Atlas Obscura · November 2019

Three years after a famine that killed millions, the Kremlin decided the country’s real shortage was champagne. A winemaker replaced bottle-aging with pressurized tanks, cutting three years to a month. The bottles were advertised on the vans that carried prisoners to the Gulag.

Atlas Obscura · November 2019

Mao regifted a crate of mangoes from Pakistan’s foreign minister because he didn’t like messy fruit. Workers who had never seen one sat up all night stroking and sniffing them. Within a year a man was executed for comparing the fruit to a sweet potato.

Atlas Obscura · June 2018

A woman dining alone in the 19th century was assumed to be a prostitute. Ice cream saloons got around it with parlor furnishings, which is where the name comes from. They were also one of the few places a couple could meet unchaperoned, and moralists warned of ice cream drugged with passion-exciting vanilla.

Atlas Obscura · January 2021

David Maxwell trained as a Mayanist and became the world’s only scholar of beer can archeology, with 4,500 catalogued by country and brand. His 1993 guide to dating cans by design change is now standard practice, and the most-read thing he has published.

Atlas Obscura · October 2019

Jasper McCarthy pulled his first pint at ten and buried his first body at thirteen. The Famine forced the arrangement: an 1846 statute sent bodies to the nearest public house, and beer cellars were the only cold storage in town. The law stood until 1962.

Atlas Obscura · December 2018

Gilmore’s network of Black women raised $125 to $200 a week to fund the carpool for 381 days during the Montgomery bus boycott. Most of them worked in white households and couldn’t be seen organizing, so only Gilmore knew who was cooking. Martin Luther King Jr. financed the restaurant she later opened in her dining room, where he held meetings over fried fish and butter beans. She called him “heifer.” He called her “Tiny.”

Atlas Obscura · September 2018

On one day a year, millions of women line the streets of the capital of Kerala, build brick hearths on the pavements, light them together at one signal, and prepare porridge for the goddess. It’s the largest gathering of women on earth, and for a day the city belongs to them.

Featured in Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer’s Guide.

Hyphen Magazine · September 2020

Abusers had a new tool in 2020: the racial climate itself. Counselors described partners telling Asian American women that shelters were refusing Asians, that they would be left to die alone if they coughed. One organization’s hotline volume tripled between March and May.

Lady Science · July 2020

Orosa was the first person to can and freeze mangoes, made vinegar from pineapples, and invented banana ketchup. During the occupation she smuggled rations into an internment camp inside hollowed bamboo. Her recipes are still on shelves. Her name came off them.

Cited by the New York Times and the National Park Service; featured in Appetite for Freedom.

Narratively · September 2020

At a munching party in 1907, guests chewed each mouthful of food for five minutes while a conductor timed them with a stopwatch and rang a gong. The Detroit Free Press found the evenings notably less vivacious than dinners used to be. Upton Sinclair and Kafka were converts.

Smithsonian Magazine · April 2019

Gold Rush San Francisco paid a dollar an egg, so men rowed 26 miles to a seabird colony and scaled cliffs in crampons made of rope and rusted nails. It ended in a dawn gunfight in 1863, two dead, and a murre population cut from 400,000 to 60,000.