The Best American Food Writing 2019

I know a vegetarian who can’t pass up the occasional bite of roasted duck, avid carnivores who order soy lattes, and cooks at award-winning earth-to-table restaurants who have a fondness for Coke Slurpees and late-night fast-food drive-thrus. I love that!—it seems very human.

According to epidemiologists and physicians, Southerners weigh too much, have too much tooth decay, eat too much fat, and drink too much coke. We cushion against the hurt with the abundance of love found in food. And we revel in taking up space with sayings: “Only a dog wants a bone,” we say. The constraints are rarely mentioned: overwork, poverty,

Food is an inescapable fact of life, and the task for each of us is to find a way to make our peace with it. Disordered eating is very different from alcohol addiction, whose cure is sobriety. When eating goes wrong, the antidote is not a life without food, but figuring out how we can bring ourselves to eat new foods in new ways.

Sometimes we lose all of this magic in the margins. Even though food is everywhere in our social fabric and in our culture, it’s still squeezed into one thing or another. Diet gurus make food the sum of calories and carbs. Self-avowed foodies use food as a code for class. Restaurant critics polish food into a smooth, substance-less thing, while foo