocoa powder, cocoa butter, and more. 

Cacao is native to South America’s Amazon basin and was introduced to Central America by ancient civilizations It has been cultivated in these regions for millennia: traces of theobromine, a chemical compound found in cocoa, have been found in artifacts in a site in Ecuador dating back 5,300 years. References to cacao are common in the art and writing of the later Olmecs, Mayans and Aztecs.

For several thousand years running—cocoa, the main ingredient in chocolate—was used in a spicy, invigorating drink known as Chikolatl. This original “hot chocolate” was spicy and frothy.

“The Eccentric Growth of Cacao Pods, Dominica, British West Indies,” 1900. Courtesy of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

In the 16th century, the plant’s importance, and especially its perceived value, didn’t go unnoticed by the invading Spanish. They established the Encomienda system in the regions they seized, forcing Indigenous populations to offer tribute in the form of cacao beans. Cacao (and by extension, chocolate) eventually became a luxury good, first in Spain and then across Europe, produced by the oppressed and enjoyed by their wealthy oppressors. In this respect, things haven’t changed. Cacao is now produced mainly in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, impoverished countries that consume very little of the end products. Multinational corporations, meanwhile, make billions each year. The actual cacao production process, too, is grueling: it involves machetes, toxic herbicides, hot days, and heavy loads. And the workers? At best, they are in penury; at worst, they are enslaved. Many are children, often migrants fleeing instability elsewhere in the region.

From Cacao to Milk Chocolate

The allure of cacao, and by extension, chocolate, in Europe was medicinal as much as culinary, and the unfamiliar plant was often described in hyperbolic medical terms. In Chocolate: or, An Indian Drinke, published in 1652, Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma (translator: James Wadsworth), claimed it cured the “Plague of the Guts,” what we’d now call dysentery.

In Europe, chocolate wasn’t immediately a hit with the masses, however. Almost exclusively served as a drink, it was usually enjoyed by the well-to-do, at least until the mid-19th century. Cocoa, served warm with milk and sweetened, became a mainstay of the Royal Navy. Thousands of pounds of chocolate were even issued to the ill-fated Erebus and Terror of John Franklin’s Lost Expedition.

London : J.S. Fry & Sons, [1889?]

While chocolate was ever-popular in hot chocolate, and used as an ingredient in Victorian desserts, such as puddings and tarts, it really came into its own until it was readily available in a solid form. That didn’t happen until the invention of the cocoa press in 1828, which made producing cocoa powder much simpler. The familiar candy bar followed soon thereafter; it was first produced in 1847.

The arrival of chocolate’s sweet, solid form coincided with upward social mobility in Europe by the middle of the 19th century, and it became what one scholar called a “small luxury” for the working class. 

Chocolate pervades culture today, especially in the U.S., which is home to some of the best chocolatiers on the planet, major chocolate manufacturers like Hershey’s and Mars, and chocolate and cocoa in about every form imaginable. And in certain quarters, chocolate—especially dark chocolate—is once again being hawked as a health food. (Never mind that heavy metal contamination in dark chocolate is a real—and recent concern.)

Perhaps in part because consumers (and manufacturers) want chocolate to be good for us, chocolate has been studied in more than a little detail as a medicinal and dietary compound. In Clinical Nutrition, the journal of the European Society for Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism, a 2018 umbrella review analyzed 240 articles studying chocolate’s effects on health outcomes. The article’s conclusion was no reason to rush to the supermarket: “There is weak evidence to suggest that chocolate consumption may be associated with favorable health outcomes.”

Still, the idea of chocolate as health food is unlikely to go away. It may not improve anyone’s health, but it does help someone’s bottom line.

Graham Cracker

Of the s’more’s three parts, the Graham cracker is by far the youngest component, and maybe the one with the strangest story. 

Graham crackers bear the surname of Sylvester Graham. Born in Connecticut in 1794, Graham was a minister—like his father, who died when Graham was just two—as well as a doctor. He bounced between homes as a child, and at one time spent time doing chores in a tavern. It was there, seeing the results of booze consumption, that his worldview crystallized. 

Graham became one of the rare advocates for both a meatless diet and temperance in the pre-Civil War US. Through a series of well-publicized lectures, which were soon widely distributed in print, Graham became relatively well known and developed a devoted following that verged on cult-like. His message is pretty familiar today; he was what we’d call an advocate of clean eating. He posited that pure, unadulterated foods were, by definition, healthier, and could even prevent disease. On the other hand, diets rife with meat, alcohol, coffee, or “adulterated” foods could lead to physical, moral, and even sociocultural decay. 

Sylvester Graham, 1880. New York: Harper & Brothers. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Despite his radical 19th-century health influencing, Graham is best known for his thoughts on sex. Graham warned young men about the dangers of male masturbation, which, he cautioned, “rendered this life a pilgrimage of pain” and had inevitable digestive, cardiovascular, hepatic, and mental consequences. But intriguingly, Graham’s views of sexuality and food overlap. In both cases, he was fixated on purity and the absence of stimulation.

Graham had especially strong takes on bread and flour. He taught that God himself specified which foods were best-suited for each lifeform, and that bread, if prepared as intended, was among the best for humans. But in Graham’s era, bakeries were baking on a far larger scale than before—and to do so most economically, they employed the chemistry of the time to cut corners, producing, according to Graham, “light and white bread out of extremely poor flour” made edible because “they have also been able to disguise their adulterations.” For Graham, bread was best when it was as unprocessed as possible and made from coarsely ground wheat. 

The earliest Graham bread (or biscuits) were intended to be both as bland and as nutritious as possible. An early recipe is about as basic as you can get: coarsely ground whole-meal wheat flour, milk-warm water, a bit of salt, molasses, baking soda, and yeast. Today, his name is forever appended to a stimulating, sugary snack he would likely have hated. And those Graham crackers? Almost invariably ultra-processed, and made of highly altered and augmented flour. Precisely what Graham feared most.

Graham died relatively young, at 57. The Grand River Times, a Michigan newspaper, didn’t miss an opportunity for one last dig “that vegetable diet, in his case, does not appear to have been peculiarly beneficial.” Still, Graham’s influence persists. Many of the things we consider healthy—whole grains, fresh air, an occasional cold shower or bath—have some connection to Graham. And while Graham’s connection to crackers is orders of magnitude more familiar than the man, his influence didn’t die with him. Some of his proteges are now household names, including the progenitors of the Kellogg and Post cereal brands. And of course, this sex-hating, Presbyterian vegetarian invented the vehicle for the chief delicacy of summer.

History, like life, is weird. You might as well have another s’more.

Brett Ortler is a naturalist, an author, and an editor. His work appears widely, including in Slate, Salon, Fatherly, and many other outlets. He lives in Minnesota. For more, visit www.brettortler.com

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Non-Fiction

“Reflections on Ramadan” by S.B.

It makes sense that Ramadan is so difficult to practice, in its purest form, in such a distracted and desensitized nation. 

Influenced by mystical Islam and other faiths, the Lebanese-American writer Kahlil Gibran wrote The Prophet based on a fictional prophet delivering lessons on life through a series of poetic fables. When asked to talk about about eating and drinking by an old man, he says, 

And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart, / “Your seeds shall live in my body, / And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart, / And your fragrance shall be my breath, / And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.

One must acknowledge the sacrifice that a living, or nonliving, being made in order to provide sustenance for another, and all the ways we are connected to what we eat, he explains. 

Ramadan, the holy month where Muslims fast from food, water, and other desires, urges a similar level of mindfulness and appreciation around sustenance. But I never quite felt the spiritual weight of it when practicing it in my adolescence and young adulthood. The long-gone Ramadan of my childhood was long nights of prayer and tea and treats until sunrise. It was especially sweet when this month, which is based on the lunar calendar and is 10 days earlier each year, would land on my summer vacation. You could sleep until the late afternoon if you wanted.

Once I got to university, I would often break my fast in a rush, alone in my kitchen with leftover food. Having to dedicate a very specific time to eat was often a frustrating inconvenience more than anything; I had assignments to complete. I especially struggled with waking up before sunrise to start my fast, which left me with only a few hours before I had to get ready for work or school.  

