Published Work Archives - Page 11 of 23

Food’s Class Warfare

January 22, 2025June 27, 2012

Slate

Slate • June 27, 2012

A few years ago, the chef and organic pioneer Alice Waters did a spin on 60 Minutes that managed to showcase exactly why foodies get branded as elitist. “Some people want to buy Nikes, two pairs,” she said in a casual moment at a farmers’ market. “And some people want to eat Bronx grapes and nourish themselves.”

This was vintage foodie-ism, a smug and irritating noblesse oblige transposed onto a discussion of our meals. That didn’t change the fact that much of everything else Waters said was right: The way we eat is making us sick; it’s a good idea for kids to learn to cook; even, in a more formal moment, “good food should be a right and not a privilege.” But her aside about sneakers made it unlikely that anyone not yet onboard with Waters would listen to her in the first place.

What It’s Like to Get Attacked by Rush Limbaugh for Food Reporting

January 22, 2025March 9, 2012

The Atlantic

The Atlantic • March 9, 2012

It’s every author’s wish that a major media figure will discuss her or his work on air. So when Rush Limbaugh spent 40 minutes lambasting both me and my first book, The American Way of Eating, during his radio broadcast to 15 million listeners on Tuesday, I was mostly elated. By the time I finished listening to the show, though, I had a question: What exactly does he think I did wrong?

‘The American Way of Eating’: What It’s Like Picking Fruit as a Laborer

January 22, 2025March 8, 2012

The Atlantic

The Atlantic • March 8, 2012

If my floor had been clean, I might have made it to the toilet.

This is the initial thought that comes to me here, crouched on the bathroom floor, my face centered over a toilet seat and inches from a wastebasket filled with dirty toilet paper. Saliva and bile dribble from my chin, and I can see, off to the side, where the initial wave of vomit and dusty mucus splattered down the side of the tub.

Holy Ted Nugent, We’re All Foodies Now

January 22, 2025March 4, 2012

Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times • March 4, 2012

A few years ago I bought a cookbook titled “Kill It and Grill It” for my boyfriend, a Yale grad who hunted and fished. Admittedly, I offered the gift ironically. I’d been drawn to it by its cover photo of ’70s rocker Ted Nugent and his wife, Shemane, each clad in a denim vest and clutching a rifle and knife, respectively. As a native of rural Michigan, I saw the image as both funny and dismaying. They kind of look like families I grew up with, I thought. But who buys a cookbook with a gun on it?

Shamrock Shakes, Burger Bash, and Beerfest

January 22, 2025March 2, 2012

New Times

New Times • March 2, 2012

Happy Friday on this stunning 80-degree day. It has been a food-filled week here and around the intranets.

This week, Tricia Woolfenden chronicled her obsession with McDonald’s shamrock shakes and informed readers of the best bars for out-of-towners and the best vegetarian restaurants for Meatless Monday.

Anthony Bourdain and Top Chef Have It Wrong: the Boys’ Club Is No Fun

January 22, 2025March 2, 2012

The Daily Beast

The Daily Beast • March 2, 2012

I’ve always wanted to be a tomboy, the kind of girl who could keep up with the boys—and do them one better. So when I landed in the kitchen of an Applebee’s, reporting undercover for my book, The American Way of Eating, I felt like I was getting my chance to be a downmarket, female version of Anthony Bourdain. My workplace was a perfect setting for it.

The Best Mexican Food of My Life

January 22, 2025March 1, 2012

The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal • March 1, 2012

A few years ago, working an undercover stint for “The American Way of Eating,” I had the best soup of my life. I had just taken a room—a cubby, really— with farmworkers in California’s Salinas Valley, paying $300 for the next seven weeks, using it as a homebase from which to find field work. As soon as I agreed to take the room, my landlady led me into the kitchen and set a steaming bowl of soup, scarlet and speckled with golden globules of fat, before me. Chunks of fish, fleshy and white, floated in the bowl alongside translucent onion snippets and scraps of herbs. Eat! she commanded in Spanish, handing me half a lime and a salt shaker. Then she pointed to a stack of fresh flour tortillas. Eat!

9 Things You’ve Never Heard About America’s Food

January 22, 2025February 24, 2012

The Huffington Post

The Huffington Post • Feb. 24, 2012

Three years ago, I went to work undercover in America’s food system. To the extent that I was motivated by journalistic intrigue, I wanted to see how the country’s vast industrial food system worked. But more than that, I had a bone to pick with foodies.

Should White “Elites” Write About the Poor?

January 22, 2025February 20, 2012

Slate

Slate • Feb. 20, 2012

It’s hard to avoid the occasional personal attack when you’re a journalist—especially when you write about an issue as fraught as poverty. And I’ve been called plenty of names before. But in the last week I’ve gained some new ones: “Elitist.” “Poverty pimp.” “Precious little snowflake.” Most of these came in the comments below three excerpts from my new book, The American Way of Eating, describing my experience going “undercover” to work in the kitchen at an Applebee’s, published here at Slate.

Our Daily Bread

January 22, 2025February 15, 2012

The Detroit Metro Times

The Detroit Metro Times • Feb. 15, 2012

I first met author and foreign correspondent Annia Ciezadlo in New York City. Like me, she was a Midwestern mutt torn between the city’s seductive bustle and the airs it put on. It was the early 2000s, a decade before Ciezadlo published her stunning memoir, now out in paperback, Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War. The book chronicles her “honeymoon in Baghdad” in 2003, the months she spent there, and her subsequent move to Beirut, all the while working as a foreign correspondent alongside her Lebanese husband, journalist Mohamad Bazzi. (Like many Lebanese, Bazzi has family in Dearborn.)

I caught up with Ciezadlo while she cooked up greens and shallots to talk about what it’s like to move to the Middle East as an American woman — and how stories of daily life and meals tell us as much about a country as the tales of its wars.