Of course the books in this series are, by no means, the only single-subject food history books on the market today. Microhistory emerged as a genre in Italy during the 1970s and has gained popularity over the past couple decades in food publishing. “In food history terms, there is nothing more ordinary than the everyday food ordinary people eat, and microhistorical studies of these unprepossessing subjects are popular, so much so that, at times, they are topping the bestseller lists,” writes Australian food writer and professor Donna Lee Brien. Indeed, books such as Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History and Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World have received praise from critics and readers, with nearly 90,000 ratings between them on the book review site Goodreads.

In this genre, the banana has garnered a fair amount of coverage. In addition to Banana: A Global History, published as part of the aforementioned series, Dan Koeppel’s Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World ranks high on many bestseller and recommended reading lists. Peter Chapman’s Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World has also received a lot of attention. (And while not a book, The Counter itself has done its own single-subject deep dive on the ubiquitous banana.)

But what about the plantain?

As a first-generation Nigerian-American, I grew up eating plantain and consider it an essential part of my understanding of what it means to be West African. Each bite of plantain connects me to my roots, though I am many miles from my father’s homeland.

You may be thinking that you’ve seen plantain in the media recently, and you’d be right. It is not uncommon these days for stories in prominent publications to praise the fruit for its multifunctionality, and to offer recipes. Over the past couple years, Nigerian food writer and recipe developer Yewande Komolafe has written about the starchy fruit and its versatility for both TASTE and The New York Times. Also, word has been spreading about Ghanaian-American scholar and entrepreneur Rachel Laryea, founder of the plant[ain]-based Brooklyn shop Kelewele, which opened last year. Laryea sells all kinds of amazing plantain-based foods ranging from what she calls “placos” (plantain tacos) to “Liquid Gold” plantain ice cream, not to mention some fashionable plantain gear. 

Yet, even with Komolafe and Laryea’s efforts, among others, I still see a gap in the publishing world when it comes to plantain. There are few—online or in print—easily digestible and accessible global histories that tell the plantain’s tale. I believe the American public deserves the chance to hear the plantain’s unique story, like the fact that one of the world’s leading banana experts once hypothesized that it may have been the first-ever fruit crop on Earth.

Admittedly, an investigation into plantain’s origins leads to words like “complex.” That’s because the history of the plantain is nearly inextricably linked to the history of the banana. This makes sense as the two fruits have an abundance of overlaps, even today. And it’s worth noting that when you start investigating bananas and plantains, you will find divided opinions and classifications: Are plantains a type of banana? Are they genetically related but distinct? Is the truth somewhere in between? Experts disagree.

Regardless, it’s clear that plantains are of singular importance in many cultures across the globe, and have a rich and complicated history that’s both intertwined and distinct from the banana. As Komolafe notes in her Times piece, “[L]ike bananas, plantains grow in tropical and subtropical climates across the globe, ensuring that they are always in season and making them a crucial ingredient in cuisines across West Africa, South and Central America, India and the Caribbean.”

It might be easiest, then, to begin—but not end—with the banana, whose origins are generally considered to be in Southeast Asia between 8000-5000 BCE. In his 1995 paper “Banana and Plantain: The Earliest Fruit Crops?” Professor Edmond De Langhe, founding director of the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain (INIBAP), discusses bananas and plantains as two separate groups, hypothesizing, “If the term ‘crop’ signifies a plant that can be grown for subsistence, then the plantain and the edible diploid bananas [a group that shares a similar genetic structure or makeup] may indeed have been the first fruit crop, at a time when hunting and gathering were still the main means of procuring food.” De Langhe theorized that between the 5th and 15th centuries, bananas and plantains likely moved along the coast of the Indian Ocean by humans. After that, up until the 19th century, Portuguese and Spanish traders probably carried the crops “all over tropical America.” 

This is fascinating information about the plantain’s globetrotting. Yet, not only is it hypothetical—it is also only available online as a file that requires a degree of tech-savvy to access. And De Langhe’s audience is by no means the general Western public. Though he has done amazing research into the plantain, much of De Langhe’s work is stuck in peer-reviewed (and paywalled) academic journals. Most other works that mention the plantain’s past are also buried in academic texts not accessible to the masses. 

And speaking of the masses, where are the stories by people who live and breathe plantain, consuming it every day of their lives, in the research?

We have to construct our own plantain history. And piecing together the fruit’s unheralded story will require scouring the internet’s far corners to see what stories exist in the online world’s remote regions. And it will also require getting out and talking to those for whom plantaining is a way of life.

Here is how I would start.

In my father’s homeland of Nigeria, fried plantain, referred to as dodo in his native Yoruba language, is a favorite food. In this country famous for having one of the highest rates of twin births in the world, a common piece of plantain folklore is that if you encounter a pair of conjoined plantains, you must separate them in front of yourself. Otherwise, doing so behind your back will cause you to birth conjoined twins. 

As evidenced on many a food blog, plantain has long been so central to the way of life in both Cuba and the Dominican Republic that a particular descriptor—aplatanado—is used among locals. It roughly translates as “to be plantainized” or “to be plantain-like” and is used to refer to foreigners who have become accustomed to the local traditions. In a post on their award-winning “Dominican Cooking” food blog, Clara Gonzalez and Ilana Benady proclaim, “As plantains are a traditional, indispensable, and favorite addition to our daily meals, they have apparently been chosen to represent our sense of being Dominican in the same manner that people from the U.S. have chosen apple pie.” 

One of the few references to plantain’s history I have seen in a prominent Western publication was in the food origins and culture magazine Whetstone last year. The article, written by Indian food writer Jehan Nezar, focuses on the Mappilas, a Muslim community in the south Indian state of Kerala. “The story of bananas and plantains in Mappila cuisine is also a tale that is interwoven with that evocative element of nostalgia,” Nezar writes. 