I had come to practice a watered down version of Ramadan, I realized. This year, I vowed that things would be different. It was my first Ramadan after my move to New York, and I wanted to truly understand the spiritual realm of the month, not just count the hours until it was time to eat. It also became the first time I truly understood why the Prophet Muhammad, whose teachings Muslims follow around the world, said “he is not a believer whose stomach is filled while his neighbor goes hungry.” 

Throughout the month of Ramadan and for months before, Israel has waged a war of hunger in Gaza. At least 31 Palestinians have died of starvation, including 27 children, ahead of Israel’s plans to further escalate into Rafah, the southernmost part of Gaza where Israel has trapped over a million people. All 2.2 million people in Gaza are facing acute food scarcity, with half of the population on the brink of starvation. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), there has been a critically steep increase in malnutrition, and levels of acute food insecurity have already “far exceeded” the threshold for famine in northern Gaza. Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war, systematically blocking the entry of aid into the Gaza strip and killing those who attempt to deliver it. The rest of us watch helplessly.

Despite not knowing when their next meal will be, countless Muslims in Gaza still decided to fast this past Ramadan. At the same time, millions of Muslims in the United States and around the world were fasting alongside them, some blessed with large, extravagant dinner parties while others persisted despite similarly struggling with constant hunger. (In America, over 12 percent of households are food-insecure.)

Many Americans don’t think much about how their food ends up on their plate, and that includes myself. The average American eats their dinner in under 20 minutes, and 34 percent of Americans eat their dinner alone every day. In contrast, Ramadan requires you to eat with a sense of intentionality: you start your fast at sunrise and break your fast at sunset. That means when the sun dips below the horizon to mark the end of the day, and the imam makes the call to prayer, you pause for a moment to have a date or a sip of water at the very least. Those who have been blessed with more time, often have community iftars and congregational prayers. And those who are unable to fast for medical or other reasons, are instead required to feed someone for 30 days.

But Ramadan doesn’t just force you to slow down. It forces you to strip away any distractions—peel your eyes off whatever Excel sheet you’ve been crunching numbers into, whatever show you’re binging, whatever minor heartbreak you’ve been agonizing over—and pay attention. Pay attention to what is going on inside you, all the internal battles your ego faces. Pay attention to your neighbor, whose struggles you have yet to understand. 

When we can’t even make time to sit down and eat by ourselves—nevermind cook together and share a meal with our loved ones—who will we have time to remember?

This need for reflection goes beyond just food, and speaks to a general lack of awareness of the world at large. In a Gallup survey testing American adults’ knowledge on international issues, only six percent of respondents answered correctly for 80 percent or more of the questions. People are hungry to know more—80 percent agreed it is important to teach foreign policy in high school, yet only 30 percent said that they learned it when they were in school. There are consequences to this lack of foreign policy education. This is the education that leads people to support the bombing of Agrabah, a fictional country that sounds just foreign and middle-eastern enough for people to rally behind its destruction. 

This disconnect is what allowed us to sleep peacefully while Israel created the conditions for famine. Gaza has been under a permanent blockade since 2007, and has experienced restrictions on travel to and from the strip for decades, restricting access to medical care, economic opportunities, and basic sustenance for the Palestinains that live there. Before October 7, almost 80% of Gaza’s population already relied on humanitarian assistance for survival. This forced dependence gives Israel the power to give or withhold food and other necessities at their will. 

It’s been hard for me to think about anything else lately. People say that the war is not about religion. In many ways, I would agree, but it’s difficult to ignore the Palestinians praying amidst the rubble of the mosques Israel bombed, or families breaking their fast with the scraps of food they were able to get amid a suffocating siege. This Ramadan, Muslim worshippers were attacked by Israeli police at Al-Aqsa mosque (thwarting access with force to the holy site is a scene that has been seen in Jerusalem many times before). Israel mockingly dropped leaflets on people in Gaza, the same way they have announced impending air strikes, to commemorate the beginning of Ramadan. 

Palestinians’ faith is what connects them to each other and to their land. In order to defeat them, Israel attempts to sever their spiritual bonds. Muslims understand what it is like to have their sacred connections to food, the earth, and to each other slip through their fingers, or worse, have it be forcibly ripped away from their grasp. I won’t take these things for granted ever again. 

I haven’t quite mastered all my desires yet. Most days, I managed to eat exactly what I was craving, without waiting too long past sunset.  I still struggled to wake up before sunrise, because I had to get up for work on time. But this Ramadan has made me painfully aware of the ways inequality seeps into every aspect of our existence: from how much we get to eat, to how much time for reflection and self-determination we can afford. The only way the oppressive systems of our world function as they are, and will continue to function, is through isolation of the average man from the devastation their country is causing elsewhere. 

The larger community has been similarly reenergized by Ramadan. Every community iftar or prayer I attended included a word or prayer for the people of Palestine. In late March, an iftar hosted by New York Mayor Eric Adams was boycotted by members of the Muslim community, who gathered  for a “people’s iftar” outside with food, prayer and protest, as others also disrupted the event inside. Many refused an invitation to an iftar hosted by President Biden this year, forcing the White House to have a smaller, more modest event with people within his administration. Both Adams and Biden have refused to call for a lasting ceasefire in Gaza. The people refuse to break bread with leaders that do not stand against the starving of their kin. 

I cried the first time I heard the adhan, or call to prayer, in New York, from the speakers of a mosque on Fulton Street. I was heading home from work, late to break my fast, and a food truck was handing out meals to those waiting in line. It was a peaceful, poetic call that signaled for everyone to pause and feed themselves and their neighbor. It stood in such contrast to the lights and sounds of a dwindling rush hour. That we had an entire month dedicated to discipline, reflection, and mutual aid, is a miracle in itself. 

S.B. is a writer based in New York.

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Art & Text

“Invitation to the Feast”

and other works

by Ann Calandro

Tea and Oranges
Watermelon Morning
Dreaming of Gluten
Invitation to the Feast

Ann Calandro is a writer, artist, and classical piano student. Her work appears or is forthcoming in various print and online literary journals, and her artwork has been exhibited and published. She has a master’s degree in English from Washington University in St. Louis. See more artwork at ann-calandro.pixels.com. 

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Fiction

“Tough Bite”

by Evan Kanouse

The tip of Angela Kane’s cigarette flickers as she dusts the stoop outside Kline. She savors a deep inhale as she bends down and takes a seat. Her nicotine breath becomes entangled with the sun’s golden rays. Fatigue drapes over her with each languid puff, weariness etched across her reflection in the dining hall’s tall windows. Poplar leaves beside the pathway are fluttering upward, their branches all bent to one side. 

Perched at the entrance, students ebb and flow. The lunchtime hustle and bustle has finally hushed, granting her a few stolen minutes of quiet. When Angie returns, she’ll swipe their cards, collect their cash, and send them on their way. While others cocoon themselves in thick winter jackets, Angie, with her one free hand, unbuttons her jacket, crumbs tumbling from her crimson exterior. A bronze-colored name tag adorns her right breast. Daylight falls into her as unto the night dew which lingered on thin blades of grass nearby. Puddles cradle small craters of wet: memories of rain, still on the surface.

She has dealt with marriages that had grown dull, the sudden arrival of illness, the intransigence of memory, swells of desire, weather-beaten friends and inadvertent intimacies, the will to change and the inability to change. So she takes fifteen and lights a cigarette.

She lets the new warmth of April settle in like a whisper or a secret. Spring unfurls slow and quiet along the shoreline of the Hudson. She could wait: she had waited, the unhurried pace of the seasons no match to Angie’s fifty-nine years in this town, a quarter of which she spent in this place. Miniscule buds on the trees accompanied precocious students’ big-worded conversations:  “Sartre,” “Heidegger,” “panopticism.” Their nervous energy can be unsettling, like a bum knee and an eight-hour shift. She gently taps her cigarette, watching her breath curl up beside her. She taps her knee—slowly, methodically—as a therapist had once instructed. 

You get used to things, she thinks, without getting used to things.

Angie runs her nails—a deep shade of purple, trimmed down to her fingertips—through her thin blond hair, tucking the loose strands behind her ears. Eyeliner and mascara conspire to create the illusion of eyes deep as weather. Dark folds linger beneath, immune to attempts at camouflage. A metallic cross drapes beneath a plump flap of excess skin which blends together her throat and her neck. 

