The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024
-
- $10.99
Publisher Description
A collection of the year’s top food and travel writing, selected by the trailblazing New York Times bestselling author and Emmy-nominated host of Taste the Nation and Top Chef Padma Lakshmi.
“Food and travel are natural companions,” writes guest editor Padma Lakshmi. From this pairing comes “the possibility of seeing anew, of examining how we make and assign meaning.” The essays in this year’s Best American Food and Travel Writing circle the world—from Dakar in Senegal, to Michoacán in south-central Mexico, to the Camino de Santiago in Spain—and deepen our understanding of our place in it. An ode to the American grilled cheese spurs the desire to find beauty in the smallest daily activities. An obsessive odyssey for the perfect Chinese food blossoms into a heart-wrenching search for a lost childhood. Bold and insightful, joyful and moving, this collection celebrates the experiences that connect us all.
The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024 includes C PAM ZHANG • LIGAYA MISHAN • KIESE LAYMON • MARIAN BULL • MAYUKH SEN • BEN TAUB • AND OTHERS
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sacred places and cuisines both exotic and familiar are explored in this sumptuous anthology of the year's best essays on food and travel. Among the 22 entries selected by television host Lakshmi (Love, Loss, and What We Ate) and journalist Saxena (coauthor of Basic Witches) are food-focused explorations of political and social conflicts, including Sharanya Deepak's "India's Beef with Beef," which investigates how a right-wing Hindu nationalist movement to ban beef consumption in India has sparked violence against Muslims and other "beef-eaters." Elsewhere, Marian Bull's "Orange Is the New Yolk" examines how chicken-feed additives became necessary to produce today's now-ubiquitous bright orange yolks, while C. Pam Zhang's "Eating Badly," offers an affectionate ode to the "brown, salty," food of her grandmother's kitchen ("What I was fed matters less than that I was, by people who loved me"). Travelogues, of which there are fewer, range from Melissa Johnson's "The Hungry Jungle," an exuberant narrative of a lesbian wedding party held at a Mayan pyramid in Guatemala, to Ben Taub's "The Titan Submersible Was ‘An Accident Waiting to Happen,' " a dark retrospective of the vessel's doomed voyage to the wreck of the Titanic. The sharp, vivid prose shines brightest when capturing food in all its materiality, bizarreness (see Karen Resta's visceral tribute to Kraft's Catalina salad dressing), and poetry ("Each grilled cheese sandwich is entirely itself, like the moon is its whole self in a barrel of water," Talia Lavin writes). Readers will devour this.
