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The Sad, Sexist Past of Bengali Cuisine

Mayukh Sen Food 52
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

Inside a Bestselling Syrian Cookbook From the 13th Century

Hannah Walhout Food & Wine Magazine
This 13th centure cookbook of Syrian recipes shows us the opulent upper limits of the cuisine from those who cooked and ate it—chefs developing recipes, explorers discovering ingredients, the wealthy elite who demanded luxury and ingenuity.

food

The Hidden Radicalism of Southern Food

John T. Edge New York Times
In the South, America has identified food-system problems and developed solutions. Today, as Americans agitate for food sovereignty, the bold agricultural ideas conceived in the late 1960s by Fannie Lou Hamer and other radical Southerners suggest paths for us to follow out of our food deserts.

food

How Lunch Became a Pile of Bologna

Amy McKeever Eater.com
How we feel about bologna reveals something about ourselves. The history of such seemingly mundane food can be fascinating, as is consideration of its future.

food

The New Deal Meal

Rachel Laudan Wall Street Journal
During the Depression, a loose coalition of Progressives set out to remake the American diet. Milk was regarded as the perfect food. This tension between scientific advice and traditional preferences can be traced back to the Great Depression, suggest Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe in “A Square Meal.”

food

The consumption of the New South

Matt Hartman The Awl
Celebrating a progressive South means supporting the whole economy of practices that enabled our traditions in the first place. That means supporting the actual communities and the actual restaurants that have been here—that made this place a here in to begin with.
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