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Notes From a Rookie Volunteer

Like many of you, I’ve been thinking so much, so often, about the 47 million Americans—more than 13 million kids included—who don’t have enough food. I took a trip to West Side Campaign Against Hunger to volunteer with my nine-year-old, Holden, who wrote about it. Plus, a short list of food organizations loved by the Bittman family.

The Bittman Project 2025 Holiday Gift Guide

Today’s list of holiday picks is small but mighty, and anything on it is sure to be much loved by anyone who likes to get in the kitchen and get down to business. (Except for a few outliers, which are just all around excellent in any room.)

If You Love Popcorn So Much, Why Don’t You Cook With It?

We’ve started to treat popcorn the same as any other grain-based ingredient. Like croutons, it adds crunch and heft everywhere it goes. Except there’s one big difference: Instead of getting soggy in liquid, popcorn turns pleasantly chewy while its nooks and crannies collect sauce and seasonings. (Also: It tastes corny.)

Things We Like: Cheese Storage, Simplified

Welcome to our biweekly roundup of our favorite things. We’ll only ever recommend things that we personally have tried and enjoyed. This week: Japanese-ish cooking, easy Stroganoff, and an apron you’ll want to wear as clothing.

The Ups and Downs of Mexico’s Government-Owned Supermarkets

While Zohran Mamdani’s proposal for municipally-owned grocery stores may seem far-fetched in the US, it happens that the government of Mexico has owned a grocery store chain since 1953—and it’s getting renewed attention and support from the current Presidential administration. Looking at the project’s problems and successes seems particularly timely at this moment.

Athens: A Love Story

For visitors, Athens once represented nothing more than a twenty-four-hour stopover en route to major tourist destinations like Santorini and Mykonos. But today the city is a great paradigm for good Mediterranean living and eating. It’s also become an amazing food city, an international food city, where Greek and global flavors mesh seamlessly, where the next generation of chefs, nurtured on the internet, have a much more fluid sense of Greekness when it comes to the food they’re creating.

The Cerulean Cookbook

In 2001, Ebury Press published Living and Eating by John Pawson and Annie Bell. It was a quiet release, not much splash. The book is still not very easy to find. But in the last quarter century it’s achieved a certain cultish status among contemporary cookbook collectors—and has inspired a thousand lookalikes.

Bread So Good You Have to Guard It

Michael W. Twitty, author of Recipes from the American South, remembers guarding—with a toy compass, helmet, and toy weaponry—his grandmother’s light bread at age seven to ensure nobody would take “my bread.” Here’s what made it so special.

Maureen Abood Loves Lebanese Baking—And You Should, Too

Maureen Abood’s new book, Lebanese Baking, which includes both sweet and savory treats, reads very much, and very much in a good way, like an old-school cookbook. Kate talked to the author about phyllo—both store bought and homemade (yes, you can do it!)—baklawa and knafeh, and the dish that most evokes memories of her mom.

Are Those Ubiquitous Hemp Edibles Toxic?

State legislators have tried to regulate hemp products in order to make products that contain THC harder for teens to access. But state rules designed to clamp down on hemp have been hampered by a federal law that experts worry hemp producers are exploiting a loophole in, in order to make products that are as potent as marijuana products but without state or federal oversight.

College Dining: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

The dining experience, along with the campus itself, are the two institutional touchstones that all students encounter throughout their four years in college. But when it goes wrong, students are inclined to isolate themselves, opting for ramen in their dorm room rather than risking getting raw chicken or plastic in their dish at the dining hall.

Things We Like: Tweezers, an Easy Pepper Grinder, and a Tiny Rice Cooker

Welcome to our biweekly roundup of our favorite things. We’ll only ever recommend things that we personally have tried and enjoyed.

In Praise of Campy Cookbooks

I’ve got plenty of books for culinary instruction. I’m looking for stories. For perspective. For a tether to the old days. I want a sense of how people cooked and ate and wrote about food in days gone by. I want inspiration. Connection. Style. Humor. I want vibes. 

The Best Pancakes You’ve Ever Had—and Other Thoughts

If you know me and eat meals with me often, chances are you’ve been to Loring Place. The menu at Loring Place is one of the best encapsulations of how I like to eat as I’ve ever encountered—and when you have a restaurant you keep going back to, surprises arise.

Fresh Cheese Is All in a Day’s Work

The elemental pleasures of dairy products are dulled in their supermarket forms, their subtler essences erased by the demands of industrial production, storage, and distribution systems. Cured cheeses take months or years to finish, so making them at home is beyond the reach of almost all of us. But fresh cheese—paneer in South Asian cuisines, queso fresco in Mexican, ricotta in Italian—is easy.

Five Questions for Keith McNally

What was most striking for me, when I read McNally’s recent memoir, was how self aware he is. So we were thrilled when he agreed to be the inaugural interviewee for our new column, “Five Questions for.” We talked controversies, favorite dishes and restaurants, and brutal honesty.

RFK’s Promise to Take Farming Back 80 Years Isn’t Plausible

What exactly would it mean for the average American to eat like we did in the 1940s? To turn the US food system back to the small-scale style farming of those days would be extremely costly for farmers and consumers alike.

What’s It Really Like to Be On GLP-1 Drugs?

In this excerpt from Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine: The New Science of Achieving a Healthy Weight​​​​, author David A. Kessler, MD shares his own firsthand experience with GLP-1 drugs—plus a deep dive into the science behind the weight loss.

What Makes a Gay Restaurant So Special?

In his unique and lovely new book, Dining Out, Erik Piepenburg explores how LGBTQ restaurants shaped and continue to shape generations of gay Americans. Today’s excerpt is a love letter to one of Erik’s favorite places, the now defunct Melrose Restaurant.

Kitchens of Hope

About eight years after her father left Sierra Leone, Emilia Olabisi Fatmata Smith and her family were reunited with him in the US. They were in culture shock. “By that time, my dad was too American for us, and we were too African for him.” What was the same, though, was what happened in the kitchen.