As Nezar distinguishes between the two fruits, she documents the plantain in dishes that sometimes show its relationship to the banana and sometimes its uniqueness. To illustrate the plantain’s distinct significance in Mappilan cuisine, she tells the story of local cookbook author Ummi Abdulla, whom she calls “the doyenne of Kerala’s Mappila cuisine.” Abdulla hosted a food festival at a 5-star hotel in another town, but the venue was unable to provide plantains. Adamant that she could not host the event without the fruit, she resolved to get plantains to the hotel on her own. “I ended up having to send raw plantains from Kerala by courier,” she tells Nezar. “By the time I reached Kolkata, they were ripe.”

Don’t these anecdotes documenting plantain’s global presence demand that we need to know more? Or call for more curiosity, at the very least? As a child growing up in California, I recall reading Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s poem “United Fruit Co.” at school and learning about the imperialist invasions orchestrated by American banana companies in Central America. It was a troubling look at the dark history of the banana industry but was also required reading for all students. I was 37 the first time I saw plantain mentioned in a piece of literature, and that was because I went digging for it. Yes, plantain is less common and less popular in the West than the banana. But that doesn’t mean its story should be invisible.

I spoke with Rachel Laryea about her work toward shining a spotlight on the plantain via her Kelewele shop in Brooklyn. She said it is as much an educational endeavor as it is entrepreneurial. “I spend a lot of time educating people on what plantains are in the first place,” she said. “It’s folks that look like me that are doing that work of putting plantain on America’s culinary landscape.” 

That landscape may soon look brighter thanks to an upcoming release in the publishing world: a children’s book. Earlier this year, Afro-Latinx author Alyssa Reynoso-Morris landed a deal with Atheneum—an imprint of the third largest publisher in the United States, Simon & Schuster—to publish her debut children’s book Plátanos Are Love in 2023. The book tells the story of a young girl who learns about plantain’s cultural significance from her grandmother. 

I talked to Reynoso-Morris about the inspiration behind her book. “Growing up, I ate plantains for every meal basically,” she said. Since her audience is young children, Reynoso-Morris said her book will focus narrowly on plantain’s significance in Dominican and Puerto Rican cultures. However, she hopes to include a map of all the countries where plantain is eaten in the back matter of the book and also to share lesson plans with information about plantain’s global presence on her website. 

While I wait for Reynoso-Morris’ book to reach my hands and my sons’ ears, you’ll encounter me reading, writing, and talking about my favorite starchy fruit, continuing my never-ending quest to normalize knowledge of its past.

When it comes to the plantain, there are more stories to tell, more blanks to fill in—and, I maintain, a book’s worth of global history that needs to be written. 

The post Publish the plantain: Why this venerable, global fruit deserves a book of its own appeared first on The Counter.

But Swanson had grown and distilled Hazlet for several years before he considered the possibility that other varietals might provide flavors distinct from those he was getting from Hazlet. It was a 2014 call from a Maine farmer who had been growing rye for some local distillers that got Swanson thinking about other varietals. This rye producer said that distillers had complained about the pronounced pepper spice they were getting from rye categorized as VNS (“variety not stated”) by grain merchants. He had heard about the vanilla notes Swanson was getting from his Hazlet rye and had set out to get some for himself. However, the producer had not been able to find the seed anywhere east of Saskatchewan, so he asked if Swanson would sell him some. Swanson did, and thus started his deeper dive into the relationship between rye varietals and flavor—with the help of researchers from the University of Minnesota Crookston.

The vast majority of commodity rye grain is sold as VNS rye. The same is largely true of the rye seed farmers buy, though there is a bit more specificity of variety on the seed side. There are many factors behind the prevalence of VNS rye, but an important one is that many farmers grow rye only as a cover crop. But another significant reason is that rye is a cross-pollinator that can shift genetic—and thus varietal—characteristics in just a generation or two, which makes it difficult to maintain one variety’s purity over time. 

Unlike most rye whiskey producers, Swanson grows all the grain he distills, and he had come to believe that the variety of rye he had chosen was more important than conventional wisdom recognized. Swanson wasn’t the only one: A few other distillers in the U.S. were also making whiskey from specific rye varietals, so he set out to test the proposition that variety affects flavor. 

In 2015 Swanson asked Jochum Wiersma, a small grains specialist at the University of Minnesota Crookston, if there was any scientific research into how variety influences flavor, particularly in rye whiskey production. The answer, a literature review suggested, was no. So together, they applied for and won a crop research grant from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture to start the process of finding out. Despite what Swanson had already gleaned from distilling different varieties of rye, he knew an outcome showing that variety does not influence flavor would be a valid scientific result, even a welcome one.

“That would be good news for farmers,” Swanson said, “because then they could grow whatever rye grows best for them, and good for distillers, because the flavor of the ultimate spirit would then be mostly about their skill and not the exact character of their ingredients.” 

Researchers at the University of Minnesota Crookston examined the flavor profiles of whiskeys produced from 15 different winter rye varietals. In the study, 190 participants (a mix of industry experts and laypeople) smelled and tasted the unaged distillates—or “white whiskey”—and provided descriptive feedback for each of them. The results, portrayed as flavor wheels with larger sections representing greater frequency of that descriptor, demonstrated significant differences between varieties, with tasters sharing common flavor notes for each variety. Some, like Arostook, Brasetto, Oklon, and Bono, offered pronounced floral notes, while others, like Rymin, Spooner, Dylan, and Wheeler, leaned more sweet- and fruit-forward in their profiles. The frequency of grainy and spicy notes also varied noticeably across varieties. And some varieties clearly yielded more “off” notes—sulphur, solvent, chemical—than others.

