About Joseph Tobin

Author Archive | Joseph Tobin
Web Exclusives | Samira Kawash

Comeback Caramel

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.

Read full story Comments { 4 }
Web Exclusives | James Barnett

Crop 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?

Read full story Comments { 2 }
Web Exclusives | Eleanor West

Cooking 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…”

Read full story Comments { 1 }
Web Exclusives | Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

Where 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.”

Read full story Comments { 3 }
Web Exclusives | Molly Watson

Bourdieu’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.

Read full story Comments { 18 }
In the News |

Gastronomica wins James Beard Award

Gastronomica has been awarded the 2012 James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for Publication of the Year.

Read full story Comments { 3 }
Responses to Kitchen Wall Alabama Farmstead | Patty Crane

Stare Long Enough

And the wall becomes a field,
each plank a row of planted cotton.
Then the cotton turns to dust–

Read full story Comments { 0 }
Responses to Kitchen Wall Alabama Farmstead | Ellen Doré Watson

Alabama Splinters

Lanes of splinters climb the walls, are

the walls, while cross-strips are all about

usefulness, scaffolds from which hang:

Read full story Comments { 0 }
Responses to Kitchen Wall Alabama Farmstead | Elizabeth Graver

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.

Read full story Comments { 1 }
Responses to Kitchen Wall Alabama Farmstead | Francine Prose

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.

Read full story Comments { 0 }