Easily afraid, always unsettled: she carries something that cannot be set down. Angie is severe, salty, proud, opinionated, and physically imposing (or at least she sees herself that way). She inspires fear and muted amusement from the students, who smile at her tender-hearted but comically incapable warmth. Inside, she is surging with feeling—fear; full and complicated love for her son and sometimes, her ex-husbands; tidal anger. The consequence of looking inward for so many years is her trademark lack of insight; she has the sensitivity of a tuning fork, and so she’s hardened herself against too much sensation. 

Amidst the brisk student traffic, Angie takes another deep inhale. She has gotten used to the various bodies which run in parallel orbit around the college. Tweed-clad college professors, preoccupied and condescending; undergraduates, transient, anxious and absentminded and sometimes unexpectedly, unbelievably kind. Maintenance, B&G, Dining: all caught in the velocity of it all, continuously pulled inward. She observed their comings and goings; the students’ wide-eyed wonder in their freshman year, the pontifical wisdom they wore with honor as they walked with their diploma and she prepared lunch. 

Angie is glad to have landed here. From crafting aircraft breaks to house cleaning and babysitting—it is this role that unexpectedly emerged from the shadows that clung to her. The rhythm of the job became magnetic: the aroma of simmering macaroni, the familiar beep of the register which preserved her sanity (that fragile thing). She resisted the tides that swept others away: the changes, the new jobs, the prospect of something better. Hope was a cancer, she thought, and she didn’t want it. 

By thirty-two, Angie was married and had a daughter. Balancing the demands of work, motherhood, and her illness presented a challenge. Her first husband—and later, her second—didn’t understand. Relationships crumbled as swiftly as they formed, often when she found herself unable to step beyond her own doorstep, consumed by the paralyzing fear that gripped her. The simple act of grocery shopping became an insurmountable weight, and the mere thought of leaving her home sent her off-kilter. 

It was like drowning in cobwebs, she thought, whose sticky maze was spinning about her. A darkness rumbled through her, her soul suffocating in tar. Every heartbeat felt like a seismic tremor that reverberated through the body. This turmoil again and again sent her adrift, tethered only to relentless worry. To come up for air seemed impossible. 

There were days when it was excruciating. Years that seemed perennially rough. Unyielding. Blinding. Something passed over her, like a shadow crossing in front of the sun. Angie’s trepidation was a relentless specter, shrouding her in suffocating panic. She evaded anything that threatened to unleash her fear: public transportation, open spaces, closed spaces, standing in line, bustling crowds, empty rooms—everything, really. Angie’s anxiety held her in a relentless pull and cast a shadow over every move. She sought refuge at home, life remained stable even as it seemed to suffocate her.

It began in the high school at the end of a corridor, that central artery of the arts and sciences and P.E. During a mundane social studies lesson, an insidious panic emerged that constricted Angie’s breath. She felt the stain of some sadness make its way through her. A perceptive teacher sensed her unease and probed with a question, setting off a fire somewhere deep down within. She sought refuge in the girls’ restroom, where Angie huddled in a ball on cold tile, encircled by concerned onlookers who called for help. 

The sequence repeated itself the following day and the next again. She withdrew two months shy of graduation. Her sanctuary became the confines of her home, where stepping outside was laden with dread. A profound worry took root, coercing her into a life of confinement and self-imposed exile. Within the walls she knew best was a fortress, or a jail cell. 

Outside, Angie’s fear held her with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean. Meadows green and bright with sunshine; rivulets of melted snow that ran down craggy mountains, glittering like silver chains; revelations and memories; concrete walls and so many futures—all suddenly beyond her grasp. Time passed and Angie boiled under the surface. Clenched, off balance, prickly. As if pickled in a jar. Some days she shook as though an electric current ran through her.

I can do better, Angie thought. Look, she said, look how I want to live, look how I want to hold on. It was criminal to look out on all that color, all that joy in a world of sadness and misfortune, and not do better. 

In due time she began to patch herself up, to walk down the street again. She found herself learning all the intimate ways that history works itself in, navigating tumultuous swings of antidepressants, experimental treatments, and other drugs. At times, she was a distant, shrouded planet, cloaked in the darkness of side effects and unrest, orbiting her own vexations. At others, her thoughts were a suffocating void where the weight of anxiety bore down upon her. Thinking became an elusive feat; every breath seemed a struggle as she gasped for a smoother, more gentle surface.

Eventually, a faint glimmer eventually began to pierce the darkness. It was like moving into a pocket of warm air. Gradually, the feeling began to wane, and when it returned, it did so only with a dull, medicated intensity. Shattered fragments of life unearthed themselves, and one by one, she picked them up. 

As Angie reached smoother shores, she summoned the courage to attend an interview at the local liberal arts college. They were hiring a part-timer for the kitchen, and she made the leap. At first, she was terrified of the power of her wish—to have an anchor, something to hold onto, outside home—but with time, her nerves receded. Soon, the bustling dining hall, initially foreign territory, began its transformation into her daily routine, an extension of home. 

The place etched its mark on Angie, where she served up routine as the temperamental chefs did meals. She found comfort in the predictable cadence of the job and in the occasional mischief of its occupants. One year, food fights were a daily ritual. Her eyes widened as she caught the sight of a student dashing through the hallway, stark naked. Another, she discovered a pig’s head in the servery. She loved complaining over roast beef and cigarettes almost as much as she loved the antics themselves.

The flow of life gave rise to good days and bad. Through routine, she navigated her little revolutions. When the sun shone, she smiled. Occasionally, her anxiety welled and turned into anger. Inside she was a tempest, a storm brewing as pent-up frustrations flashed—often unexpectedly—at minor figures, when no one could save the students who faltered, forgot their cards, or fell a few dollars short. Students glimpsed her moods, knew when the lights flickered and it was time to rush off. Sometimes even she was dizzy, spinning through the vastness of her emotions, their origin hidden behind the clouds.

Her lighter flicks on and off again as she lights another cigarette. Angie chews on her reflection: a solitary figure on a stoop, another cigarette smoldering between her thick fingers, trying to make her way and still reduced to a crawl. Doubt takes hold, as it often does, and she wonders if something is perhaps just inherently defective about Angela Kane, why this burden has fallen squarely upon her shoulders. Her notes half-broken, limbs creaking in resistance; weight stuck like a dense blanket of snow. A life churning with static. Doctors, lovers, kids and friends: they all seem to slip away through the cracks, out of grasp. 

She thinks about that lost decade, when her world was confined to four walls. It’s gone now, those years swept up with the wind. Life, it seems, has always been like this: never easy. The dread stings as it finds the surface. For Angie time is as big and round as the sky, and to try to make sense of it is like trying to make sense of music and God and why the ocean is so deep. Long ago Angie had known not to try to make sense of these things, the way other people tried to. 

Dinner’s prospects—like the fate of most things—are slim. Typically, the dining hall staff could bring home leftovers, those odds and ends that couldn’t find a place in tomorrow’s reheated menu or the dank basement’s cavernous refrigerators. She’d grown accustomed to TV dinners and the warmth of sloppy seconds. The fare, dripping with its fat and oil, is simple and familiar. But as she rests her wrist on her knee, the thought of lugging a hefty shopping bag feels like a recipe for pain. Her mind scans her freezer at home, its snowy insides with frostbitten meats and containers of pre-seasoned vegetables. 

One more cigarette before she heads back in.

Angie’s always loved food: eating it, cooking it, smelling it, the last bite and the first. All facts laid bare, she just likes it, plain and simple. Perhaps in some other life, it would transport her back to some idyllic childhood, to simpler times that she could keep close. Everyone has one: an illicit affair, a shoe collection, a drinking habit, a full refrigerator. A thread that keeps you connected to the rhythm of life. Three meals, sometimes four: they anchor her. A refuge, where past and future fade out of the foreground and the present moment becomes some kind of relief. Fork in hand, she has control. As the food descends and kindles in her stomach, it fuels the fire, banishing the chill of frigid nights and enveloping her in the heat of summer mornings. 

Those bites, the swallow, the exhale of a single drag. They’re hers. 

