Jan 25, 2023
My Kwik Trip Gas Station Has Always Been There for Me
I want to preserve this old gas station because it feels like preserving myself.
An Ode to Kraft Dinner, Food of Troubled Times
While the world has continued to change, Kraft’s product has remained the same, somehow evading inflation at one or two dollars per box.
Jan 19, 2023
How My Maker’s Manhattan Made Me
I felt I had something to prove. But the Manhattan, unchanged since its nineteenth-century origins, has nothing to prove.
Oct 04, 2022
The Tortilla Type of Hurt, How One Broke My Heart
What I didn’t say was how much of home each of those packs brought with them.
Jul 21, 2022
How Lunchbox TikTok Is Healing My Relationship With Food
Lunch-packing videos have shown me that, regardless of your age or your body size or how big of a breakfast you had, we all deserve to eat.
May 18, 2022
South Indian Filter Coffee Tastes Like Home and Empire
For me, longing for filter coffee and missing my father are one and the same.
Mar 03, 2022
We Need the All-American Diner
Diners are affordable, accessible, and a staple of our national imagination. They’re also disappearing—and we need them now more than ever.
Mar 02, 2022
How Yams Helped My Family Survive Postwar Vietnam
To my family, yams are more than just a root vegetable.
Feb 24, 2022
Making Fruitcake for My Father as an Act of Optimism
A year in fruitcake means a year soaking in hope and optimism. Committing to the cakes meant believing that we would all see some semblance of survival.
Feb 23, 2022
Remembering My Chinese Heritage Through Re Gan Mian
Before I knew it, I finished my re gan mian, and I was filled to the brim with Wuhan, now a place no longer foreign to me.
Feb 09, 2022
Celebrating My Malaysian Heritage Through the Beauty of Rojak
Like rojak, our fluid and hybrid identities, I believe, make us more accepting as a community. Mixture is celebrated instead of shunned.
Jan 26, 2022
Learning to Live with Durians Again
Was my rejection of the durian, Southeast Asia’s King of Fruits, a betrayal of my cultural identity, of my life in Singapore?
Oct 18, 2021
I Can’t Go Home, So I Go to the Indian Grocery
Each time I contend with the reality of another month—season, year—apart from extended family, I drive my ennui to Namaste Plaza.
Oct 12, 2021
Seeking Culinary Guidance from God, My Mom, and Kelly Ripa
My first unkosher months weren’t especially guilt-ridden; if anything, it was the closest I had felt to coming of age.
Aug 30, 2021
In the Pandemic, Cooking Connected Me to My Ancestors
I could almost sense them beside me, as if the spattered index cards they’d left behind had come to life.
Jun 14, 2021
My Bicultural Comfort Food is the Spicy McChicken Sandwich
Both the sandwich and I were ‘made in China’ but with an undeniable Americanness.
Dec 09, 2020
How Saunf (or Mukhwas, or Fennel Candy) Built Me a Home
To these writers, saunf occurred in the world as a curiosity, but not as an inevitability.
Oct 20, 2020
In Praise of Spoon and Fork
Could I really not keep anything from the unbearable whiteness of being?
Oct 13, 2020
Wherever I Go, Kimchi Fried Rice Feels Like Home
They were our new friends, and we wanted to treat them to food from that had become special to us.
Aug 24, 2020
How My Family Cookbook Brought Me Back Home
We weren’t exactly rewriting our family traditions, but it felt good knowing that there was still a place for me in them.
May 12, 2020
