I. Denial. Some say it’s a Celtic thing. Others that I’m “kissed by nature.” You’re blessed. Special. That mark is a stroke of luck. Thick and unruly, the first gray hair stakes its claim when I’m 15. Socially anxious with acne to match, this leaves no place to hide. My dark hair is a thicket, and the white emerges in sharp contrast, drawn hastily. Once it starts, the trickle turns to flood. Read more… Published June 12, 2020
Categories: essay
I. Hairline crack. I don’t know why I went south looking for my father, but I did. When I was a freshman in college, I saw his face up in the clouds, a mental imprint strung high over Jersey City. I was driving down the Jersey Turnpike and the image emerged like an apparition: his dark hair inverted to white and a soft smile playing on his lips. It held steady until the wind changed and then started to disintegrate. […]
Categories: essay
I need to get this computer off me, she says. I can’t tell if I’m sick or depressed. Depressed is sick, I tell her, but she says there’s a difference. She would know. Her mom, and her mom’s mom, and the moms before them, all swirled out into that inaccessible distance. One killed herself. One got committed and clothed in a buttermilk dress. The rest toiled on amid children and husbands, saying everything’s F-I-N-E fine. They repeat it like a […]
Categories: fiction
2019 Eddy Award, Best Feature “Mother Nature, she’s the boss.” Billy Mayer looks at the bay, his eyes taking on the deep blue hue of the waters where Obes Thorofare and Steelmans Bay meet. “You have to look at the moons. You have to look at the tides. All that knowledge? Nobody is going to teach you that. You can’t describe that. It’s just something that you pick up over time.” Mayer speaks to a primal truth with the poetry […]
Categories: food & drink, on the water
Perhaps no food conveys a sense of place like the oyster. To tip back a Cape May Salt or Forty North Rose Cove and sip its brine is to kiss its native waterway on the lips, in a paraphrase of French poet Léon-Paul Fargue. It is to commune with season and location, a humble creature transformed by salt and time into something far more grand. It is to taste the point where river gives way to sea, the best of […]
Categories: food & drink, on the water • Tags: farming, oysters
This has been a challenging, no good, difficult 2017. Sure, sure, there has been positivity along the way. (Its persistence is shocking, isn’t it?) Yet there have been plenty of just-plain-tough days, too. And when things are low, when they come just shy of bottoming out, there is a dish I return to for solace: The Casserole. Spoken aloud, the words are an incantation. They bring my best friends into the kitchen when I’m pushing against the empty, a lifeboat […]
Categories: essay, food & drink • Tags: essays, recipes
Contributed to a statewide guide to the most delicious local bakeries, published in the April 2020 issue. Your Guide to the Garden State’s Best Bakeries 6 Delicious Destinations for Pie 7 Bakeries to Visit If You Have Dietary Restrictions
Categories: food & drink
In the push-pull of the current moment, centering rituals can take on new meaning. For some, this means jogging. Others find solace in the kitchen. Haddonfield-based tea and wellness expert Alexis Siemonsdraws on her earliest memories when called to go inward. “My first memory of tea was my mom drinking it in the morning,” she says. Siemons mom was both a doctor and a mom—in other words, a superwoman deserving of downtime. “When it was nice, she would go outside, have […]
Categories: food & drink
Shelter-in-place cooking can feel like an amazing escape or an obligation. If you’ve already cooked through your own go-tos, these cookbooks will offer a jolt of inspiration. FOR BAKERS: Modern Jewish Baker, Shannon Sarna As the reality of shelter-in-place sets in, cookbook author and editor of The Nosher Shannon Sarna hosted a Zoom challah class. While she demoed braiding techniques, her youngest daughter strolled into the scene—and it was kind of perfect. In that moment, Sarna was all of us, wrestling pets and […]
Categories: food & drink
For the average person, any rumination on the fruit fly ends with a distracted swat. Yet the hidden world of this diminutive species has potential to reveal surprising insights into the neural-generated behavior of species across the animal kingdom, including our own.
Categories: academia
Somewhere during the span days since Covid-19 upended—well, everything—the Twitter-verse noted a nuance in this popular Mr. Rogers quote: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” Rogers’ words are inspiring on their merits. Yet here’s the thing: He was talking to kids, which means it’s us, the adults, who are being called on to help. […]
Categories: food & drink
SINCE 2014, THE FREE LIBRARY OF PHILADELPHIA’S Culinary Literacy Center has been a hotspot for innovative food education. Every month’s roster of classes is rooted in the center’s mission to advance literacy through food. In some cases, that’s literal. Since 2015, the Edible Alphabet program has welcomed English language learners, including immigrants and refugees, to the library’s kitchen classroom for free six- to eight-week courses that blend culinary and language lessons. People from around the world prepare a shared meal, led […]
Categories: food & drink
Marcello De Feo grew up in a South Philly Italian household. His mother, Santa Bianca, came to America from Abruzzo when she was a teenager. “I’m first-generation Italian,” De Feo says. “My Nonna lived with us from when I was born.” Looking back, she looms large in his food memories. Each day, Nonna Paola would pack his school lunches. “I didn’t realize how spoiled I was. I’d go to school and my lunch was this amazing roll with things like […]
Categories: food & drink
IN THE U.S. ALONE, MORE THAN 52 MILLION TONS OF FOOD ENDS ITS JOURNEY IN A LANDFILL EACH YEAR. That’s more than a waste of food. Deprived of oxygen, a single head of romaine can take up to 25 years to decompose, producing climate-warming methane in the process. Yet, with recent innovations, that food may be put to productive use—even if it’s not on the plate. In the shadow of Newark airport, a new chapter in the state’s food-waste recycling […]
Categories: food & drink
Roughly once a month, employees from Nespresso’s North American headquarters in Manhattan board a bus and take the 60-mile journey to rural Sussex County. With the city in the rear-view, skyscrapers give rise to an open landscape defined by lakes, postage-stamp downtowns and hilly green vistas that stretch into the distance. It’s a far cry from their normal 9-to-5 digs. Yet this isn’t just a team-building exercise. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. On a farm and warehouse near Route […]
Categories: food & drink