Back in her one-bedroom in Tivoli, Angie stays busy. Her curtains sway gently in the breeze, every stitch her own. Amid snapshots of her daughter, her granddaughter, a dog long dead and buried, it’s every bit a gallery of those soft spots that still remain. It’s really all there is to life, she thinks, those photographs caught in the amber of the moment: family and nature, desire and death, stories made from love and joy and scratch. At night, the television flickers to life, casting its warm, mind-numbing glow across the room. Golden Girls. I Love Lucy. When she reaches an end, she just turns back the clock, rewinds and restarts the series over again. A lifeline to something continuous—that, even in the stillness of this small and lonely place, life continues in its beautiful and gut-wrenching hue. 

Nights always close with The Andy Griffith Show because it reminds Angie of her father, whose time was cut short when Angie was twelve. She can still recall the mornings he’d return home from the bakery at the A&P, wet flour and an aroma of freshly baked bread clinging to his clothes. In the kitchen he’d craft velvety mashed potatoes, rich gravy, pork tenderloin in the oven. Flavors all so familiar. 

Overnight, he vanished. In the quiet corners of her mind, Angie navigates her past, retracing the blurred lines between what was and what might have been. In the presence of revolving colleagues and each year’s fresh batch of young faces, she shares his stories: how her father, Richie, toiled as a pinsetter at a bowling alley when he was six; the night he gifted her mother a golden necklace and she threw it in the river; when she was little and they sat on milk crates and collected coal along the Hudson line, and they were happy. 

Their shared moments exist together in delicate layers, like sponge cake or lasagna, fragile images sketched in parchment. A phantom crafted from loose threads of memory. She was so young when he left that Angie wonders whether she created him herself, whether any of what she tells is really true; whether her father is really just a tapestry of fragments and emotions that have emerged from the ether; the strokes of his existence, a dance of light and shadow. 

Angie stamps out the memory, the longing, the fear, the butt of her cigarette, and heads back in.

Evan Kanouse is a writer, artist, and educator. He is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at The New School. He has studied and written about belief systems in education (M.Ed. Educational Leadership, Boston College. M.A. Religious Studies, Fordham University. B.A. Religion, Bard College). He lives in southern Connecticut, where he works at an N-12 independent school and is co-founder of Outbox, a non-profit organization dedicated to LGBTQ-inclusive education.

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Non-Fiction

“The New Approachable Wine List”

by Nikki Palladino

Master Sommelier Rajat Parr, writes in Secrets of the Sommeliers: “What you love to drink is never better than when it’s drunk with what you love to eat.” I’m almost a pro at coursing out a meal, but before I studied wine, I didn’t know how to pair what was on my plate with what could be poured in my glass. For sommeliers, like myself, developing that kind of knowledge base can be a full-time job. And it is. 

Wine mastery goes beyond the palate though: the most successful sommeliers can communicate and curate an experience that is both approachable, yet elevated for guests dining in a restaurant. And, as the profession works to become even more relatable, wine lists present sommeliers with an opportunity to celebrate terroir and to feature wines with different liquid legacies, without pretension, leading to more education, translation, and inclusion, when it comes to talking about wine. Who doesn’t want to course out a full meal without having to rely on tech at a table?  

Before I trained with master sommeliers, who taught me how to pronounce Châteauneuf-du-Pape and spot Sangiovese in a blind tasting, I poured over descriptions of wine labels in wine shops and at wine tastings. I didn’t want wine lists to all look Tuscan to me. My dad is from Italy.

Wine lists are, by their very nature, vital to how sommeliers drive and sustain profits for a restaurant. They help wine professionals justify the cost of adding selections to the cellar if guests dining at their places of business purchase bottles. But multiple factors often drive guests’ decisions to make a purchase or not. And typically, this comes down to the approachability of a wine list and the restaurant’s sommelier, by extension.

During the French Renaissance, being a sommelier was a badge of honor. As Karen MacNeil writes in The Wine Bible, a sommelier (so-mel-YAY), was entrusted with a lord or king’s life; the tradition of tasting wine before serving it was about survival. 

If you’ve ever nosed a cork-tainted wine, then you know the dank, wooly, wet smell and gnarly, even metallic taste. Unfortunately, too many people don’t know how to recognize cork taint and continue to drink a bottle of wine that’s “off.” Whenever possible, sommeliers try to prevent this through proper wine storage, which is key to a wine’s survival.

On the Upper West Side, close to Shakespeare & Co., there used to be this cozy French eatery that I liked to frequent because it offered obscure BTGs (by the glass), think Ugni Blanc, and delicious French onion soup. After I completed Intensive Sommelier Training at the International Culinary Center, I remember it registering one night that all the wine bottles at this place were stored upright on the wall, and it was really stressing me out. Maybe that’s why it closed. No, seriously.

Wines must be “sound” to make it through a meal. That’s where the French café might’ve missed the mark. Their wines weren’t being stored horizontally, without exposure to light or significant temperature changes. My guess is that many of its bottles were sent back because they were corked. So much goes into preserving a wine program at a restaurant. It’s why there’s a higher markup in restaurants than retail. There’s more overhead.

In addition to selecting wines and spirits, sommeliers, or beverage directors with sommeliers reporting to them, running wine programs must track and trace inventory. This includes different types of glassware for beverage service, mix-ins for cocktails and mocktails and miscellaneous wine opening and chilling apparatus like corkscrews, serviettes and wine buckets.

Sommeliers also schedule tasting appointments with distributors and producers. And afterward, plead with beverage directors or managers to bring in the wines from the tasting appointments, promising to move the inventory because they’re different from the wines that are already on the list. It’s a hard sell. It’s a lot of pressure. But we do it because we try to make room for lesser- known wine regions and wine producers to earn a spot where they’ve always belonged: featured on a wine list.

In March of this year, Wine Spectator interviewed Amy Racine, sommelier at Chef Kwame Onwuachi’s restaurant at Lincoln Center, about how to curate a wine list for Tatiana, a groundbreaking Afro-Caribbean concept. Here’s part of Racine’s response:

[The chef, bartender, and cocktail director, and myself] … all from totally different backgrounds, ethnicities, races, genders. We represent a very positive change in the hospitality and beverage industry… I thought, what if we did a minority-and-women-focused wine list? Let’s represent producers that are breaking boundaries. We looked for as many of those producers as we could and also selected wines that best pair with African-diasporic cuisine (influenced heavily by Caribbean and West African cooking).

In that same article, Racine references Foradori, a family-run winery in Trentino-Alto Adige, close to the Austrian border.

Three decades ago, after the unexpected death of her father, Elisabetta Foradori returned to her family’s estate to care for the vines. She could’ve chased market trends, like vintners in Tuscany, who famously ripped up their Sangiovese to plant international varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon. But instead, she focused on cultivating local grapes.1 Namely, Nosiola, Pinot Bianco, and a relative of Syrah, known as Teroldego. Both are richly flavored and intensely fruit-forward. But who would know that grape by name and feel confident ordering it if they saw it for the first time on a wine list?

That’s where Sommeliers shine. With hours of self-study and tasting practice under our belts, it’s gratifying to suggest a new wine to someone, especially when we think they’ll love it, but only if they’re willing to engage with us. But some guests just prefer to scroll through their Vivino app.

Someone in New York City declined my suggestions once, in favor of using their phone. I’ve got to believe realtors encounter a similar apprehension from buyers or sellers preferring FSBO (for sale by owner) transactions. With unfettered access to the internet and no one to guide you, what could go wrong?

A lot, especially when it comes to matching food and wine in a way that’s appetizing without missing the mark. Secrets of Sommeliers, which won a James Beard Award for Beverage, includes many useful quotes, including this one: “The process of narrowing down a pairing involves both trial and error and good taste.” And sommeliers are advanced tasters, at least when compared to non-industry professionals.

While we don’t want to overcomplicate a pairing, we also don’t want to see a meal overwhelmed by the wrong wine. So, we make a point of knowing how the five tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami and a wine’s structure (e.g., racy [acidic] or round [oaked]) contribute to what a guest will experience on their palate with their meal selection. As far as I know, apps like Vivino don’t provide that level of service. It’s job security for now.

