Portside

Food manufacturers use language to magnify the desirability of a product and can lead you to believe it’s something to make you healthier—even though what’s inside that box may not be all that good for you.

The nonprofit National 4-H Council accepts donations from a veritable who’s who of Big Ag: Monsanto, ConAgra, DuPont, and Altria each gave at least a million dollars in 2015. A lot of cultural norms around gender and sexuality are directly illustrated by the history of 4-H.

Party line suggested that widowhood made a woman’s sex drive fickle and vulnerable. A woman’s libido was a site of such agita that she couldn’t be trusted to keep it quiet, and so her body needed to be governed. The alienation imposed upon high-caste, Hindu Bengali women was meant to act as a hormonal suppressant, silencing the desire more dangerous than hunger for fish or meat: sex.

Food establishments are actively catering to users seeking 'Instagrammable' moments, where an photo-op worthy experience is virtually as important as the food itself

Food offers a powerful, surprising and sometimes uplifting path through difficult news events. For example, the story of emergency food relief in Puerto Rico shed light on the desperation across the island and underscored the lack of government aid, especially immediately after the storm. In Houston, after the hurricanes, cooks tried to instil a sense of normalcy by making makeshift kitchens. Post Katrina, its restaurants reflected NOLA's devastation and resiliance.

Thanks to a decades-long effort by the chocolate industry, chocolate is now being convincingly sold as a health food. But the chocolate-industrial-research complex distracts us from issues like what in our food contributes to the obesity and diabetes epidemics; chocolate certainly isn’t the solution here.

In the biweekly podcast, The Racist Sandwich, chef Soleil Ho and journalist Zahir Janmohamed discuss racism, classism, and gender in the food industry and the experiences of people of color working within it.

A whole new genre of food videos, focusing on specific intense sounds like crinkling, chopping, sautéing and stirring, is becoming popular. These eating sounds trigger pleasing tingling sensations in the brains of viewers who experience ASMR, which stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response.

Poor diet is not just about individual choice, but about the systems that make eating poorly the default for most Americans.

Seven of the biggest olive oil manufacturers in the US have been cutting their products with cheaper, inferior oils (such as sunflower oil or canola oil) in order to minimize the cost of production. This prompted the University of California to carry out studies on 124 imported brands of extra virgin olive oil, and they found that over 70% of the samples failed the test.