Winter rye varietals of whiskey flavor wheels produced by researchers at the University of Minnesota Crookston

Five varieties received fewer responses, so their flavor wheels feature less detail:

Wiersma pointed out several shortcomings of the study, like the fact that it featured neither replicated grow-outs (growing particular varietals more than once) nor replicated batches (making whiskey batches with each varietal more than once). Instead, over the three years of the study, each year featured a distinct set of five or six varietals grown in one-acre test plots, meaning some varietals were grown in different seasons. And with only one-acre plots for each varietal, some of which yielded much less than others, there wasn’t enough of some varieties to make more than one batch of whiskey. But Wiersma added, “To me, the study is really a first foray into the question: Does variety matter?” 

Despite the study’s limitations, Wiersma said the results point clearly in one direction: The flavor differences between types of rye in the study are so vast that they are most likely varietal rather than seasonal. Since Swanson grew all of the plots on his own land, the differences could not be attributed to location. Production techniques were also consistent across varieties, as Swanson used the same enzymes and mashing process for each, and ran them all through the same single-pass distillation process. 

Jeremy Wilson, a farmer in Jamestown, North Dakota, whose approach centers on no-till techniques, grows rye both as a cover crop and for harvest, but his main focus is on what rye does for his soil. “One of my biggest uses of rye is before soybeans, because I can plant soybeans right into rye, and they don’t mind the rye being there at all,” he said. “Rye has an allelopathic effect in its roots where it doesn’t allow other weeds or plants to grow. And we use that to our advantage: We’ll plant a good stand of rye, then we have less dependence on herbicides for some of our other crops. So rye’s kind of my buddy.”

Another challenge is that many of the open-pollinating varieties, especially those sought after as “heritage grains,” not only yield less than the hybrids, but many also add layers of difficulty by requiring particular spraying schedules or special harvesting techniques. Laura Fields, CEO of the Delaware Valley Fields Foundation and the driving force behind the Seed Spark Project, which aims to restore long-lost heritage grains, has been working to bring the varietal Rosen rye back to Pennsylvania (Michter’s, back when it was a Pennsylvania distillery, touted the ingredient for a number of years on its labels). One farmer she worked with, Wesley Kline, did not find growing Rosen too challenging once Fields laid out the steps he should follow and their timing. But some of the steps were new to him, like applying a growth inhibitor early on to help keep the notoriously tall Rosen rye plants (which normally reach six feet in height) from falling over. And harvesting such a tall plant caused some issues: “It’s a lot slower harvesting,” Klein said, “because of the length of the straw. And it was also laying down, so it took longer.” Klein had a good experience growing Rosen and got a great yield and a high price for his crop, but is ambivalent about growing more. “I’m not sure yet,” he said. “We want to grow it a second time [on the same small plot they used last year] to see.”

There are also questions about how best to establish sustainable markets for varietal ryes. Wiersma, for example, notes that unless a big producer decides to use varietals, the demand for such ryes faces one significant barrier: “You don’t need a lot to make a hell of a lot of whiskey. Two quarters, or 320 acres, for a farmer isn’t that much. But for Mike, it’s enough to last him a decade. We can’t drink our way out of that problem.”

But varietal advocates like Fields are working to address this problem of scale directly. Fields and the Seed Spark Project are connecting farmers to a growing stable of distillers to produce Rosen directly for them. The goal is a farming cooperative that provides Rosen rye in such a way that no particular bad crop leaves distillers without grain. But scaling up too quickly can undercut the premium farmers can currently get for Rosen. “I want to make sure that we’re satisfying all of the needs without overproducing, and having money lost, because this is a very expensive grain to grow right now,” Fields said. “So it’s a balancing act.”

The post Conventional wisdom says rye varieties don’t affect whiskey flavor. One producer spent three years proving they do. appeared first on The Counter.

“It was a real treat for us,” said NASA astronaut Megan McArthur during a press call she took in space. “We could come and smell the plant, and see the chiles growing. So it’s really been a nice morale boost, as well as an interesting science project.”

The ongoing chile experiment, nicknamed “Hatch to ISS” by NASA, is part of a larger effort to explore the possibility of growing more fresh fruits and vegetables in space to supplement the astronauts’ packaged food-infused diet. The experiment is one of the most challenging to date because of the long germination and growing time of Capsicum annuum, the scientific name for chile peppers. 

Jacob Torres, a technician and horticulturist with NASA hailing from northern New Mexico, helped evaluate the seed used in the experiment. It’s called NuMex Española Improved, and is an early-maturing, medium-heat variety that is widely cultivated around Hatch, New Mexico. In the testing phase, this pepper outperformed other contenders in its ability to adapt to high levels of carbon dioxide and the microgravity of outer space while maintaining a desirable flavor and nutrition profile. “Not only did it have a champion in New Mexico, but it also did very well during our screening tests in a space cabin-like environment,” said Spencer.

Torres felt proud to work on the project. “To be part of this team and work on the New Mexican chiles I grew up eating really means everything to me,” he said in a video interview. And the space experiment surpassed his expectations. “Our mission was to grow one pepper. One successful pepper. And now we had seven in just the first harvest,” Torres added.

Another harvest will take place just after Thanksgiving, according to Spencer. Among that new batch of peppers, some will be sent back to earth for a nutritional and food safety analysis. Spencer is unsure if microgravity will add a unique flavor to the signature medium heat, but she thinks the experiment will advance the technology for growing chiles in controlled, indoor settings that use significantly less water.

“When we were touring New Mexico to select seeds, farmers in Hatch told us that they were worried about the impact of climate change and the drought on their chiles,” Spencer said. “Perhaps a controlled environment with limited water and electricity input, like the one we have up there, could save the chiles.”

The post How New Mexico chiles ended up on the space station appeared first on The Counter.