Although there’s always the possibility that diners can encounter a wine snob on the job, often, sommeliers are motivated by driving an experience and not just a sale. The best philosophy I’ve encountered to date when it comes to selecting pairings comes from Secrets of the Sommeliers: “Light reds [are] great with fish, and richer whites can pair with certain meats. White wines with a touch of green in them—Albariños, Sancerres, some Greek whites—are usually good paired with green foods like salads and vegetables.” I’d even add Vermentino, Grüner Veltliner, and Pinot Grigio to that list.

But how can we serve guests if they aren’t inclined to engage with us? We can appeal to them through a wine list.

Food writer Sara Dickerman says, “Menus are a literature of control. Menu language, with its hyphens, quotation marks, and random outbursts of foreign words, serve less to describe food than to manage your expectations.”

When creating or editing wine lists, sommeliers make choices. I take the view that wine lists represent texts or tools that the public needs to be able to engage with in order to advance rhetorical action, based on an essay I read in grad school titled, “Ecological, Pedagogical, Public Rhetoric,” co-written by Nathaniel A. Rivers and Ryan P. Weber.

In practice, if a guest orders a cocktail in lieu of a bottle of wine or, worse, takes to social media to tell their followers just how unsavory they found the whole process of navigating the wine list—a true story revealed later in this essay—it’s a missed opportunity for a sale, yes, but also for a wine professional to practice engaging public rhetoric pedagogy.

While to some, wine lists may seem like nothing more than “mundane documents,” according to Rivers and Weber, they help to “mold human behavior.” They have the potential to drive sales and interest in wine or to turn people off completely. Take the following observation: “Sometimes when customers open a wine list and find a lot of verbiage on the page, they don’t want to deal with it,” says Nicole Burke, chef/owner Burke & Black. “But then when a list is just that—a list—and there is nothing to guide [guests], they similarly don’t want to look at it.” 

Before the wine buyer’s revolution, after the mid-2000s, an industry-wide shift to stop arranging wine lists by bin numbers, producers, and prices but little else, a lot of sommeliers stocked cellars based on their desire to get a taste of celebrated Burgundies or rarer wines, rather than appeal to their guests’ particular wine preferences.2 However, that changed when people like Paul Grieco at Terroir, Belinda Chang at The Modern, and Carlton McCoy at Element 47, a few years after that, reinterpreted the content and tone of wine lists so that the form and function, as well as its creator, could take on a whole new (creative) rhetorical discourse.

The wine programs they took over, and wine programs at famous restaurants elsewhere, mostly touted Chardonnays and Cabernets made almost exclusively in Burgundy and Napa. But with these sommeliers at the helm, their wine lists featured Rieslings made in Germany and Austria, Nebbiolos produced in Piedmont, and Cabernets, Syrahs, and Pinot Noirs from the U.S.

As Parr writes in Secrets of the Sommeliers, “Good lists also have diversity. The best wine directors have a democratic sense, wanting everyone to love wine as much as they do, so they will make sure to stock their list with lots of styles at lots of different prices.”

One of my favorite examples of this is Seasons 52, which offers 52 wines by the glass. The BTG list is a joy to navigate. White wines feature prominently at the top, all arranged by varietal (e.g., Sparkling, Sauvignon Blanc, Rosé, Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio), even including a section for “Interesting Whites.”

I like the idea of “interesting” styles because there are popular varietals being made in unusual places, like the Napa Valley. One of my favorite wineries, Matthiasson, produces Ribolla Gialla, an Italian varietal, in the southern part of Napa Valley. They’re serious vintners making serious wine in a place seriously obsessed with Bordeaux varietals. “Interesting” to say the least. Although they’re not presently on the BTG list, Seasons 52 is featuring Band of Vintners—wine that’s made and priced fairly by industry vets. That’s why I’ve got a hunch that the beverage directors at Seasons rotated through bottles of Matthiasson at one time or another.  

I mention Matthiasson, the husband-and-wife winegrowing and winemaking team, here because they are opening doors with their internship program which provides entry for women into the farming side of their business; their involvement with the Two Eighty Project empowers anyone and everyone to learn how to make, manage, teach, and sell wine. It’s all part of how they run their business. They’re regenerative farmers. I think you might even be able to taste their thoughtful philosophy.

On a list Ribolla Gialla might not mean anything to the average wine drinker, but it does to me. I got to visit the Matthiasson’s yellow house and taste their wines under a fig tree, after I passed my Certified exam in 2018, through the Court of Master Sommeliers. The following spring, I had the privilege of tasting Laura Felluga’s family’s Ribolla Gialla while working for Lidia Bastianich’s hospitality group and later attending Vinitaly in Verona. I mention that here because if I said that to someone out of context, I would probably sound like a wine snob. 

Sommeliers get a lot of scrutiny. We deserve some of it, especially The Washington Post coverage back in 2020 from Dave McIntyre, decrying restaurant wine lists that intimidate “even the dining pros.” As McIntyre writes:

The language of wine can be intimidating. Wine lovers have our own vocabulary, complete with foreign words that can be difficult to pronounce…. All this leads to the stereotype of the wine snob lording knowledge over the rest of the world. And of course, there’s the snooty sommelier who intimidates diners with an impenetrable list and an imposing demeanor. Most sommeliers I’ve met here in Washington and elsewhere take great pains to dispel that stereotype, but the negative image seems to be alive and well.

The article then references Helen Rosner, famed food writer for the New Yorker. And her now famous X (formerly Twitter) rant:

I am an actual professional restaurant eater and I still have no … clue which of the many many words on a wine list is the one word I’m supposed to say to indicate that this is the wine I want a glass of.

Judging by Rosner’s tweet and McIntyre’s motivation to write the article, the snooty sommelier stereotype still exists.

But our profession is and deserves to be distinguished. Not because of Wine Spectator’s acclaimed Restaurant Awards program, now entering its 43rd year or due to coveted titles Wine Enthusiast bestows on a “Sommelier/Beverage Director of the Year.” (Fun fact: Seasons 52 boasts a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence.)

Setting aside the fact that healthy disagreement exists within the industry about who can refer to themself as a sommelier, (I’m partial to the idea that you can call yourself a Sommelier, even if you no longer work on the floor of a restaurant) our profession deserves more praise than Twitter punishment because our job is to do more than sell: it is to educate. 

That’s why I think the food and wine writing category has become so popular in the last four decades. But some bad press is good, especially if it forces people in the industry to pay attention to and reshape our approach to our rhetorical activity. Other press is just in bad taste.

If there’s a takeaway from Helen Rosner’s criticisms about unreadable wine lists, let it be, as Rivers and Weber write, that we bring together “disconnected threads.” Let the “we” be the wine industry and let us take our menus (e.g., mundane documents), snobs (e.g., interpersonal networks), exclusionary hiring practices (e.g., rhetorical moves and countermoves), and grapple with this “messy ecology of public discourse.” We and you deserve so much more than Sip. Swirl. Repeat.

  1. Louis/Dressner Selections, https://louisdressner.com/articles/an-interview-with-elisabetta-foradori. ↩︎
  2. Sciaretta, Gillian. “Biography of a Wine List,” Wine Spectator, 31 Aug. 2018, pp. 63.
    ↩︎

Nikki Palladino, a full-time copywriter, enrolled in the graduate writing studies program at Saint Joseph’s University to write about her passions, food and wine. She has worked as a sommelier on the floors of Lupa and Oceana in Manhattan and also, as the program coordinator for the Wine Studies Program at The International Culinary Center. Her creative nonfiction explores the culture and personality of the wine and hospitality industries and she’s currently at work on a young adult novel about a first-gen Italian American teen with a passion for pastry arts. Follow her @nikki_pall .

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Fiction

“Something to Drink”

by Casey Adrian

“All of our food is grown, raised, and caught Upstate,” Terrence said. He and his trainee walked out of the cooler— tubs of sliced lemons in their arms, stocking the dining room for dinner service. The heart of the kitchen was loud with the churning sounds of machinery, the fine chopping of parsley, deep sinks filling with ice and cold water. A chef scraped the grill with a bent spatula, digging up black soot and smelling of smoke. “The eggs and the beef are from local farms; the fish are caught in the lakes. Our produce is grown nearby.” They turned into the kitchen alley. Terrence emptied lemon wedges into a silver pan—seeds and juice splashing against stainless steel countertops and forming sour puddles. The sight of the yellow fruit made the trainee’s mouth jolt, bringing her tongue to life. “The shellfish are from New England,” he admitted. “But Chef can’t go without mussels.”

