Congratulations and welcome! You’ve arrived at GOOD’s new Food hub.
If you’ve followed GOOD’s food coverage for a while, right now you might scratching your head and saying things like “Wha?” or “Huh?”
On the other hand, you might have already noticed a few changes in the last couple of weeks. For starters, we’ve stepped up the pace of posting a bit, to cover more of the food news and stories that matter, and we’ve introduced a handful of new regular features, including a weekly Taste of Tech column in partnership with Gearfuse and Feast Your Eyes, a daily serving of visual pleasure or provocation.
But these early innovations, as exciting as they are, are just the tip of the iceberg. Together, the GOOD team and I have big plans for the site: We are going to make GOOD Food even better. The best, even!
So what is GOOD Food all about?
It starts with the idea that all of us (unless we are very unlucky or sick) interact with food several times a day, and those interactions are both shaped by and shape our individual and collective health, culture, community, politics, economics, infrastructure, and environment. What that means is that food is a really important lens through which we can understand and improve the world we live in. And if the crew at GOOD didn’t believe that the world can be improved and that our community are the people to make that happen, we would have given up this thankless media business and become surf bums or corporate lawyers already.
So, the GOOD Food hub will keep you up-to-date with breaking food news, of course, but more importantly, we’ll give you the infographics, stories, interviews, and investigative reporting you need to really explore important food issues—and the tools and ideas you need to make a difference.
What’s more, we believe food is too important a topic to restrict the conversation to the usual suspects. You’ll be as likely to meet a commodity trader, a synthetic biologist, or an industrial archaeologist as a chef or food activist on the GOOD Food hub. We promise to bring you a really exciting diversity of perspectives and a variety of voices, because both a neuroscientist and dishwasher have something interesting to tell us about what food is—and what it could be.
GOOD Food also stands for good quality: in a world filled to distraction with blogs, tweets, and YouTube videos, we want to be the site that is always worth your time—the site that helps you realize how radically our food system has changed the world in the past and gather the inspiration to consciously shape its future.
For the rest of this month, we’ll be rolling out more new features and partnerships. What’s more, all next week, we’re hosting a week-long blog festival, with a group of amazing writers, thinkers, and makers lined up to share what’s interesting about food from their point of view. We’ll be hearing from Steve Silberman (NeuroTribes), Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG), Nicholas Jackson (The Atlantic Tech), Robin Sloan (Snarkmarket), Marion Nestle (Food Politics), Jessica Helfand (Design Observer), Alexandra Lange (Design Observer), Dechen Pemba (High Peaks Pure Earth), Tim Maly (Quiet Babylon), Smudge Studio (Friends of the Pleistocene), Alex Trevi (Pruned), Kristen Taylor, Drew Tewksbury, Laura Brunow Miner (Pictory), Dan Pashman (The Sporkful), James Reeves (Big American Night), Jonah Campbell (Still Crapulent), Dan Maginn, Scott Geiger, and Nick Sowers, and many more—including you, I hope, in the comments at least, if not on your own blogs, Facebook updates, and tweets.
Based on previous experience, these blog festivals are much closer in spirit to a week-long online party filled with really interesting people than their real-world ugly sister, the conference. We should come out the other side armed with even more ideas, questions, and energy to take forward into the coming months.
One more thing: who is “we,” exactly? I am Nicola Twilley, the new Food Editor at GOOD, so I’ll be the hub’s lead writer and host. I’m based in Los Angeles, and I also write my own blog, Edible Geography, co-organize the Foodprint Project, and occasionally embark on various other adventures, such as making scratch-‘n’-sniff maps or co-curating an exhibition about quarantine.
I’ll be joined by long-time GOOD food columnist, Peter Smith (known—and loved!—as Borborygmi or foodrumblings around here), with frequent visits from the rest of the all-star GOOD editorial team. There are many more partnerships, guest writers, and even live events in the works, so bookmark this page, follow us on @GOODFoodHQ, our newly created Twitter feed, and add us to your RSS reader.
Most importantly, please use email (I’m nicola at goodinc dot com), Twitter, Facebook, or the comments thread to tell us what you think, send us tips and ideas, and call us out when we don’t live up to the standards we’ve set. I’m looking forward to it—I hope you are too.
