Talk to Me About Food Ali Tadlaoui

What follows now are musings about the forces impacting what we choose to eat AWAY from home Priya Krishna, a contributing writer to the New York Times food section shared her assessment of what she and her team discovered surveying 121 menus from restaurants around the country in a story called “The Menu Trends That Define Dining Now.” This was in the February 7th 2024 edition. It's mostly a light-hearted take on what is on menus and observations about the menu itself. In a previou...

On this episode of Talk to Me About Food I share top line findings from "The Menu Trends That Define Dining Right Now," by Priya Krishna, writing in The New York Times. I also muse specifically on Caesar salad which is one of items that's hot across the country from the survey of 121 menus that underpins Ms. Krishna's article.

This episode is one in a mini-series about a range of soups and simple foods from different food traditions that are suggested, prescribed, maybe sometimes even foisted on someone feeling under the weather. I consider a basic udon soup. Where it’s the bounty of the land that nourishes a chicken, it’s the bounty of the ocean and sea washing up on every millimeter of Japan’s coastline that infuses udon noodle soup with its curative power. Marc Matsumoto talks me through how to make dashi; the b...

How much, if at all, does the food you eat define who you are and where you come from? Do the choices around what food you buy, where you buy it, how you prepare it and even how you dispose of it subscribe you to a specific community (willingly or unwittingly)?In this episode I muse about "gastronativism" - a word coined in a book titled Gastronativism, Food, Identity, Politics by Fabio Parasecoli. The author, a professor of food studies at NYU, defines gastronativism as the use of food...

Brief musings around discovering overnight oats. Beats regular old hot oatmeal any day of the week.

Sandor Katz, a self-described fermentation revivalist and author of three books on the topic helps me unpack fermentation. What it is and why it’s so engrained in all food cultures. He talks about the role of fermentation in preserving food then explains how fermentation plays a vital role in helping us get the most of the nutritional content of food by breaking food down into easier-to-digest elements, like amino acids. Apparently, we don’t benefit from the full nutritional potency of manufa...