Maybe, to you, cookbooks are neutral tools, pretty to look at, or part of middle- and upper-class leisure. I firmly believe cookbooks are always political, even conceptually. To cook requires resources, and resources are not available to all. And in the case of refugee cookbooks, their authors want to have it both ways—to draw emotional and moral authority from crisis, while avoiding getting their own hands too dirty. 

That’s why the “resilience” narratives are so important: They invoke the political in a facile way, while avoiding opportunities for more nuanced engagement. Cookbooks capitalize on this sprinkling of politics. The authors establish themselves as politically conscious global citizens, often attempting to provide or promote financial support for displaced peoples. Soup for Syria’s proceeds went to refugees in the Bekaa Valley. Ripe Figs features an addendum of refugee aid organizations to which readers can donate. But is financial support where our simulated sympathy ends?

Ultimately, the effect is not necessarily to support the displaced peoples of the world, but to comfort the reader. The reader is made benevolent through their support of these refugees. After all, they purchased the book.

These tropes in the last decade’s cookbookery are most evident in works about the Syrian community, particularly those written by outsiders. But they do show up when Syrian-authored cookbooks hit the market. Some Syrians also reach for resilience and displacement narratives. Our Syria, a 2017 book by Itab Azzam and Dina Mousawi, includes stories of displaced Syrian women in Lebanon, placed between recipes for different mezze and classic mains like lubiya bi-banadora. 

Even books by Syrians that center on personal narratives and food history are marketed to or interpreted through a Western vision of the “Middle East,” an amorphous conflict zone. Media coverage of 2021’s Sumac describes author Anas Atassi as a refugee and the difficulty of fleeing Syria. Yet he does not mention displacement in the text itself. Sumac is an ode to family and to diaspora: coming home during summers and learning the food, cooking it wherever you are. His “Mom’s Famous Beet Salad” is a sharp and clear human moment, one we don’t see enough of in cookbooks produced for English-speaking audiences.  

That said, other Syrian cookbook writers explore community through history rather than family. Marlene Matar’s The Aleppo Cookbook focuses on a single city, and she is heavy-handed with the detail. Aleppo’s distinction as a food city is proclaimed through its racial diversity, trading history, and the dozen or so varieties of kibbeh. But feature articles about Matar’s book always mention the destruction of Aleppo, despite no mention in the book itself. 

Coverage of Matar’s book is a testament to how poor English-language food writing has been on the Arabic-speaking world writ large. With few writers from our own communities—be they Syrian, Sudanese, or Tunisian—on food discourse, the field is largely represented by white writers who have a very limited understanding of the cultures they write about and thus, a limited understanding of the implications of how they frame food. 

As someone who is not Syrian, I am not here to make assertions on how Syrians should portray themselves or their food. Those conversations must happen inside communities, and the value of resilience narratives will differ from place to place and among individuals. I hope that, for Atassi, Matar, and Azzam, cookbookery yields some catharsis, no matter how the outside world seeks to define them.

However, I question the framing of food from the Arabic-speaking world in English-language media. I’m tired of seeing the food-brings-us-together concept show up in cookbooks featuring the foods of people from, say, Morocco to Iraq because Middle Eastern and North African cuisines have been relatively sidelined in food media.  When was the last time you saw za’atar other than thrown onto your roast chicken, as both an afterthought and to make your dinner a little exotic? What about a feature on the history of a Sudanese or Algerian community in the United States, and how they’ve adapted their food?

Beyond the simple fact that refugee cookbooks edge into politics when convenient, food has parallels in larger social politics; it reflects mainstream understandings. Fighting dictatorship and political oppression is romantic at first, but the violence that often follows regime change affirms the Western public’s longstanding belief that the people over there are violent and pitiful at the same time. In reportage and cultural criticism, the newsman and the commentator’s reflex is to portray us as perennial refugees and ingovernables—but our food’s good.

Cookbooks, as the only real representation the Arabic-speaking world has in food writing outside Twitter, are doing us a poor showing. While the door has been opened by cookbooks like Ripe Figs, it’s also closing behind them. Based on the market, Western appetites, and its success, editors will ask cookbook writers to make their books a little more like Ripe Figs, with little nuanced understanding of the region.

Maybe the only solution is not quite to join that small but growing bookshelf of titles, but to expand food writing from the Arabic-speaking world itself. There is far more to explore outside the cookbook or the memoir with recipes, outside the migrant camps, and refugee culinary training programs. A few excellent food writers—Liana Aghajanian, Farrah Berrou, Fadi Kattan, among others –—are carrying the burden of speaking for and from the region in English-language food media. Social media has existed as a liberatory space for food, as has the blogosphere, with Assyrian, Iraqi, Palestinian, and Yemeni voices tumbling through the social media algorithms.      

But capital doesn’t flow cleanly to social media: You need followers to generate book and ad deals, and nonwhite people are both less likely to get such deals. When they do, they’re less lucrative because nonwhite audiences, specifically those from the Arabic-speaking world, are seen as niche. As for discourse, we don’t get paid for tweets or long Instagram posts: Our intellectual labor is futile in such an information economy. We need a foot in the door of cultural criticism to discuss the refugee cookbook and everything it touches.  

The refugee cookbook did not begin with the forced migration of Syrians. It won’t end there either, especially as we face another wave of people fleeing Daraa and Idlib, both in Syria, as well as Afghanistan. It’s easier to just follow the same script: to offer refuge to tiny numbers of displaced people, give them minimum-wage jobs making pita bread for our bakeries, and to praise ourselves for our generosity. 

The post The rise and folly of the refugee cookbook appeared first on The Counter.

But language isn’t static. Non-English words work themselves into American English and vice versa. 

Andrea Nguyen, a James Beard Award-winning author of cookbooks like Vietnamese Food Any Day (Ten Speed Press), has employed Vietnamese diacritics or accent marks off and on throughout her career; in that most recent book, they appear only when the word is not already part of the English lexicon. 

