Best of 2018: Food Writing

To Counter a History That is Far from Sweet

Over a free Veterans Day lunch at Sizzler, a daughter comes to terms with her ambivalence toward her father’s Vietnam War legacy

We'd heard buzz that Houston may, sneakily, be America's best food city. But when GQ food critic Brett Martin arrived, he realized that was selling the city short.

Michelle Zauner writes about visiting the Korean supermarket H Mart after her mother’s death.

Government cheese shows up in the punchlines of jokes and song lyrics, but to those who have actually lived on it, it’s both a cornerstone of survival and an object that inspires complicated tinges of nostalgia.

I read this wrapped in grief. We’d just unexpectedly had to put a magical dog down. And I was going through a phase of hating myself taking diet pills and checking my weight frequently. The idea of eating seemed too close to letting love in, and letting love in seemed like it was reserved for someone who was not me, and Sara Finnerty wrote this beautiful essay and came to my door bearing a platter of homemade Chicken Parmesan and very specific heating instructions, and reading about a young girl kneading gnocchi in the basement with her grandmother was just the reminder I needed to continue…

This shrimp boil from New Orleans is heavily seasoned, with extra cayenne for kick.

I started working at Dairy Queen a month before my fourteenth birthday, a month before I was able, legally, to work. I lied on my application and a friend on staff vouched for me. I suspect, now, that he hadn’t done this out of loyalty, but self-preservation: he was chubby and feared being teased about his weight. But next to me he looked smaller, even normal. That summer I weighed 230 pounds.