Food

Celebrity chef shows how to prepare chicken wings for sailors at naval station

Professional kitchens get gentrified while foodies pretend to be ordinary folk

A story by Lisa Abend in Time this week, “Kitchen Gods,” chronicles the rise of the celebrity chef and the role of “the global hum of diligent foodies at their keyboards” in creating rock star chefs. Ok, so the chef as rock star isn’t anything new. I mean, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can probably rattle off a few names yourself. But […]

Professional kitchens get gentrified while foodies pretend to be ordinary folk Continue Reading

Loyalty card for Toronto Coffee Conspiracy

Caffeinated conspiracies and indie economics (2)

(This is the second of my posts on independent coffee shops and socioeconomics. The first looked more specifically at the microcosm of Cabbagetown coffee culture.) Like the Tim Hortons and Jetfuel debate in Cabbagetown, the newly formed Toronto Coffee Conspiracy (TCC), is equally applause-worthy and depressingly elitist. In an effort to encourage people to support their local independents, seven cafes have gotten together to form

Caffeinated conspiracies and indie economics (2) Continue Reading

Lego woman chef figurine representing female chefs and sexism

Women! Chefs! Sexism!

Tired of hearing about gender bias (read: female chefs and sexism) in professional kitchens? That’s too bad, because the problem isn’t going away. Amidst the hubbub over the recent James Beard Awards, more than a few people noticed the nearly uniform lack of women on the winners’ list. Three out of 24, to be precise. In the four years of the awards, a whopping 16%

Women! Chefs! Sexism! Continue Reading

Barista pouring coffee at fancy, independent coffeeshop.

What Tim Hortons has that independent coffeeshops keep missing

This is the first of two posts looking at Toronto indie coffee shops. My next post will talk about the recently launched Toronto Coffee Conspiracy. → When was the last time you applauded the opening of a new Tim Hortons or a Starbucks? Now think about your reaction anytime a new independent coffeeshop opens up in your neighbourhood. Unless you live under a rock, you

What Tim Hortons has that independent coffeeshops keep missing Continue Reading

Authentic cuisine: Jewish Artichoke alla giudia in Rome

Edible authenticity puts class politics on the plate

Just who does “authentic” cuisine serve? Anya von Bremzen, writing in the April issue of Saveur, isn’t so sure. I don’t normally buy food magazines for the articles on Italian food, but the April Saveur has a piece on Roman food, “Eternal Pleasures“, by von Bremzen, who also wrote one of my favourite cookbooks, Please to the Table: The Russian Cookbook. I was in Rome

Edible authenticity puts class politics on the plate Continue Reading

Butch Bakery website screengrab for gendered food terms

Crimes against language: A guide to gendered food terms

We may have replaced stewardesses with flight attendants and firemen with firefighters, but that’s ok because food is getting its man on these days. It’s the “manification” of food? Not to be confused with that “mancession” we’re slogging through. So cute, you just want to pat him on the head. This slow creep of gender-specific, nonsense words, makes it easy to ignore the underlying gender

Crimes against language: A guide to gendered food terms Continue Reading

Cover for The I Hate to Cook Book by Peggy Bracken

The kitchen-bot revolution 2—And a robo-chef in every kitchen

(This is the second of two posts on “Mombot.” In my first post, I talked about the gender dynamics of kitchen-bots and found that there was surprisingly little to say about it, compared to other models of service robots that have been developed.) The New York Times headline that first grabbed my attention—“Just Like Mombot Used to Make“— got me thinking about how a kitchen-bot

The kitchen-bot revolution 2—And a robo-chef in every kitchen Continue Reading

Scroll to Top