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When New York Could Not Stop Cooking: A History of September 11 in Casseroles

There is a particular helplessness that visits a city when its citizens are asked, urgently, to be useful, and discover they are not. In the days after September 11, 2001, New York produced an ordinary miracle that has gone under-examined in the official record of that week: it began, almost immediately, to cook. Blood banks turned donors away within hours, their supply already exceeding what the day's casualties would require. The rubble was a task for trained hands, not vol

A CUISINE BUILT FOR ALTITUDE

Most cuisines are built to please. Tibetan cuisine was built to survive, and it makes no apology for the difference. At four thousand meters, on a plateau where barley is nearly the only grain that will grow and firewood is a luxury rather than a given, food stopped being an exercise in variety centuries ago and became an exercise in sufficiency. What emerged from that constraint is not a lesser cuisine for lacking the range of a lowland one. It is a different discipline enti

Hunger Is Cheap. Loyalty Costs $1.29 Trillion.

The United States government already knows exactly what it costs to feed a family. It calculates the figure every year, down to the cent, through something called the Thrifty Food Plan: the minimum a household of four needs to spend on groceries to avoid going hungry. The latest estimate sets that number at $983.80 a month. This is not a talking point. It is the government's own arithmetic, used to decide how little a struggling family is allowed to need. Hold that number in

The Epicurer

2 days ago4 min read

Opinion

Hunger Is Cheap. Loyalty Costs $1.29 Trillion.

The United States government already knows exactly what it costs to feed a family. It calculates the figure every year, down to the cent, through something called the Thrifty Food Plan: the minimum a household of four needs to spend on groceries to avoid going hungry. The latest estimate sets that number at $983.80 a month. This is not a talking point. It is the government's own arithmetic, used to decide how little a struggling family is allowed to need. Hold that number in

The Epicurer

2 days ago

Gastronomic Fascism.

This week, Alternative for Germany won its first regional government since the postwar era. In the same news cycle, a documentary carried the complaints of Germans who felt their street no longer smelled of Sauerbraten but of döner: too many kebab stands, they said, and too little of their own cooking. The complaint sounds culinary. It is not. It is a complaint about power, dressed up as gastric nostalgia, and it deserves to be taken apart with the same seriousness one would

The Epicurer

2 days ago

Hunger as Instrument

There is a version of atrocity that requires no explosion. It arrives instead as a closed crossing, a rejected truck manifest, a warehouse of flour that sits a few kilometres from people who are starving while a customs classification is disputed. It is slower than bombardment and, for that reason, easier to look away from. But the doctrine of international humanitarian law has never treated the deliberate obstruction of food to a civilian population as a lesser crime than th

The Epicurer

Sep 2