Photograph from cliff1066 on Flickr A story in this week's New Yorker (subscription required) points out that Florida is being beset by a nascent plague of invasive species. It's the consequence of a mid-'90s exotic-pet trend that fizzled out as overwhelmed python and lizard owners let loose growing and unmanageable reptiles. One such nasty-sounding beastie is the Nile monitor (Varanus niloticus): ...they are spectacular animals that make terrible pets. Up to seven feet long, with stout legs, tapered jaws, and skin that seems to be encrusted with semiprecious stones, Nile monitors are notoriously aggressive and ill-tempered. When cornered, a monitor will stand on its hind legs and hiss, inflating its body and lashing its tail like a bullwhip. What...
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The New Yorker's Joan Acocella spends more than 5,000 words dissecting the hangover. As she eloquently points out, "it is a preventable malady: don't drink." But beyond abstinence, other popular cures include peanut butter in Africa, chilies in Mexico, pickle juice in Russia and greasy, fried whatever everywhere else in the world. Read what triggers the bed spins and tummy aches in the Annals of Drinking. Or just scan our favorite shots of wisdom from the piece, after the jump....
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The New Yorker drops a lengthy and sobering piece this week that looks at the depressing state of the world's food-supply system as detailed in four "second-wave" food-politics books. Where "first wave" books (such as Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation) leave off at the ill effects of junk food, the new crop of books looks at how "the entire system of Western food production is in need of radical change."...
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The New Yorker has a lengthy and inspiring profile of Grant Achatz, chef at Chicago's Alinea, who's on the comeback after fighting tongue cancer. If you've been following this story, you'll know that Achatz wanted a line of treatment that would preserve his sense of taste. Well, after irradiation of his tongue, he lost that sense, but it's slowly returning. Because his ability to taste has come back over time, Achatz feels that he is understanding the sense in a new way—the way you would if you could see only in black-and-white and, one by one, colors were restored to you. He says, “When I first tasted a vanilla milkshake"—after the end of his treatment—“it tasted very sweet to me,...
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I know many of you are probably sick of reading about Momofuku chef David Chang (as he himself probably is), but his quote in The New Yorker about his current relationship cracked me up: "I’m finally dating somebody that I don’t hate her guts,” he says. “We had dinner yesterday and I was like, I don’t hate you at all! You know?” His girlfriend is also Korean-American, and was also raised to be brilliant at something—where he played golf, she played the violin. She now works in the advertising department of Microsoft. She seems to tolerate him amazingly well. “I am the worst boyfriend ever,” he says. “I’m high maintenance. I mean, you have no idea how high maintenance." The...
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The Serious Eats Weekend Book Giveaway is back with a vengeance this holiday weekend with a really cool book, Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, edited by New Yorker Editor-in-Chief David Remnick. The book features food and drink-related stories and cartoons that have appeared in the New Yorker by such heavyweights as Calvin Trillin, Anthony Bourdain, A. J. Liebling, Jim Harrison, John McPhee, and Roz Chast. It's the perfect bedside table companion for serious eaters. Thanks to the generous folks at Random House, we've got seven copies of this book to give away. Just answer the following question in the comments: Who is your favorite food writer? Winners will be chosen at random from among the...
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Photograph from gordonramsay.com In this week's New Yorker, Bill Buford takes us behind the scenes and into the kitchen of screaming English chef Gordon Ramsay as he opens a restaurant in New York City. Buford's a terrific writer, but I'm not sure we learn anything that surprising in its 12 pages. Ramsay curses a lot, is a surprisingly understated chef, and is really a good bloke when you drill down and get to know him. The story's big revelation is that Ramsay himself stole the reservation book at Aubergine, his London restaurant, and then accused his former mentor Marco Pierre White of doing it to prevent White from making a deal with Aubergine's principal owners to take over the...
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