Put An Egg On It

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Now in it’s ninth issue, this booklet-magazine contains short pieces of food memoirs. These are stories of people whom the conventional food magazines consider as the nobodies — the ordinary men on the street — but the emotions in each piece are so raw and so riverting. While there may be a couple of heart-wrenching read, be prepared for a good laugh at some of the hilarious food memories.

Remedy

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Like the previous magazine it has many food memories to share, except that they each come with a recipe. By inviting you to taste their food, the writers are inviting you to partake in a moment of their lives.

Cereal

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I don’t care for the Kinfolk-like aesthetic but I appreciate the anthropological and historical approach in their food features, like addressing how carrots hadn’t been prominently orange before the 16th century, and discussing maize’s domestication and cultivation in Mesoamerica. It has since rebranded, now a “travel and style” magazine, but you might still find its older issues in magazine stores.

Meatpaper

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A magazine of art and ideas about meat. It compared old and new school butcher shops, interviewed the designer who sewed Lady Gaga’s meat dress, and in its final issue in 2013, discussed about the future of meat with a food historian. Yes, this magazine publishes no more. I include it here to establish that there is much about meat to talk about — at least 20 issues-much.

The Art of Eating

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It is most similar to the mainstream food magazines but it has none of the product placements and chichi dining recommendations. Instead, there are more musing on the different styles of New England baked beans or the superiority (or not) of cultured butter.

Modern Farmer

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I laughed at their handcrafted sleds and German-made leather tool case features, but their how-to guides (how to chop a stack of wood, how to build a backyard farm) are quite an eye-opener. That said, I wouldn’t rely solely on their words if I really want to build a farm.

Cherry Bombe

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It is run by women and it tells stories about professional women in the industry. It has extensive interviews with famous food personalities such as writer Ruth Reichl (above), and Judith Jones, ex-vice president of Knopf Publishing who batted for Julia Child’s manuscript that became the famous Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The rest of the magazine is of the same spirit: celebrates women who grow, make, style, and enjoy food.

Sugar & Rice

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A magazine about Houston through the eyes of people who live, eat and breathe food. Every issue revolves around a theme, such as migration, which covers a resident’s discomfort with the term “ethnic food” that usually describes cuisines of non-white people, a story about the Vietnamese immigrants’ struggle for better lives in the Gulf Coast’s shrimping industry, and a photoessay of Houston’s Chinatown. It is both personal and technical — my preferred recipe for a food magazine.

The Gourmand

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I tend to save the best for the last. This is a London-based magazine that focuses on the role of food as an art form for social criticism. It features the works of artists like John Baldessari who, through a series of food-selection exercise, question the concept of taste, and in a different project, cuts out the heads from the images of people breaking bread together, to draw attention to their body languages and the gender politics taking place. The Gourmand also did an interview with Milton Glaser about his food column in the 1960s, and publishes commentaries on recent food events such as horse meat eating. The magazine predictably stylised foods like chicken feet and chocolate, sometimes involving cats, but like a Dadaist artwork, some of them do provoke new perspectives of these everyday objects.

Bitch Winter Issue

This issue of the Portland-based feminist magazine tackles women’s food production and consumption roles. What is refreshing about this magazine is that many of its contributors take on a scholarly approach, calling on histories, data and stakeholders’ interviews to challenge the readers’ existing knowledge of the topics at hand. Yet the articles are not typical of scholarly papers—incessant and sometimes sleep-inducing. Most stories run only a couple of pages, an appropriate length for a casual read over a cup of coffee.

The piece that I find most intriguing is about a group of women who quit their jobs to collect, categorize and utilize coupons in the most efficient and tactical ways coupons can possibly be used. The larger issue revolving around couponing is that it challenges the age old idea of shopping as trivia and the women responsible for it as frivolous and wasteful. Full-time couponers demonstrate wisdom and economic muscle, no less than the working women, and as a result they save thousands on child care, commuting, and grocery bills yearly. Most importantly, couponing proves the economic value of household chores that is so often ignored by the tax-paying segment of society. How homemaking is different for these women compared to their home bound mothers and grandmothers is that it has become a financially viable choice as opposed to a duty imposed upon them. But what I wish the author had also discussed is the types of food discounts available on the coupons. My fear is that the choices are limited to nutrients-deficient processed food and that couponing further drives the domestic diet towards a high-in-sodium/fat one if modernity hadn’t already done that. In other words, couponing isn’t as empowering as it appears to be. Instead, it has given manufacturers and retailers more intimate control over where consumers spend their buck.

Another piece worth deliberating is the death of homemade meal as a result of women’s liberation. The writer links it to the post-war modernism belief that technology is the key to achieve social improvements. Convenience and efficiency were prized and sold to families in the form of wartime innovations like household appliances and ready-to-eat food. The reason the latter became successful, besides convenience, was the hygiene fetish of the time, in reaction to the outbreaks of food-borne illnesses. Supermarkets’ sterile food prepared with chemicals was seen safer to eat than fresh produces. Unfortunately, the writer’s failure to discuss other reactions to these new technologies, such as rejection or consumption in ways unintended by the creators, suggests that women in the early twentieth century were vulnerable subjects of political agenda and market trends, rather than individuals who could independently weigh the values of tradition, nutrition and taste against convenience.

But besides the lack of an alternative view in some of the articles—perhaps an editorial decision to keep them short and approachable—this issue of Bitch pushes its readers to think hard about present day’s food phenomenon and their underlying gender issues that are not always obvious to the casual readers.

A modern connection to the lay on serious farm issues

As the world wonders how it can feed itself with the growing appetite of the new rich and the increasing population in the underdeveloped world, some nations have turned to GMO for answers. GMO promises higher yield compared to conventional crops and better resistance against bacteria and pests. But it also destroys the livelihoods of smallholder farmers who can’t afford the more expensive seeds and the chemicals it requires. Modern Farmer, which content proves more constructive than its cover gives credit for, features success stories of farmers who returned to conventional seeds after their failed venture with GMO, which benefits waned after a few years of harvests. Their move is encouraged by the growing demand for non-GMO products and supermarkets like Whole Foods that recently decided to label all its foods containing genetically modified ingredients by 2018.

This magazine also discusses other thought provoking agro issues such the possibility and dangers of agro-terrorism, as well as the over-reliance on refrigeration in the food supply chain (a case proven by the wrath of Hurricane Katrina and Sandy). Most of these contents are not highlighted on its cover, although they should. The short (500-1000 word) pieces combined mass media headline news (terrorism, Hurricane Sandy etc) and the less familiar farm issues, which could interest the lay to inform themselves with these obscure but pertinent problems. That is to say, serious readers who are expecting in-depth discussion—in the case of the GMO piece, the downside of conventional seeds and how they were resolved by the farmers who returned to them—will be disappointed. Some of the articles even leave one to wonder what the stakeholders have to say.

Then of course the magazine successfully “hipsterizes” the farming job, as its cover promises it will do. There’s a section on cool machineries (one that picks out bad grapes from the good ones), a feature on an opulent residency on a barn, and a rather informative piece on the best types of sheeps for wool, meat or milk targeted at the clueless amateur farmers. But a $1,326 Bernhard Willhelm silk dress in the fashion section could set an unrealisitically high expectation among aspiring farmers on the returns of farming.