A bad taste in the mouth: over fifty years of doubt about MSG
Mariel Tishma Chicago, Illinois, United States A Chinese Food Storefront in New York, NY. Photo by Jkusachi. June 2019. Via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Monosodium glutamate’s bad reputation started with one letter to the New England Journal of Medicine. From there, the truth was confused by misinformation and prejudice. Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok […]
Munchausen by Proxy
Charles Halsted Davis, California, United States My last patient of the morning was a teenage girl, just turned eighteen. She walked in slowly, her face in agony, apprehensive. Her mother said the pain had begun at age twelve, about when she started to menstruate, yet it never let up, periods or not. Refusing food, […]
A moonie
Simon Wein Petach Tikvah, Israel Untitled blue face, Acrylic on Canvas, 50/70 cm, 2017. Painting by Daniel Wein. Published with permission of the artist. Wally Moon was a legend who stood at least 1.90 meters tall. The most striking things about him were his appearance and his gruffness. When I met him during my […]
Food as medicine
Keerthi Gondy Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States Photo by PhotoMIX Ltd. from Pexels In my family, food is the language of love. A warm meal is the way we say “I love you.” Whenever I get sick, my mother prepares a pot of spicy turmeric soup and honey lemon tea. When my brother threw a game-winning strike […]
Mustard: history of the yellow seed
Carol Sherman Chicago, Illinois, United States Figure 1. The Sign from the Mustard Museum. Photo taken by Douglas R. Siefken, August 15th, 2019. Provided for this article. The National Mustard Museum in Middleton Wisconsin1 describes itself as having over 5,600 mustards. They originate from all fifty states of the United States and from more […]
Learning to eat at thirty
Hannah Harpole Bern, Switzerland “Chai” photo by Hannah Harpole My hippie parents indulged me as a picky eater. At two I proclaimed I was a vegetarian. Around the age of four, I survived solely on yogurt, refusing all other nourishment. I do not exactly know when this morphed into a combination eating disorder of […]
The pains and pleasures of spicy food
Danielle Dalechek Norfolk, Virginia Human tongue. Credit: Macroscopic Solutions. Wellcome Collection. CC BY-NC Do you enjoy the painful yet delightful sensation of spicy chili peppers making your mouth feel as if it were on fire? Are you a fan of eating dishes that make your eyes tear and your nose run? If so, it […]
Fasting: for body and spirit
Isabel Azevedo Porto, Portugal St. Catherine of Siena was known for rigorous fasting and abstinence. Her fast was so severe at times that it was questioned by her sisterhood and the clergy, who insisted she eat properly. Having struggled with the obesity epidemic for decades,1,2 the scientific and health care communities are now giving […]
“I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat”: the complicated history of American food aid
Joy Liu Rochester, Minnesota Harvest, Joy Liu. 2008 Private collection Every afternoon after preschool, I would crisscross the maze of stolid Beijing apartments to collect a jar of fresh suan nai. Equal parts sweet, tangy, and savory, the fermented milk drink was a favorite I usually devoured as soon as the elderly peddler handed […]
Food of the body
Katrina Genuis Vancouver, Canada Pero and Cimon Fresco, 50 to 79 CE, unknown artist, Pompeii, Casa IX. Copyright of photograph attributed to Stefano Bolognini. Two thousand years ago, the Roman writer Valerius Maximus documented a particularly strange set of events. In his collection Memorable Doings and Sayings, Maximus recounts thousands of episodes of exemplary […]