“Words like banh mi and pho are part of the English dictionary,” no accents needed, Nguyen said over the phone.

“I don’t recall … having any push and pull, like ‘I need you to include less Spanish’ or ‘We can’t get these accent marks right,’” said Téllez. But she noted that proofreading the Spanish was entirely her own responsibility, made considerably easier by the fact that she is a native speaker. 

Nguyen also proofreads the Vietnamese and other Asian scripts in her manuscripts, poring over them multiple times before they go to print. While most publishers use in-house proofreaders for English text, the onus of finding someone to proofread a second language very often falls on the author. If the authors themselves do not read the language fluently, they may ask people they know for help; such was the case for Danette St. Onge, a London- and Paris-based food and travel writer. She enlisted relatives to proofread her 2017 book, The Better-than-Takeout Thai Cookbook (Rockridge Press). 

In addition to proofreading, printing itself has historically been a hurdle when publishing content in languages less commonly printed in the United States. Technical constraints were a longtime barrier because including non-English script often depended on what was technically possible—and affordable—at the time of design and publication. 

When Nguyen started writing cookbooks, the designers at Ten Speed Press, one of the largest cookbook publishers in the country, had to input the diacritics manually.  It was easy to make mistakes, and when her first cookbook came out in 2006, there weren’t many fonts beyond Times New Roman and Arial at the disposal of the author and publisher. 

Whether the original writing system is included and to what extent can also depend on the publisher. 

“Obviously, it’s much harder for us to proofread in another language,” said Leyla Moushabeck, acquisitions editor for cookbooks at Interlink Publishing, an independent publisher in Massachusetts. “There might be regional differences in the names of the dishes, so it’s not as cut and dry as just finding someone who speaks that language.” 

Founded over 30 years ago by her father Michel Moushabeck, Interlink has published cookbooks by authors from a wide range of countries and cultural backgrounds. One of its most recent releases is Parwana: Recipes and Stories From an Afghan Kitchen by Durkhanai Ayubi, an Australia-based author of Afghan descent. In Parwana, recipe names are typically presented three ways at once; a transliteration of the recipe name appears in large, bold text, with a line of sprawling Arabic script just beneath, usually with a translation in the top right corner. The dish banjaan borani, for example, is rendered in English as  “braised eggplant with yogurt dressing.”  

For books like Parwana, Ms. Moushabeck said, whether to include one or all of these elements is usually a conversation the cookbook team will have with the author early on—and it can depend on whether the author feels that it’s necessary to an individual recipe. 

Being independent also gives Interlink the creative freedom for Interlink to publish the books they want.  “We have a lot of creative freedom to publish what we really believe in,” she said. 

I advertised the tasting in my newsletter, which at the time was around 500 subscribers, and also posted it to my LinkedIn. A former coworker of mine shared the event with her boss, her niece, cousin, and sons and suddenly the 12 spots for the tasting were taken up. The tasting was inspired by a 2019 trip I took to Colombia visiting the cacao farms and featured Castronovo Chocolate, a chocolate maker based in Florida.

I hesitated about doing more online events because I have two kids, a 14-year-old with special needs, and a younger girl who is now 7 and a half. They were doing remote schooling and suddenly that became my job; my husband didn’t lose work, and someone had to take care of the children. I just didn’t have the energy to create something new and would be exhausted by noon, lying on the couch.

In July, while I was promoting my online ticketed events, another food writer named Megan Giller reached out to me and asked if I could fill in for her at a virtual event she was hosting for some corporate clients. I did two more for her, and by September, I felt like companies really came to terms with the idea that there was no going back. I went on to host my own corporate tasting event for Électricité de France Innovation Lab, which has an office in California. Now, I’ve partnered with two event booking agencies to host chocolate tasting events for corporate team building and private parties. I have about 12 to 14 private tastings a month, but I also try to keep one ticketed event a month that’s open to the public.

When I used to have in-person tastings, the prep was pretty chill beforehand, until I’d head to the venue, but then I would be on my feet talking to people nonstop and when I got home, I was completely wiped out. When I transitioned to online, I had to do all this work up front. I needed to have everybody’s address at least two weeks in advance so I could send them the bars of chocolate before the tasting. I’d also have to check the weather and make sure the forecast would be okay so the bars wouldn’t melt. Now, the events feel so easy. It’s almost like backwards from my old life: I can do three back-to-back tastings and it’s no big deal, whereas before I could never have done that. 

Over the years I have built some really wonderful relationships with amazing people. For the first virtual Colombia tasting I had, I featured three bars from places I visited. I wondered how I could excite people and keep them engaged in front of a computer for two hours, so I reached out to Denise Castronovo, who is the founder of Castronovo Chocolate, and asked if she could jump in and surprise the participants.

It was really amazing to have Denise, all the way from Florida, speak on behalf of the chocolate she made. At the March tasting, we had a woman in Guatemala cut open a cacao pod for everyone, explaining her process in Spanish. We had a translator present and all the participant’s faces were in awe, it was truly a moment when I realized the power of technology. I can really see the potential of these virtual events, even when the world reopens.

I’m in no rush to return to in-person events again soon, but when I do, I look forward to working with some old partners again, like the local winery. I think we’ll want to tweak how we do it, maybe up the price per person and give everyone more time to talk. I think the local is going to feel more important and the in-person aspect is going to feel more precious. 

The impact on my family has also been tremendous. It’s amazing to be able to have dinner at 6:00 p.m., then a tasting at 6:30 p.m., then 7:30 p.m., and then have time to give the kids a goodnight kiss. That’s incredible. Also since I live in a small town, it’s great to meet everyone online from different international backgrounds. Chocolate is such a global food, so much more than a piece of candy. It’s been amazing to share the richness and beauty of it, including the culture and people, during a really difficult time.

