All the news that's fit to eat
By Chris Mittelstaedt The 1878 edition of A Domestic Cyclopædia of Practical Information, published by Henry Holt & Company, explained to eager readers the uses for the banana: “It is eaten raw, either alone or cut in slices with sugar and cream, or wine and orange juice. It is also roasted, fried or boiled, and is made into [...]
By Chris Mittelstaedt The college application process was not an easy one for me. I didn’t know where I wanted to go to school, and I had no idea what to say to encapsulate myself in an essay. I finally settled on telling the story of the summer I spent rehabbing houses in the Appalachian Mountain towns [...]
By Chris Mittelstaedt It’s hard to let go of things that were ingrained in my brain as a kid. I still feel nervous if I take food out of the kitchen to eat somewhere other than the table (“not on the rug, Chris!”), and oftentimes I find myself humming an old Sesame Street song from Cookie Monster: [...]
By Chris Mittelstaedt My wife is on the East Coast for FruitGuys business, and I’m flying solo. My teen and preteen zombies, formerly known as my children, start rising at 5:45 every morning and usually grunt through the breakfast routine. I’m surprised when my daughter raises an eyebrow (complex motor skills aren’t usually seen at this hour) and asks: [...]
By Chris Mittelstaedt It was the kind of month that gave a grown man a hangnail—the really nasty kind that snags easily on wool sweaters in dry fall air and requires Neosporin and a superhero Band-Aid. I had been working a case that had me stumped. Ginny Grapefruit had rolled into my office looking for her roots. [...]
By Chris Mittelstaedt Yes, this is Conference Room A, Building 12. It’s about 10 o’clock in the morning. That’s the Strategy Squad. They’ve been here since 5 a.m. Something about reassessing their core. Some confusion was reported from one of the other buildings. Maybe it was a gas leak, maybe it was something more. People [...]
By Chris Mittelstaedt It’s a strange feeling when someone dies who affected your life but whom you never knew personally. I’ve found myself grieving over the passing of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs (1955–2011). In the early 1980s, I spent countless hours on my family’s Apple IIe playing Time Zone and Dig Dug. I can still remember the “beep!” [...]
By Chris Mittelstaedt I’ve always been a pretty active person—something that made coming down with a random medical condition all the more humbling. About a month ago I had an acute onset of achalasia, an uncommon disorder in which the muscles around the lower esophagus clamp down like a boa constrictor and restrict food and liquid from getting [...]
By Chris Mittelstaedt When O’Henry peaches start to appear, I think of O. Henry—the turn-of-the-century American short story writer who wrote The Gift of the Magi, a story about a young married man who sells his watch to buy his newlywed wife a beautiful set of combs for her long hair. Of course at the same time, without [...]
By Chris Mittelstaedt Change has come slowly but steadily to the foods we’ve eaten over the last 70 years. While there has been no acute onset to clearly demonstrate the difference between the food of today and yesterday, if you take a look at local agriculture, you can see the fingerprint of change in all partsof the [...]
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