For generations raised on Kraft cubes, the superiority of a fresh, small-batch caramel is largely unknown. In fact, the mediocrity of the overprocessed caramel helped chocolate bars rise to dominance in the candy aisle.
About Joseph Tobin
Web Exclusives | James BarnettCrop Futures: How Surplus Breeds Demand
Here’s a thought experiment: Let’s pretend that human consumption of all soy products and bulk field corn dropped to zero in the coming marketing year, and that everyone knew this was going to occur. What would happen?
Web Exclusives | Eleanor WestCooking with My 19th-Century Quaker Relative
In the introduction to her 1845 cookbook, Domestic Cookery, Elizabeth Ellicott Lea writes, “[T]he Authoress offers to her young countrywomen this Work, with the belief that, by attention to its contents, many of the cares attendant on a country or city life, may be materially lessened…”
Web Exclusives | Benjamin Aldes WurgaftWhere is My Jetpack?
In 1931 Winston Churchill claimed “fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”
Web Exclusives | Molly WatsonBourdieu’s Food Space
So here is a new take on Bourdieu’s “The food space” chart. It has none of the deep sociological research that spawned the original behind it, and questions of women’s free time and status, as well as rates of food and cultural consumption, have been left off.
In the News | Gastronomica wins James Beard Award
Gastronomica has been awarded the 2012 James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for Publication of the Year.
Stare Long Enough
And the wall becomes a field,
each plank a row of planted cotton.
Then the cotton turns to dust–
Alabama Splinters
Lanes of splinters climb the walls, are
the walls, while cross-strips are all about
usefulness, scaffolds from which hang:
Walker Evans, Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead, 1936
We say down to the bare bones, expose the framework. Down to the square nails, hand hewn, raw. Unfinished, we say. Barn, ship, cradle, manger, belly of the beast. We say expose; the contractor says insulate. We say rustic; he says code.
Walker Evans
The Walker Evans photographs that I like best are the ones I think of as spirit pictures, photographs of ghosts, a little like those Victorian photos in which the ectoplasmic residue of the dead hovers, threateningly or comfortingly, in the frame with the grieving beloved.




