Tater Tot Hotdish, Minnesota Soul Food

My Home State’s Favorite No-Fuss Meal Is a Tribute to Its No-Nonsense Spirit

I am a Minnesota writer. I realized this only after my first book was published in 2009. One reader called it “a crash course in being Minnesotan.” Reviewers noted that my characters were oddly formal, obsessed with grammar, wanting to connect with others but unsure how to do so—all traits that I had grown up surrounded by and passed on to my characters. A friend said that she would never want to break up with one of my characters because there is no yelling, none of the pleasure to be …

By Lori Ostlund | February 29, 2016

Do You Take Your Coffee With Sugar, Milk, or Guns?

In My Search of the Origins of Our Daily Elixir, I Kept Encountering Armed Men

By Murray Carpenter | January 7, 2016

One morning a few years ago, I met a coffee grower in an upscale apartment complex at the edge of Guatemala City. He drove a Toyota Sequoia customized as a …

What My Italian Neighbors Taught Me About Gluttony

If a Long, Extravagant Meal in the Tuscan Countryside Is Wrong, I Don't Want to Be Right

By Sara Jenkins | November 23, 2015

As a so-called “international gypsy,” a child raised by journalist parents around the globe (mostly the Mediterranean), I suppose it’s natural for me to be drawn to food. I have …

There’s No Word for ‘Gluttony’ in Chinese

People in China Indulge in Food and Drink as a Symbol of Pride and Relationship Building

By Tony Chen | November 23, 2015

I had just consumed a pitcher of beer along with too many Chinese-German sausages at the Tsingtao Beer Museum, when I received the email from an editor asking if I …

Why Aren’t People Eating in Medieval Depictions of Feasts?

It’s an Expression of the Era’s Ambivalence Towards Food

By Christine Sciacca | November 23, 2015

When most people think of a medieval feast, they envision a room filled with boisterous guests and the lusty consumption of hunks of meat and goblets filled with wine. Feasts …

I’ll Have What She’s Having

Jewish Delis Are Noisy, Crude Eating Places That Turned the Idea of the Restaurant on Its Head

By Ted Merwin | November 23, 2015

My maternal grandparents, Jean and Lou Kaplan, did not keep kosher. That was their ancestors’ way, the path of slavish adherence to the stringencies of Jewish law. But old habits …

Get More Zócalo