It was a Saturday night, the first of June, and it was humid. Terrence was sure that it was going to be busy. By seven o’clock, the bar would run out of fresh mint and they would have to start improvising; all of the lake trout would be gone by sunset and Chef would begin shouting and cursing in frustration, dripping sweat from her brow and onto the tile; the kitchen would become tense and booming and airless; the dining room would fill with patient bodies, breathing in each other’s heavy air, talking of trivial and faraway things. Terrence’s joints would stiffen by the end of the night. He would be dry-swallowing painkillers in any inconsequential moment of freetime.

But being busy was good. A busy Saturday meant that there would be lots of distractions to center his mind. The young servers, like ballerinas falling from their pointe shoes, would become flustered by their full sections and give a table to him. He would welcome six or seven parties at once—welcoming six or seven gratuities. A bounty of cash would grow in his pocket, allowing him to splurge on a bottle of post-shift rosé.

His life was full of these contradictions: he wanted Saturday to be both busy and slow; the grapefruit margarita was bitter and tart; he loved serving and he hated it; he missed Hudson and wanted him dead. Maybe these contradictions came with age. Maybe he was a contradictory person. Either way, he felt those busy nights in his bones.

At The Anchor, the first of June marked the resurrection of the summer menu. It was Terrence’s thirty-eighth June at the restaurant.

“I’m drowning.” One of the younger servers grabbed Terrence’s arm, churning the black sleeve of his dress shirt like a pepper grinder. He was standing at a P.O.S. in the dining room, sending drinks to the bar. His trainee loomed beside him like a shadow. “Can you greet Table 14? Or take them? I don’t care. I’m going to kill that new hostess.”

As he expected, it would be his seventh table. He agreed.

In fleeting moments of tenderness, Terrence saw himself in the new servers. He saw himself when they came drifting into the restaurant in their clean, black clothes. He remembered fumbling with corkscrews—when a glass of water would slip from his hand and onto the tile. He was especially reminded of himself when they came as he had: in a pair.

“My boyfriend and I got hired together,” the trainee said. She was pretty and clear-skinned and went to one of the colleges in town. She couldn’t have been older than twenty-one, claiming to have service experience from a restaurant back home, wherever that was. “He’s training as a barback.”

Terrence was always amused when a couple got hired together. He watched how they engaged with each other, asking their partner for special favors and treating these tasks with a particular seriousness. He could always tell when they had been fighting or fucking before a shift—how they saw each other in the black uniforms of The Anchor versus the colorful clothes of the real world.

“Try to keep your work lives and personal lives separate,” he said to the trainee. He rolled the sentiment in a fine coat of sugar, not taking his eyes from the screen.

“We will. It helps that he’s behind the bar and I’m on the floor, I guess.” She took a sharp breath, matching the surrounding sounds of silverware. “It’s exciting to be here together, though. I never want to leave his side and now I don’t have to.”

“Just make sure that you know what you want.”

She nodded without knowing what he meant.

He finished at the P.O.S. and turned toward the bar.

“To work here, you’ll need to know how to eat seasonally.” Terrence and the trainee approached the service corner, scanning the counter for their drinks. He was always walking just a few steps in front of her. “For example, on the first of June—the first day of the summer menu—I would never recommend the mussels. It’s too early in the season and too close to their spawning.”

“Spawning?”

“When they release their eggs. It weakens them. They start to smell rancid.”

From across the counter, the new barback approached Terrence’s trainee. “How are you doing out there, babe?” He used tattooed forearms to pop the cap from a bottle of ale. It was the color of gold, crisp and malted, breathing citrus fumes.

“Trying my best.”

“I’m sure you’re doing great. You look gorgeous on the floor.”

She rolled her eyes, morphing into something playful and coy. “You look hot behind the bar.”

Terrence snatched the sweaty bottle from the boy’s hands. A fragmented memory of his youth dripped down his throat and he swallowed it away. “The galley needs ice,” he barked.

He looked back at the girl beside him. “Table 43 must be in the window. Let’s go.”

“Do you know the wine list?” They entered the kitchen alley. It was busy with backwaiters.

Intensity spilled from the line and engulfed the space in a steady hum. Seared fish and charcoal pierced through the watery air. They tucked themselves into a back corner, speaking quietly. The energy was too fragile and sanctified; it could easily have been thrown off by such conversations.

The trainee thought of the wine list. She tried to center herself in the strange sea of noise and scent. Her senses were being provoked and her synapses had trouble keeping up. She couldn’t overlook Terrence’s snarling. “More or less.”

“What would you pair with the blackened trout?”

She hung in the air, her mouth ajar.

From the window, the expo started shouting. “Runner, Table 43!”

“A dry riesling,” Terrence answered for her. “The acid counteracts the spice. You don’t want anything with oak.” He swatted at the backwaiters so that he could grab the tray.

When Terrence and Hudson started at The Anchor—back when their skin was elastic, dotted with dimples and acne scars—they had been the same way. The wine list was not yet scripture. The grilled bass was not a glorious relic of the lake, but something to be chewed quickly and chased with beer. But Terrence stayed up at night to study. He laid cardstock pages and half-empty bottles on the bedroom floor, straining to distinguish one cabernet from another. He mapped the anatomy of the tongue. He dreamt of oysters and woke in a milky haze.

Hudson, on the other hand, was the kind of boy who ate fast food in the driver’s seat. He drank his coffee with three spoonfuls of sugar. He never cared for a hit of adrenaline or a complex taste. During the rush of service, Hudson longed for a corporate career, a tidy cubicle with a framed photo of his family.

“I just wish that you would take this place more seriously,” Terrence said once. “You need to learn this stuff.” They were standing in the same, private corner of the alley. Hudson, for the third time that week, had misplaced an order, and Chef screamed and threw a pan in response, calling him all kinds of names.

Hudson unrolled some noise from his throat. “And you need to lighten up.” He motioned around the kitchen, all of its cathedral glory. “This whole place,” he gestured, “is just a means to an end.”

“To me, it’s more than that.”

“It can’t last forever. You can’t work here for the rest of your life.” A backwaiter brushed past Hudson’s shoulder. He lowered his voice, but the sentiment stayed the same—his tone like the snapped sound of a rubber band. “How can you settle down in a place like this?”

Terrence and his trainee dropped the food at Table 43. A filet mignon, tender and bloody and blue rare. Landlocked salmon, baked with brown sugar and served with steak fries. Angel hair pasta with steamed clams. 

When they left the table, the trainee turned over her shoulder, balancing a tray of bread plates in shaky hands. She was unpolished, Terrence knew, but she had potential. He could tell by the look in her eye. “How long have you been working here?”

“Almost forty years.”

She turned from the tray for just a second. “Wow.” She couldn’t have imagined the passing of four decades; it existed in her mind only as a hypothetical. “You must be happy here.”

It wasn’t as simple as that. There were parts of it that had never grown old: the fast and abundant money, the food, the mind-erasing stampede of service—all of the things which he loved at the beginning and continued to love until the end. It was a rush that he couldn’t have found anywhere else. It was an addiction that he had never seemed to shake. His old friends had pills and powders. Terrence had this.

Instead, he simply nodded, saying, “I am.”

Table 14 was occupied by four guests—a middle-aged couple and two teen boys. “I’ll get them drinks,” he told the girl. “Go empty your tray and check the kitchen for food.”

The trainee did as she was instructed. Terrence was certain that she would drop the tray, shove the dishes in front of a new, flat-lipped dishwasher, and meet her lover behind the bar. Maybe she would tell her boyfriend that Terrence scared her. Maybe they would sneak a shot of rum. Maybe, only under the dim, revealing light of the restaurant—a fantastical force that stripped all pretenses away—she would discover her lover’s first flaw. 

Terrence took a breath and approached the table of four. It was no different than any other night; he had done this dance a thousand times.

“Good evening, everyone.”

