The Best American Food Writing 2019 Quotes

“Beyoncé spins her own bittersweet narratives into art. “I’ma rain, I’ma rain on this bitter love/Tell the sweet I’m new,” she sings on “Freedom.”
As bell hooks writes of Beyoncé’s Lemonade in her essay “Moving Beyond Pain,” to be truly free, we must choose beyond simply surviving adversity, we must dare to create lives of sustained optimal well-being and joy. In that world, the making and drinking of lemonade will be a fresh and zestful delight, a real life mixture of the bitter and the sweet, and not a measure of our capacity to endure pain, but rather a celebration of our moving beyond pain.”
If Will Cotton’s paintings—- resplendent with pure, idealized fantasy—- are the sweetness we lazily dream of, Walker’s A Subtlety is the sweetness we actually live: rearing up through centuries of hurt and exploitation, planting its feet in the good and the bad, the pleasure and the pain. It crystallizes across the surfaces of our imperfect lives, and makes us shine.”
― Samin Nosrat, The Best American Food Writing 2019

“No sugared association is stronger than that between sweetness and femininity. Girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. Women are honey, sweetheart, cupcake, candy girl, honey-bunch--- or they're tarts. In the Bible, "The lips of an adulterous woman drip honey" (Proverbs 5:3). Meanwhile, black women have been "caramel," "brown sugar," "mocha latte," "chocolate," and "molasses,"--- both desired and diminished. Making sweet foods is considered women's work--- and eating them is too. Girls receive an Easy-Bake Oven; cake mixes are marketed exclusively to women; home bakers are overwhelmingly female. Candy and chocolate are heavily feminized that a Yorkie bar in the U.K.--- normal chocolate, massive chunks--- until recently stood out by marketing itself as "not for girls."
It's not just in American and European food cultures that this holds true. I spoke to food writer and journalist Mayukh Sen about the gendering of foods within Bengali cuisine. "Sweetness is very much gendered female in Bengali cooking," he explained. "There's a word, mishti, that stands for both Bengali sweets and is also used to describe someone, usually a woman, who is 'sweet' (pleasant, youthful, and nonthreatening/demure)." In Japan, amato and karato refer to those who love sweets and those who prefer salty, savory, and spicy foods, respectively, and yet these labels loosely trace the dividing line between men and women. Jon D. Holtzman writes that a Kyoto-based confectioner--- by all accounts a man who loved his sweets--- assured him that he was more a karato kind of guy: "strong, energetic, and ambitious.”
― Samin Nosrat, The Best American Food Writing 2019

“Yamanashi is green, dense with red pine and white oak forest and beautifully kept orchards that cut deep into its slopes. Fruit hunters pay to eat as much ripe, seasonal fruit as they like in a short span of time. Say, thirty minutes of thin-skinned peaches, or fat pink grapes, or strawberries, warmed from the sun, dipped into pools of sweetened condensed milk.”
― Samin Nosrat, The Best American Food Writing 2019

“The Kit Kat first came to Japan in 1973, but the first 100 percent, truly on-brand Japanese Kit Kat arrived at the turn of the millennium, when the marketing department of Nestlé Japan, the manufacturer of Kit Kats in the country, decided to experiment with new flavors, sweetness levels, and types of packaging in an effort to increase sales. Strawberry! A pinkish, fruity Kit Kat would have been a gamble almost anywhere else in the world, but in Japan strawberry-flavored sweets were established beyond the status of novelties. The strawberry Kit Kat was covered in milk chocolate tinted by the addition of a finely ground powder of dehydrated strawberry juice. It was first introduced in Hokkaido--- coincidentally and serendipitously--- at the start of strawberry season.”
― Samin Nosrat, The Best American Food Writing 2019

“As bell hooks writes of Beyoncé’s Lemonade in her essay “Moving Beyond Pain,” “to be truly free”
― Samin Nosrat, The Best American Food Writing 2019

“Veganism is not just about animals,” states Claiborne. “It’s not only for one group either. If you care about animals—and humans are animals—then it should be inclusive. All factions of veganism”
― Samin Nosrat, The Best American Food Writing 2019

“I made a deal with myself when I saw the writing on the wall,” Spalding said. “I would say yes to everything I could to save the monument. When all this is over”
― Samin Nosrat, The Best American Food Writing 2019

“Anthony Bourdain built his career on the telling of truth.”
― Samin Nosrat, The Best American Food Writing 2019

“Perhaps more than any other product”
― Samin Nosrat, The Best American Food Writing 2019

“It’s a statistic that a lot of family businesses don’t survive past the second generation,” Dana said. “My dad was in the third generation”
― Samin Nosrat, The Best American Food Writing 2019

“If we have to be the generation that is going to be calling out problematic behavior”
― Samin Nosrat, The Best American Food Writing 2019

“The best staples make a virtue of blandness. They quiet the mind. The nuttiness in rice”
― Samin Nosrat, The Best American Food Writing 2019

“I thought I had a gift,” he told me. “But really it was Napa. Anything can grow in Napa.”
― Samin Nosrat, The Best American Food Writing 2019

“Imagine the agony of a ghost who is too nice to haunt anyone properly”
― Samin Nosrat, The Best American Food Writing 2019

“As the twentieth-century poet and activist Muriel Ruckeyser said”
― Samin Nosrat, The Best American Food Writing 2019

“Today the Food Establishment may be less male and more geographically diverse”
― Samin Nosrat, The Best American Food Writing 2019