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Take, for example, Dave’s Hot Chicken, which has sold 300 franchises since it opened in East Hollywood, Los Angeles, in 2017. As Dave’s—co-founded by a chef trained in Thomas Keller’s “Bouchon organization,” according to the company’s website—describes its origin story, “four childhood friends came up with a simple concept—take Nashville Hot Chicken and make it better than anyone else in America.” 

What a poor yet revealing choice of words. “Take” hot chicken and improve its soul-food insufficiency with “chefly” knowhow. The website mentions its “proprietary brine,” but not the Prince family, which now owns two locations. 

The Princes have something else as well: a legion of non-Black business descendants who rarely acknowledge their pioneering and ongoing work. Some shout-out the Princes in homages that cost newbie hot-chicken entrepreneurs nothing and imply a sort of creative kinship that’s utterly lacking in this wholesale hijacking of hot chicken. 

How chicken got hot

Chicken; a spicy, savory rub (wet or dry); pickles; and that tabula rasa of carbohydrates, white bread: One can argue that’s too general to constitute intellectual property. What makes a concept—not a recipe with defined quantities of ingredients and delineated cooking methods—ownable? 

I’m not sure—and I’m not sure I’ll ever be sure. But culinary authorship—and who’s responsible for a dish’s popularization—counts. 

Long before hot chicken set anyone’s lips afire, the domesticated chicken was linked to Black Americans. As scholar Psyche Williams-Forson wrote in Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power, free and enslaved people were often the “primary chicken vendors” of their antebellum communities, despite laws that prohibited trading by and with slaves. Hocking poultry gave enslaved women a measure of economic autonomy, if not freedom. That preponderance of Black chicken sellers before the Civil War likely influenced much nastier associations, the enduring stereotypes that Black people would do anything—steal, tap dance, or abandon all common sense—for chicken, preferably fried. 

So decades before Thornton got that wee-hours tongue burn, hot chicken’s saga had already begun. Hot chicken had a historical head start in its designation as Black food, simply because it was chicken. The spicy, peppery delight made by the original angry woman became triply Black: created in a Black home in a segregated neighborhood; prepared in a growing number of Black restaurants in Nashville; and consumed in Black homes for decades.

Hot chicken started as many innovations do: in a burst of domestic creation—and, as often happens in Black history, by a person who can’t be fully credited. On one hand, the Princes’ hot chicken can be traced with remarkable precision (unlike other soul food dishes with fuzzier and disputed origins, such as chicken and waffles). On the other hand, the name of the angry woman behind that first incinerating batch has been lost to time. In Hot, Hot Chicken, Martin gamely tries to identify her using all the archival materials and historian’s tricks at her disposal. But because Thornton Prince III was a serial groom with an itinerant phallus and outside children, he left a cortege of pissed-off contenders for the crown. Was it first wife Gertrude or Mattie, with whom he had a child during his marriage to Gertrude?

Though this woman’s namelessness seems to be a function of time and a shattered relationship (if we believe the narrative), that’s not the only explanation for her absence. 

Chasing historical leads and dead ends, Martin helps readers see invisible hands at work: the urban planning that made today’s Nashville into a booming, still-segregated metropolis, and the Black women and men who established an enduring food tradition. The American food economy has long hidden or pooh-poohed the contributions of important laborers, even as it’s relied on them for profit: the enslaved cook; the Black domestic in freedom; the unnamed Black chef behind Bisquick mix; the immigrant; the mother who makes meals; the woman whose home-based work isn’t separate from wage-earning activities. It’s largely erased countless figures like John Young, the man whose mumbo or mambo chicken sauce paved the way for another hot, saucy chicken dish: Buffalo wings. 

At some point, Nashville’s hot and saucy chicken ceased to be a family meal or a secret. Maybe Thornton Prince, apparently once a hog farmer, decided to raise more chickens. Maybe he started selling takeout hot chicken from his back porch. But someone decided this chicken was saleable, and many other someones agreed it was worth buying. Hot chicken became intraculturally popular in Black Nashville. That community sustained Prince’s and also birthed local Black competitors who recognized a hot thing and business model when they ate it or made it (because a few former Prince’s employees have started businesses with their own versions of hot chicken). 

The originators of hot chicken and their customers were what communications scholar Everett Rogers called “innovators” and “early adopters” in his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations. He categorized people by how fast they embrace new ideas or products. In his much revised and debated theory, 2.5 percent of people are “innovators,” the risk takers. They’re followed by “early adopters” who catch on quickly, thrive on novelty, and ply their influence. The masses—estimated to be nearly 70 percent of a given network—are the “early and late majorities” who wait to embrace newfangled thingamajigs. The “laggards” bring up the rear, resistant or slow to change. A person can innovate in one sphere and lag in another part of their life, and many factors influence an individual’s engagement with an unfamiliar concept: whether the idea or product seems advantageous, is easy to learn, can be tried before adopting it, and whether it fits into an existing belief system.

All that sounds neutral and perfectly reasonable—and absolutely raceless. In Rogers’ theory-speak, Thornton Prince III and his great-niece, André Prince Jeffries (who runs the business today), would be the innovators. Those who’ve recently discovered the Princes’ fabled hot chicken—much of white and middle America—are laggards. But Rogers’ original research, which investigated why farmers hesitate to use new technology that could boost their yields and bottom lines, didn’t explore the way racial dynamics can complicate habits of adoption. “Existing belief systems” also include racism, Jim Crow, and lasting disparities in access to material and social capital—and those factors help to explain both hot chicken’s deep community roots and its seemingly sudden, mass-market virality.

