Last week, as I hope some of you may have noticed, we hosted a six-day Food for Thinkers blogfest. With the launch of GOOD’s new food hub, I wanted to stake out an expanded territory for food writing, and at the same time, start building a community of influences and inspiration.
I emailed a bunch of my favorite bloggers, designers, and critics, and asked them if they would mind writing something that shared their perspective on what makes food so interesting. Forty-three of them said yes, and the result was an incredible week-long, full-spectrum rollercoaster ride of stories, ideas, opinions, proposals—and a lot of really, really good writing.
To make it easier for you to go back and check out posts you missed, or revisit favorites, as well as to serve to a guide to the range of perspectives and themes we covered during the week, I’ve put together a 16-course tasting menu with links to each of the 54 posts. There is enough nutritious reading material in here to keep you sated for weeks, so bookmark this page, and enjoy!
“Digging Up and Eating Fish in Qatar” (Colleen Morgan at Middle Savagery)
“De Condimentis (8): Food History” (Tom Nealon of Cruditas at Hilobrow)
“Medieval Soldiers Illuminate Modern Stunting” (Jeremy Cherfas at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog)
“Why Do I Write About Food?” (Rachel Laudan at Rachel Laudan: A Historian’s Take on Food and Food Politics)
“The Way to a Good Tourist’s Heart is Through Their Stomach” (Kitty Sutcliffe at Boring History Girl)
“Teaching Transgenic Food” (Zackery Denfeld at the Center for Genomic Gastronomy)
“Spaces of Food #2: Inflatable Greenhouses on the Moon” (Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG)
“And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Our Bread” (Drew Tewksbury at Das Blog)
“Food for Thinkers: Takes a Geologic Turn” (Smudge Studio at Friends of the Pleistocene)
“Harry Potter and the Farmers’ Market” (Robin Sloan at Snarkmarket) (served on the side: a crowdsourced list of Famous Fictional Eating and Drinking Establishments)
“Old Mr. Flood and A Boston Breakfast of Cod’s Cheek, Tongue, and a Flotation Bladder” (Peter Smith at GOOD)
“Food Writing Gets Hot and Heavy” (Scott Geiger at GOOD)
“Distributed Bureau of Agricultural Crime Investigation” (Alex Trevi at Pruned)
“WANTED! Prison Food Writers” (Bryan Finoki of Subtopia at GOOD)
“What You’ll Find in a Discarded Can of Vienna Sausages” (John Thorne of Simple Cooking at GOOD)
“Consuming the Space Age: The Cuisine of Sputnik” (Alice Gorman at Space Age Archaeology)
“Tsampa Eaters and Sweet Tea Drinkers: Tibetan Identity Assertion Through Food” (High Peaks Pure Earth)
“Spaces of Food #1: Agriculture On-The-Go and the Reformatting of the Planet” (Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG)
“Spaces of Food #3: The Mushroom Tunnel of Mittagong” (Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG)
“Spaces of Food #5: Madeira Odorless Fish Market and the Templehof Ministry of Food” (Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG)
“Five Borough Farm” (Urban Omnibus)
“Food As Eating Choreography” (Daniel Fernández Pascual at Deconcrete)
“Food As Public Space Editor” (Daniel Fernández Pascual at Deconcrete)
“Food As Geopolitical Subjugation” (Daniel Fernández Pascual at Deconcrete)
“What If Your Food Hired an Architect to Redesign Your Kitchen” (Nicholas Sowers of Soundscrapers at GOOD)
“What Should Food Look Like?” (Alexandra Lange at Design Observer)
“Food and Architecture” (David Garcia at David Garcia Studio)
“Why We Don’t Need Anonymous Critics” (Alissa Walker at GOOD)
“Does Not Butter Ennoble Enough?” (Jonah Campbell at Still Crapulent)
“A Lunch Manifesto” (Yen Ha and Michi Yanagashita of Front Studio at Lunch Studio)
“Why I Write About Food: It’s Journalism at Its Best” (Paula Crossfield at Civil Eats)
“The Rise of White People Food” (Morgan Clendaniel at GOOD)
“Panic in Aisle Five” (James A. Reeves of Big American Night at GOOD)
“The Cyborg Ethics of Eating” (Tim Maly at Quiet Babylon)
“High-Futurist Cyborg Syrup” (T. Vanderkemp at Echo and Boom)
“What Does It Mean To Write About Food Today” (Evan Kleiman at KRCW’s Good Food blog)
“Why I Write About Food: Creating Community” (Danielle Gould at Food+Tech Connect)
“What Does It Mean To Write About Food Today?” (Annie Wang at Frites and Fries)
“The Meal That Ended My Career as a Restaurant Critic” (Steve Silberman at NeuroTribes)
“You Never Go Down the Candy Aisle” (Jessica Helfand at Design Observer)
“I Like Coke” (Dan Maginn of El Dorado, Inc., at GOOD)
“Blame it on the Bouillabaisse” (Allison Arieff at GOOD)
“Consuming Passions: The Culture of Food Writing” (Kitty Sutcliffe at Boring History Girl)
“Wait, How Many Cooks Spoil the Broth?” (Laura Brunow Miner of Pictory at GOOD)
“On Food and Writing” (Jeremy Cherfas at Another Bastard Weblog)
“On Food Writing” (Aki Kamozawa and Alex Talbot at Ideas in Food)
“Has the Food Fetish Gone Too Far” (Lisa Bramen at Food & Think)
“Eating: A Fact of Life” (Dan Pashman of The Sporkful)
“A Few Good Menus” (Rebecca Federman at Cooked Books)
“Online Advertising, Or Where Toaster Strudels and Chez Panisse Meet” (Kristen Taylor of Galvanize.us at GOOD)
“Bring In Da Ponk!” (Jessica Helfand at Design Observer)
“Spaces of Food #4: Betel Nut Beauties” (Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG)
“Why I Write About Food” (Jonathan Bloom at Wasted Food)
Thank you for all your comments and tweets—please feel free to keep telling me what you enjoyed, disagreed with, and felt I missed! And a huge thank you to all the talented and generous people who shared their writing here on GOOD during Food for Thinkers week.
