Marissa Landrigan contemplates fertility and the recent, persistent sound of her biological clock.

Brouilette on how it came to pass that he got fat.

Brouilette sets the table (sorry) for his new food column.

This is how turning down food or drink, when traveling in Mexico, can logically lead to the purchase of a used knife from an old man with scar-tattoos.

Michael Levy gets out of eating a bowlful of millipedes…because he’s special.

This book describes a China very different from the one in the news.
 What do you think are our biggest misconceptions about China?

The president of Guizhou University once asked me if he could understand
 America if he visited New York City and San Francisco, and then went home. 
Could you imagine how profoundly skewed his ideas of American politics, food,
 culture, landscape (etc), would be? But, he told me, this is exactly how
 Americans view China. He’s right, especially for those of us who learn
 about China from someone like Thomas Friedman, a pundit whose coverage of China 
is way off. It’s as if the billion average Chinese in the middle of the 
country don’t even exist. Guizhou and the surrounding provinces are totally 
invisible (unless there’s a natural disaster or a riot). Kosher Chinese is an attempt to fill in this massive blind spot.

What are our misconceptions? First, there’s the religious aspect of life in
 China. I had more conversations about spirituality in two years in China than 
in two decades in the U.S. Second, there’s politics. Chinese love their
 government, and for good reason. They have no interest in what we would call 
democracy. Government, my students often told me, is for the experts in 
Beijing. They’ve given three decades of incredible economic growth, after all!
 At a time when the approval rating of the American Congress is something like
 9%, it was amazing to live in a place bristling with unbridled patriotism.

T.K. Danovich learns a thing or two about Southern cooking and home

Weary travelers weave through Mexico City, prepare for a departure to the mellower state of Oaxaca, and find that, in the city square, even in 80 degrees, it is snowing.

Keith Dixon’s newest book, a memoir with more than forty recipes, follows a rich history of novelists like Orwell, Zola and Hemingway—whose interests (some might say obsessions) with food, drink and eating spilled over into their writing. Chime in below with some examples of your favorite food writing by novelists, and we’ll automatically enter you [...]