Given this country’s rapacious harnessing of Black cultural production, Rogers’ theory needs a significant tweak. When it comes to hot chicken and other Black innovations, some white laggards eventually see opportunity. And not only do they accelerate adoption of something that is foreign to them, they claim it as their own in an act of material and narrative gentrification. The way they tell it, they were the innovators all along. 

“You’re gonna talk about this chicken”

Let’s pause for a moment here: There can be a beautiful inaccessibility to Black culture, things that white and non-Black people do not know or cannot fully grasp even if they’re momentarily “invited to the cookout.” That inaccessibility—and segregation past and present—helps the laggard convince himself he’s an innovator. 

Nashville hot chicken was created in an environment where racial cultural divisions were made all the more stark by physical and structural barriers such as Black people’s unequal access to desirable real estate or bank loans. Martin exhaustively recounts how its genesis dovetails with the rise of a Jim Crow innovation in her city: urban renewal policies that declared Black areas to be unlivable “D” zones in need of “redevelopment.” Among many changes, the “beautification” of Nashville cleared the mostly-Black area near the Capitol and made way for not one but three highways that bisected Black neighborhoods. Streets were dead-ended, businesses closed, children and families cut off from their playgrounds and walking routes. 

Nashville’s spatial and cultural segregation contained hot chicken to Black neighborhoods where upper-crust whites rarely tread. Segregation had its unintended benefits, giving Black communities the freedom to create and Black businesses a stream of culturally consonant consumers barred from boundless shopping in white retail spaces. It could also inhibit growth, though, limiting access to the white market or forcing Black businesses to relocate according to the whims of white urban planners.

But communities aren’t hermetically sealed, even and especially in the segregated South. Black and white Southerners have always lived together or near one another, regardless of segregationists’ Herculean efforts to craft a divided world. Their own laws proved how futile their efforts were, and that Jim Crow was powerful but not omnipotent. The era’s obsessively detailed lawmaking reveals just how often racial boundaries were breached; in 1930, Birmingham, Alabama, banned whites and Blacks from playing cards, dice, or checkers with each other—a frantic attempt at legislating against interracial interaction that was already occurring. 

External factors—such as Americans’ foray into spicier foods—also helped propel hot chicken to its Moment. Heat-heads have flocked to the Fiery Foods Festival since 1987. Salsa has long surpassed ketchup in our national favor. Even salsa seems, well, milquetoast compared to the potent and piquant condiments making frequent appearances in previously blah food mag recipes. The pendulum of spice preference and fashion has swung to the point that a March New York Times article presumed that spice-love is approaching cultural norm status, and deviance from it may prompt shaming and taunts; it advised readers who “can’t take the heat” that a “taste for spicy foods can be learned” or at least tolerated if you want to fit in. 

That flavor recalibration—as Americans get hip to foods that have always been here but are often associated with our immigrant neighbors—is close cousin to an important “flava” transformation vis-à-vis Blackness. To eat hot chicken isn’t merely an act of consumption. It can refute the reputation for white blandness, prove that the white eater is in the know, and provide some superficial entrée into Black culture. 

The acquisition of Black cool, perhaps the most critical stage for this humble yardbird’s spread, fuels American popular culture. From there, it can be a rush toward enhanced profitability or expansion. Maybe that arrives in the offer to franchise or to package that spice blend. It almost inevitably comes with another cycle of friendly and hostile competitors.

That success—where everybody knows your name and everybody wants your secret sauce—comes with increasingly loud whispers of appropriation. But in a country based on Black stolen labor, it’s on message to demur that a particular preparation of chicken, pepper, salt, pickles, and white bread is a pleasing combination of ingredients. And that it belongs to no one. 

In fact, this insistence may be the final stage of appropriation—and it’s the American way. African-American food is always up for grabs. I think of it as the worst form of takeout, really. And few people want a side of history with their meal. 

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Thompson, 69, had been sentenced to 40 to 60 years behind bars in 1995. He’d sold marijuana to a car muffler-shop owner who was also a police informant. Today, Michigan law allows adults to grow, use, transport, and transfer cannabis in certain circumstances and quantities. That wasn’t the case at the time of Thompson’s trial. A habitual felon law meant that a prosecutor combined prior offenses and charges for weapons found at Thompson’s home, even properly stored weapons that weren’t his. Thompson got a virtual life sentence, a harsh outcome that triggered calls for his release, from figures such as Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel to celebrity Kim Kardashian.  

As the Detroit Metro Times has reported, after the Michigan Department of Corrections outsourced prison food to private companies, inmates would sometimes find maggots and mold in their meals. Fruit was often unripe or rotten, serving sizes were too small to keep hunger at bay, some seasonings weren’t allowed, and “mystery meat” was common. Incarcerated people also appear to be higher risk for food poisoning than their nonincarcerated counterparts.  

In some ways, Thompson is luckier than most. Deedee Kirkwood, a 72-year-old activist living in the scenic seaside town of  Camarillo, California, put money in his commissary account. The cash allowed him to quell his craving for good fish with canned tuna—an otherwise unaffordable luxury. 

“She’s an angel. That was her main thing, eating right,” he said. If he hadn’t been able to eat a healthier diet than the prison food, Thompson thinks he might not have lived long enough to walk out of prison.

Kirkwood began trying to help people incarcerated on drug charges when she realized there were people in prison for marijuana, a drug she’d used when she was younger. As a white hippie who had followed the Grateful Dead, she hadn’t suffered any consequences for using the same drug that landed Thompson in prison for more than two decades. 

She started planning Thompson’s first dinner with his family and friends when word came he was going home. The Covid-19 pandemic put roadblocks in their dinner plans. Thompson initially planned to go to a restaurant for his first meal on the outside, preferably a place where the owner was an old friend. But Michigan was then banning indoor dining and it’s too cold for outdoor dining. 