At one point in time, Terrence thought that he and Hudson could make it work. He lied to himself, saying that they could understand each other in spite of their differences—in spite of Hudson’s hatred of service, his immature palate, his lust for stability. But when Hudson gave his resignation from The Anchor, so too did he pack his bags and leave Terrence’s world altogether. “We want different things,” he said. “And you’ll always be loyal to that restaurant.”

In the sore and surreal years that followed their split, the boys grew in their own directions. They picked up the shattered pieces of their lives, stitching them together into different shapes, something new but vaguely familiar. Hudson got his desk job, his tie laced tightly around his neck each morning, returned to his new home at five o’clock each evening. Terrence heard through the grapevine—a vine of Concord, tart and strong—that he was doing well.

And Terrence, in those early years of his new life, did well also. He became the sounds and scents of The Anchor. He tasted subtle flavors that he’d always been told about but had never experienced for himself. “I get it now,” Terrence, one night, said to no one in particular—holding the stem of a wine glass between two fingers. A bead of chardonnay collected on his bottom lip. For the first time, he realized what it meant for a wine to be buttery. “I understand what they mean.”

From Table 14, Hudson looked up at Terrence. The skin on his face had ripened, fine lines spreading around his lips. His hair sprouted gray like weeds in a garden. He wore the same cologne.

“Terrence,” he breathed.

A world of memories unleashed themselves from Terrence’s chest, banging against the surface of his skin. They showed themselves in the goosebumps on his neck.

“There’s no way that it’s really you.” Hudson was smiling. He looked like he may stand to hug Terrence, but he did not.

“It’s me.” Terrence became conscious of his hands. 

“How have you been?”

Some small and dormant part of Terrence, some sensitive spot on the back of his tongue, wanted to say all kinds of things. Wanted to shatter glass on the floor and stomp it into the carpet. Wanted to swing his arms and be dragged into the kitchen by the younger, more naive servers—ones with young hands and muscles and fantasies like he once had, who would reconvene in the beer cooler to snort white powder and mock his pain. He wanted to make a fist-shaped hole in the kitchen wall. He wanted to scream and sob and ask questions and demand answers.

But Terrence had grown up. Granted, he thought that he was grown back then—back when he knew the taste of Hudson’s mouth. Now, though, he was old enough to settle this leftover part of himself. “I’ve been good,” Terrence said. “Really good, actually.”

The man beside Hudson had clean fingernails and straight teeth. The boys at the opposite end of the table were scruffy-haired and fat-cheeked—the strong bones of someone raised on whole milk and full nights of sleep. “This is my family,” Hudson said. Terrence imagined that they lived in a three-bedroom house in the suburbs, a family dog that they took on walks each morning, a glass of boxed wine each night. He imagined that their family photo was framed on Hudson’s desk. “Everyone, this is Terrence.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” his husband said. His sons, in their adolescent shrill, said the same. The boys smiled at Terrence and Terrence smiled back. They were so young, unaware of Terrence’s mark on their father’s history. Maybe his husband was unaware also. 

“All these years and you’re still here.” Hudson’s smile was unwavering. It was like a song that Terrence had long forgotten. Terrence, though he always assumed the worst at times like this, knew that it was sincere. “I knew that you’d stick around.”

“It’s never grown old,” Terrence said. “I’m the head server now.”

In a few minutes, Hudson would order the fish and chips. He would ask for his water to be flat. Terrence would offer the oysters as an appetizer, thinking that something might have changed in him, and Hudson and his family would refuse. They would order the mussels, instead. Hudson knew nothing about their spawning. He would never learn these things, and that was okay.

It was not yet seven o’clock, but, around him, the restaurant was beginning to move at that pace. It was drippy and conniving in this way—the way a trickle transforms into a flash flood. A crowd of guests had begun gathering in the lobby. Soon, they’d be out of the lake trout. 

Terrence wondered if Hudson noticed the vertical line between his brows or the way that his knuckles had swollen—if Hudson could feel the constant, dull ache in the small of Terrence’s back.

“The head server,” Hudson echoed. “I’m happy for you.”

Terrence smiled. He and Hudson had made their choices. They found their loves, they ran to them, and they wound up in different places. “I’m happy for you, as well,” he said. He felt good knowing that he meant it.

He removed the black book from his apron pocket. Receipts and loose bills tried to pull themselves from the plastic binding. Terrence clicked the trigger of a pen. Around him, the restaurant was alive. “Can I show you the wine list?”

Casey Adrian is a writer and social science researcher, currently pursuing a Master of Social Work at Binghamton University. His academic and creative work focus on young love, sexual politics, and the bittersweet taste of heartbreak. When he is not writing or researching, he is moonlighting as a waiter. Casey lives in Upstate New York and can be found at caseyadrian.com. This is his debut short story publication.

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Service Issue

Letter from the Editors:

On Service

In the Inquisitive Eater’s inaugural special issue, our contributors take on a weighty theme: service. Our relationship to the food service industry can bear so many developmental milestones and societal interludes. This landscape is the scene of first jobs, second jobs, lifestyles, communities, addiction, direction, misdirection; it supports first dates and caffeine habits and those who’ve had the kind of day where making a meal for themselves seems an impossible task; it is a stage in which one can try to impress or be made to feel inferior, whether in back of house, front of house, or at the table. 

Like so many creatives, the editors of Inquisitive Eater have worked in a number of service industry roles to help support our lives and aspirations. In this way, the artist’s life is often entangled with a life of service. It is a path that offers strange hours and new characters and hard work and wages that might pay the rent but never seem quite enough for financial unburdening. In service you establish inexplicable bonds with coworkers, and work double shifts in your dreams, and field an onslaught of human behavior that can elicit sentiments of endearment or disdain in an instant. 

Mulling over service seems to be a growing part of the zeitgeist. Shows like The Bear have garnered a voracious fandom where the dysfunctions of restaurant operations have been romanticized despite its apt portrayal of physical and mental unrest; yes chef is thrown around in home kitchens and social media sketches as something humorous, something sexy. The proliferation of tipping prompts at checkout is eliciting a building ire from the American public that is pushing us to question the blurry guidelines of who we tip and how much. In many US cities, a staffing shortage of service industry jobs has lingered since the pandemic. 

Societal roles which for so long got drowned out within the hum of daily life are vibrating at a frequency that demands attention. 

The stories, poetics, and pressing questions of service are brought into conversation with one another in this Service Issue. Casey Adrian brings into focus how a passion for service and its rhythms can come at the cost of personal relationships. Sommelier Nikki Palladino breaks down the implications of an unapproachable wine list. Evan Kanouse’s piece explores service as a stabilizing force in the face of personal demons. Vanessa Ogle captures a melancholic monotony in her poem, and Marisol Aveline Delarosa tackles the slippery beast that is tipping culture.

We see this issue as the start of many more wonderful investigations to come: when it comes to the way we eat, the way we drink, there is a lot to unwrap. But for now, we welcome you to embrace the slowness and chaos of this holiday week with some tasty food writing. We hope you leave uncomfortably full.

Best,
Madison Ford, Brianna Lopez, and the editors of the Inquisitive Eater

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Poetry

“Internal Dragons”

by Kirsten Shu-ying Chen



The guy drinking Seven Tails on the rocks scoops a lemon from his glass and lets the flea live.
What else is mercy but a way of wedging between worlds—the invitational body first
submerged, then lifted and let through, D’Angelo on in the background the whole time singing
Lord knows how far that I and I will fall behind. And Jesus Christ, he says next—not D’Angelo.
Not Jesus (at present he is nowhere to be found). But the guy with the Seven Tails—a nickname
which, when repeated enough, becomes biblical, whips you beastly into, yes the past, but also the
multiverse of all the pain you’ve ever caused. It isn’t saying sorry that’s hard. It’s knowing it
isn’t enough. Jesus Christ, a six-hour flight, says Seven Tails. And I think about Jesus learning
of air travel. How much faster he could’ve got home or at least somewhere he belonged. And I
don’t mean in the footprint of God. It’s not the flea’s salvation either. Poor guy, wings stripped,
slipping aimless now in a desert of marble. Maybe this wasn’t about mercy at all.

