Category: Food
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This British Colonial Report Offers a Rare Glimpse Into India’s Historic Cannabis Cuisine
THICK, SUGARY, AND CREAMY, RICH with saffron and almonds, bhang thandai is so sweet that at first it’s hard to pinpoint the drink’s secret ingredient. After a sip or two, however, the telltale taste lingers: spicy and slightly musky, it’s the signature whiff of cannabis. After a few minutes, the high comes, dreamy as the rainbow play of…
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How Lesbian Potlucks Nourished the LGBTQ Movement
JEN MARTIN AND LIZ ALPERN lived in “that house.” Many queer friend groups have one. It’s the kind of place where a pot of soup is always boiling, where bread is always in the oven, where someone is always willing to read your tarot cards. Friends stopped to visit the Brooklyn apartment on weeknights. It was…
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The Girl Who Jumped Out of a Pie and Into a Gilded Age Morality Tale
ON MAY 20, 1895, 16-YEAR-OLD Susie Johnson, wearing nothing but gauze and haloed by a flock of live canaries, burst through the crust of a giant pie. It was polo player John Ellliot Cowdin’s 10th wedding anniversary, and the dinner was lavish: 16 courses from clams to coffee, each punctuated by champagne. Two models entertained the…
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The Promise and Perils of Resurrecting Native Americans’ Lost Crops
ELIZABETH HORTON NEVER INTENDED FOR Plum Bayou to become a testing site for recovering lost crops. By planting historical staples such as Chenopodium berlandieri, a type of goosefoot and a cousin of modern-day quinoa, she sought to teach visitors about the agriculture of the Toltec Mounds Archeological State Park’s original inhabitants. Yet Horton’s plants aren’t originals—they’re wild cousins…
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How Did Cahokian Farmers Feed North America’s Largest Indigenous City?
JUST OUTSIDE ST. LOUIS, VISITORS can witness the monumental earthen mounds that mark Cahokia, the largest indigenous city north of Mexico. There’s a persistent myth that the original inhabitants of what is now the United States were all hunter-gatherers living in small communities. Yet these mounds—likely used for ceremonial and housing purposes by people of the Mississippian Culture—reveal…
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American School Lunch Is Becoming More Diverse, Like It Was in the 1910s
ALANA DAO COULDN’T FIGURE OUT which was worse: going to school with a lunch box full of hummus, or pulling out Chinese pork floss buns in front of her classmates. In the 1990s, Sugar Land, Texas, was a steak and potatoes kind of place. Read more at Atlas Obscura. Photo: Jacob Riis, Library of Congress/Public Domain.
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The Swap-a-Fish Program That Traded Tilapia for Seafood Contaminated by Agent Orange
AS IT GLINTS IN THE afternoon sunlight, Newark, New Jersey’s Passaic River looks peaceful. But a plaque along the boardwalk has a warning for visitors. “The river remains full of life,” it reads. “Try to spot these creatures, but until the pollution is removed from the river, be careful NEVER to catch or eat any of…
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In Zambia, a Craze for a Traditional Treat Is Endangering Wild Orchids
WHEN RELATIVES VISITED BRIGHTON KAOMA’S childhood home in the Copperbelt Province of central Zambia, they’d come bearing gifts: oblong brown chikanda, freshly dug from the earth of the family’s ancestral village. Read more at Atlas Obscura. Photo: Petra Keßler/Unsplash.
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Austin Just Sent Its Favorite Queso Recipe to the Moon
IN THE QUEST TO COMMUNICATE with life beyond our tiny blue planet, human beings have sent records of our most meaningful cultural expressions into space: Beethoven’s Fifth, a mother’s kiss, and now, queso. Read more at Atlas Obscura. Photo: SpaceX/Public Domain
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This Professor’s Hot Peppers Give New Jersey’s Immigrants a Taste of Home
ALBERT AYENI WAS DISAPPOINTED. It was 1976, and he had just moved to the United States to pursue his PhD in agronomy at Cornell. Yet something was missing from his new country’s cuisine: “No hot pepper in the diet,” Ayeni says. Read more at Atlas Obscura. Photo: v2osk/Unsplash
Reina Gattuso 