The Man Behind India’s Favorite Snack Foods
Like Indian migrants through the ages, I had a contingency plan for homesickness—and it included condiments and ready-to-eat meals by Maiyas. The food company, the brainchild of Dr. Parampalli Sadananda Maiya, is widely credited with pioneering Indian ready-to-eat food.

The Taste Of America
Joshua Smith, 2019 Iron Viz co-champion, used data provided by Pitney Bowes to create a dashboard about how international cuisine shapes food identity in the US. The visualization tells a story of what is on American tables using tile maps that display the prevalence of international cuisines by state, compared to the national average.

How The Mast Brothers Fooled The World Into Paying $10 A Bar For Crappy Hipster Chocolate
While customers can’t get enough of the company’s bearded, Brooklyn hipster founders, and their brilliantly marketed, $10 “bean to bar” chocolates, a term reserved for chocolate that has been produced entirely under the maker’s control, from the cocoa bean to the wrapped bar, chocolate experts have shunned them.

Will An All-Meat Diet Kill You Or Cure You?
In anecdotal testimonials, people say that eating an all-meat diet helped them drop 10, 20, 40, 80 pounds and cured them of depression, fatigue, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, joint pain, and insomnia. How is this possible? And what is going on in these people’s intestines and arteries?

How Protein Conquered America
My bodega is only a little bigger than my studio apartment, and sells no fewer than 10 kinds of Muscle Milk. Once the niche elixir of powerlifting bros, gulping down a Muscle Milk or three is now part of a “healthy, active lifestyle” — whatever that means.

The War On Coffee
Epicurean coffeehouses in the United States numbered in the hundreds in 1989, and in the tens of thousands by 2013. A lot of that is Starbucks, but not all. Roasters in Italy went from exporting twelve million kilograms of espresso in 1988 to more than a hundred and seventy million in 2015.

Everything You Don’t Know About Chocolate
The beloved bar has come a long way in quality and complexity. Here’s a primer on how it’s made, and how to choose the best and most ethically produced.

Human Anatomy Baked Into Polymer Desserts By QimmyShimmy
Singapore-based mixed media artist QimmyShimmy uses polymer clay to craft baby figures and sugary treats that blend fantasy and reality in interesting and often disturbing ways.

The Unhealthy Truth Behind ‘Wellness’ And ‘Clean Eating’
I thought about food all day; I woke up at night thinking about sausage rolls, pizza, roast chicken with crisp, lemon-rubbed skin. Food friends and foes drew into two distinct camps in my mind, and I saw ill-health at every turn and in every mouthful. I became fearful and thin. I had found wellness. I was not well.

Is Duty-Free Dead? On The Trail Of Travel-Exclusive Unicorns
“Travel exclusive” bottlings have mostly dried up, and so have strange American export releases. And there certainly aren’t rows and rows of “unicorn” bottles just sitting in some far-flung terminal somewhere in the South Pacific.

The Lockdown Has Exposed The Fatal Flaw In Deliveroo’s Business
It wasn’t coronavirus that hobbled Deliveroo: it was its small margins and the crippling costs of competing both in its home market and abroad. In the UK, there are three big players in the market, in the US there are half a dozen, in Europe there are over 20.

The Surprising Psychology Of Dieting And Plate Design
You’ve probably heard the idea that using smaller plates and bowls can affect your perception of how much you’re eating, thereby helping you eat less. But how well does it work? A new study sheds light on that popular theory, finding that if you’re really hungry, it doesn’t work.

Why Do People Go To Restaurants? It’s Not About The Food
In the space of a few months the covid-19 pandemic has brought the hospitality industry to the brink of ruin. It has also prompted us to ponder what we’ve been missing. Why do restaurants matter? Why, after all, do we choose to spend large sums of money to dine among strangers?

The World’s Oldest Winery in Armenia
The Areni-1 complex, uncovered in 2007, contains a 6,100-year-old winery replete with fermenting vats, a grape press, and subterranean clay storage vessels. Altogether, it’s the best-preserved archeological site in the ongoing search for winemaking’s birthplace.

The Danger Of Fast Carbs
The average American eats more than 1,000 calories of rapidly digestible starches and sugars every day, and gets 500 more from the fats and oils added to many of these products. Starch serves as the carrier for much of the fat, sugar, and salt that we ingest, and like sugar, it is converted into rapidly absorbable glucose.

A Bird’s Eye View Of Children’s Diets Around The Globe
In the new book, Daily Bread: What Kids Eat Around the World, American photographer Gregg Segal has created a snapshot of the relationship between diet, culture, and location in a series of stunning portraits wherein the children are photographed surrounded by one-weeks forth of food.

What Does Uber Love More: Restaurants or Investors?
Eateries are getting squeezed by delivery apps. Restaurants can enjoy a 69% profit margin onsite, versus just 38% from deliveries. Uber could give up profit to keep them happy, but that’s not what IPO investors want to hear.

The Food Deserts Of Memphis: Inside America’s Hunger Capital
In the ‘food deserts’ of Memphis, Tennessee, dominated by fast food outlets and convenience stores, locals lack what seems a basic human right in the richer half of the city: a supermarket. With a big gap in life expectancy, are these Americans doomed to die younger than their neighbours – or can they fight for their right to nutrition?

How Fish And Chips Migrated To Great Britain
When Portugal fell under Spanish rule, the Inquisition targeted individuals with Jewish lineage. As religious violence worsened, many Jews fled Portugal and resettled in England, bringing with them culinary treasures founded in Sephardic cuisine—including fish. Peshkado frito was one of them.

It’s No Crime To Drink Wine By Yourself
From the moment we start to learn about wine, we are taught that drinking responsibly is a social activity. Wine is for sharing, for drinking with friends or family over a meal. But self-imposed isolation does not require you to forgo good food or good wine, despite the social stigma.

How Pink Salt Took Over Millennial Kitchens
Although pink Himalayan salt is perfectly functional for its intended culinary purpose—making food salty—it’s never before been particularly prized or venerated for its quality. That makes its meteoric rise from food-world also-ran to modern lifestyle totem all the more unlikely.