Kirsten Shu-ying Chen is the author of Light Waves (Terrapin Books). A MacDowell fellow, Chen has been a finalist for the Autumn House Press Chapbook Prize, and a semi-finalist for Tomaz Salamun Chapbook Prize by Factory Hollow Press, among others. Her work has twice received Pushcart and best-of-the-net nominations and has been published or is forthcoming in Bear Review, PANK, Hanging Loose, NoDear and elsewhere. She lives in New York. www.kirstenshuyingchen.com 

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Columns

“Pastry Dresses”

by Laura Rocha-Rueda




The Museum at FIT set out to the broad and vague endeavor of putting up an exhibition on Food & Fashion. I first thought that pulling this off would be an impressive feat because these two things seemed to me to have little in common. Where would they find enough material for an entire exhibition? But walking through the gallery revealed that the relationship between what we eat and what we wear is richly layered, like a creamy, meaty lasagna. The key is to look at these two things from a vantage point to include all perspectives: industrial production, social justice, consumerism, aesthetics. 

Food & Fashion exhibition view. © The Museum at FIT.

On Saturday, September 30, I had plans to make my way from Brooklyn to Chelsea to view this exhibition. My boyfriend and I stopped for pumpkin spice lattes before getting on the Manhattan bound C train.While we waited for our coffees I got a WhatsApp message from my sister, who was in my hometown of Bogotá, Colombia, asking me if she could call me. I stepped out of the pop-music-bursting coffee shop with my phone to my ear. 

My grandmother’s health has been decaying all year, maybe even before then. On a morning in July I had received a similar WhatsApp message and called my sister to find out my grandmother had a bad fall and was taken to the hospital. I’d never been so far away from my family, and whenever tragedy has struck, I’ve felt useful by physically being around them, even if I couldn’t really do anything. But this summer proved to be a test of living my life away from them, and accepting there was nothing I could do, even when I felt like they needed me. 

On that September Saturday afternoon, as I paced the sidewalk, the wind blowing against my trench coat, I wasn’t expecting any news about my grandmother. Then I heard the undertone of my sister’s voice, the one that told me she had bad news before she’d had a chance to actually say it. I realized the family group chat had been awfully quiet. My grandmother normally uses the group chat every day, even if she’s trying to communicate with one specific person. She sends things like “Me llamas?” (“Can you call me?”) usually meant for my mom, aunt, or uncle, and I’m never sure if they know who she’s reaching out to or if they all give her a call. In any case, it works. She also loves to send heart-shaped stickers on the WhatsApp group, or little gifs like a cartoon of a girl in bed with sheep hopping joyfully above her, to indicate its time for her to go to sleep. 

The news sounded bad. My grandmother had woken up that morning with half of her face drooping. She couldn’t talk or use her phone or swallow. My eyes filled with tears and I asked to talk to my mom. My mom explained that they believed she’d had a stroke. My grandmother, after recovering from the fall earlier in the summer, said no more hospitals. There was nothing they could do but wait. And the wait could be hours, or it could be days, or it could even be months. So there was no reason to fly out. If anything happened they would call me. But for now it was best to stay put in New York.

My boyfriend and I sat on a park bench instead of heading straight for the train. I took a sip from my latte, which I liked because it was like drinking a pastry, and after a few minutes decided that what I needed to do was go to Food & Fashion anyway. Sulking wouldn’t help. I wiped the tears with the back of my hand and said: “So, do you want to go look at some dresses?”

Food & Fashion exhibition view. © The Museum at FIT.

The Museum at FIT holds its temporary exhibitions in the building’s basement. The title Food & Fashion is printed on the wall by the door to the gallery, in chocolate brown cursive on a pink background, resembling icing on cake. A red carpet leads visitors through the door and down a flight of stairs, where more icing lettering greets them before entering the space, this time in funfetti. The space is dark, cool, and quiet, with the items on display spotlit, interrupted only by a few screens playing recordings of runway shows related to the theme (like when Moschino had its McDonald’s-inspired collection). The peace in the room, isolated from the chaos of the city, also calmed the chaos of my mind. Walls of gallery text explained the broad approach the curators took when creating the show, which made it feel well researched and academic, almost clinical. Clean. 

I found the exhibit to resemble a pie whose crust was baked playfulness, featuring Jeremy Scott’s Moschino and Junya Watanabe’s Comme des Garçons, two high end brands known for not taking themselves too seriously. The filling was a journey through everything you can think of relating to food and fashion: a key ingredient is cultural identity, featuring designers like Han Feng who printed Chinese tea box labels onto silk; or more problematically, Dolce & Gabbana, who printed pasta on dresses for their 2017 Spring collection on la dolce vita. To add a bit of spice, the exhibition looked at sustainability and farming practices, and how they relate to the production of both clothing and food, featuring Stella McCartney’s work on creating fabrics made out of avocado and apple waste, among others.   

Han Feng, silk jersey ensemble printed with tea box labels, spring 1998. Gift of Han Feng © The Museum at FIT.

But my personal favorite ingredient of this sweet and sour pie was the relationship between feminine dressing and baked sweet goods. The curatorial text reads: 

Magazines of the mid-twentieth century often presented cakes with the same flare as women’s fashion, highlighting their striking visuals and textural qualities. Sewing and baking are domestic activities traditionally considered a woman’s work, and as a result, there is a crossover in the language used to describe textiles and pastries. Terms such as red velvet and silk chiffon derive from the world of fashion and connect baking and clothing to women’s material culture.

Dresses that look like pastries. It’s perfect. It reminds me of my grandmother.

My grandmother took on the role of matriarch long before my grandfather passed away. She met him when she was fifteen and got married at nineteen. She had to get her parents’ official permission because at that time, the legal age to get married in Colombia was twenty-one. She dedicated herself to having and raising children, and then to raising grandchildren. And she baked a lot. She’d make scones for my grandfather’s breakfast which he ate every day with strawberry jam, homemade, and a cup of English breakfast tea. For every birthday she’d bake a special cake, different flavors for different family members, according to tradition and preference. When my sister and I visited our grandparents after school, which happened a few times a week, there were always sweet treats: brownies, cinnamon rolls, chocolate roll cake. Everything made from scratch. My best baking instincts I learned through watching her. Baking is science, but it’s also art, much like fashion. She said love was her “secret ingredient” and to her that’s what baking was: a love language.

My grandmother also fiercely knit clothing for children and grandchildren, even when we became adults. She made my mother a beautiful hooded red wool sweater that makes her look like Little Red Riding Hood, which I steal whenever I visit home and it’s a particularly gloomy day. She made dresses for the babies, booties, scarfs. She repaired socks and buttons, and kept the home together one thread at a time. She wore lots of pastels, especially knit sweaters, and often added a dash of jewelry, pieces gifted to her by my grandfather for the most part. Her rotating collection of shawls was impressive, and she always looked cozy, ready for a hug. 

Lucia Fainzilber, “The Cookbook” series prints: Pomegranate, Green, and Pink, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Praxis Gallery.
© The Museum at FIT.

Standing in a dark Chelsea basement, I thought of how my grandmother had embodied domesticity and femininity in the most traditional sense for most of her life. While there were many other interpretations of the relationship between food and fashion floating around me under glimmering spotlights, this exploration felt to me the most obvious, and yet I hadn’t considered it until it was right before my eyes. What I appreciated the most about the show is that it’s not all about crazy fun fruit and pasta prints or clothes shaped like food. It connects these two industries on all levels: economical, social, cultural, anthropological. And in this way, it makes it easy to start to see the relationship between the two in unexpected parts of your life.

When my grandfather passed away, my grandmother stopped baking as much. Arthritis has claimed her fingers, so she doesn’t knit much these days. But to my grandmother the kitchen has meant love. Maybe that’s why on Wednesday, October 4, when she was feeling a bit stronger, she made her way there and started making “masitas de plátano,” a kind of plantain pastry she’d make when her children were little. We don’t really know what is going to happen, or exactly what afflicted her that Saturday. But we do have her recipes and the clothes she made us that still fit. 


Food & Fashion is on view until November 26, 2023 at the Museum at FIT. In conversation with the exhibition, there will be a Food & Fashion Symposium on November 3, 2023 at the Fred P. Pomerantz Art and Design Center.

Laura Rocha-Rueda is a Colombian writer living in Brooklyn. Her work on the intersections between fashion, pop culture, and literature has appeared in Vestoj and HALOSCOPE. She has an MFA from The New School.

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