With money raised by activists, Thompson’s supporters scheduled a lunch for his first day out: that tomato-and-cucumber salad he’d been yearning for, catfish, chicken, mac-and-cheese, turnip and collard greens from Claudia Perkins-Milton, once a union representative at a Flint automotive plant where Thompson had worked. That factory has since shuttered, but she continued to advocate for Thompson. 

The day after Thompson’s first dinner, he awaited a brunch provided by Cory Roberts, co-owner of Michigan Cannabis Chefs, a catering company that makes dishes from the cannabis it grows alongside potatoes, corn, and onions (Thompson’s meal didn’t contain cannabis).  

Co-owners and chefs Lynette Roberts and Nigel Douglas prepared a menu based on Michael’s favorite foods. If “he wants fish,” said Douglas, “let’s get it.”

The first course was a tomato and pickle tray. Next came baby bella mushrooms topped with fresh basil, fresh mozzarella, garlic and tomato confit, and balsamic reduction. Pan-seared catfish, coated in cornmeal, followed. Roasted asparagus, squash, and Spanish onions topped with shrimp and jalapeno cornbread stuffing accompanied the main dish. 

And for dessert: baked apple crumble with fresh whipped cream, caramel sauce, and mixed nuts.

“Son of a bitch,” Thompson said after his first bite of crumble. 

The freedom of choice, the freedom to cook

The next round was more casual, kind of like the day after Thanksgiving, when there’s already so much food and everyone’s too tired for fancy meal prep. The family dove into leftovers. “They had so much fun in the kitchen, and they came up with another great meal. So this is Michael’s third ‘first meal’ and loving every bite. The sweet taste of freedom is extraordinary,” said Kirkwood. 

Thompson reflected on sharing meals with the people he loves, saying he’s not bitter about the 25 years and the thousands of meals he missed with them.  

“I like to see people eat good food. Sit down with friends and family, and break bread at the dinner table,” he told The Counter. “To see people eat something I created, whether I made or paid for it.” Those feelings are helping him damp down anxiety and “fear of the unknown. … But so much love keeps coming.” 

With the help of the Last Prisoner Project (a cannabis and drug policy reform organization) and activist Shaun King, Thompson’s online fundraiser has collected more than a quarter of a million dollars, allowing him to purchase a condo he’ll soon occupy. Daughter Rashawnda Littles invited him to live with her. But he doesn’t want to be a burden and values his independence (“Can’t get rid of this one,” he joked lovingly, noting after being without her dad for 25 years, she’s at his temporary Airbnb all the time). 

He plans to devote his life to criminal justice reform and is already working with the Last Prisoner Project. He’s not going to forget the guys he left behind because they were his community—still are—and “I consider myself an honorable man.” 

In a press release published Tuesday, the company calls itself “the first in market to produce whole cuts of plant-based meat in the form of steak and chicken breasts.” That’s a bit of a misnomer, though. Fungi aren’t plants at all, but a distinct, often-maligned biological kingdom with their own unique characteristics. While finished Meati steaks will contain a small amount of plant ingredients, they’re made mostly from filamentous fungi, a kind of fast-growing micro-organism that branches quickly into thread-like networks of cells called mycelium. (Citing intellectual property concerns, the company wouldn’t say which strain or species it is using.) The process means Emergy’s production procedure can take place entirely in a lab or factory, sidestepping agriculture completely, and opening up a new universe of sustainability implications. 

The company was founded in 2016 after two PhD students at the University of Colorado, Boulder, decided to apply their scientific expertise to the realm of food. Justin Whiteley, a mechanical engineer focused on materials science, and Tyler Huggins, an environmental engineer, spent their higher-education careers studying the ways biology might be used to create hyper-efficient new products. Together, the two have co-authored more than a dozen studies on a range of topics, including renewable lithium batteries, charcoal-based water filtration systems, and the ways fungi can be used to bioremediate highly polluted environments. Huggins tells me the pivot to food was a way to maximize impact, though it’s unclear whether he means the environmental or economic kind. You couldn’t blame the pair for seeing dollar signs: According to data from the Plant-Based Foods Association, an industry lobbying group, U.S. sales of plant-based meat are up 10 percent since 2018. Emergy Foods is riding the wave of that excitement, raising 4.8 million dollars in venture capital from eight investors this July. 

While the U.K.-based company Quorn has been making mycoprotein—protein from fungi—for decades, that company’s “beef” products are ground or cut into small strips for tacos or stir-frys. Emergy is the first company attempting to use mycoprotein for a truly steak-like fake meat, something you might enjoy in a restaurant with a white tablecloth. Still, Huggins points out that his company’s proprietary production process has some similarities to traditional foodmaking techniques used throughout the world. Miso, soy sauce, and sake are all made by fermenting soy or rice with mold spores known as koji, or Aspergillus oryzae, a filamentous fungi prized in Japan. And Tao Zhang, co-founder of the plant-based impact investing firm Dao Foods International, says Chinese cuisine has long used fungi to impart a meaty flavor to otherwise vegetarian meals. 

But while those methods use fungi to ferment or flavor plant material, Emergy’s approach is different. In its case, the fungi are not a processing agent, but the final product. The company grows its own mycelium in a submerged fermentation process, feeding them on sugar water. The approach is a little like cheesemaking, Huggins says, since the product is cultured in large stainless steel vats, then harvested. Fungi-based meatmaking also superficially resembles the still-experimental process used to produce cell-cultured meat, an emerging approach that entails growing animal cells inside large bioreactors. But, Huggins says, fungi have a major advantage over their animal-cell cousins. 

“Animal cells don’t have their own digestive system,” he says. “They don’t have the capabilities, the mechanics to actually break down complex carbohydrates or sugars into something that they can use as energy.” After all, isolated cattle cells in a test tube lack the stomach the full-grown animal has.

“That’s where fungi come in,” Huggins continues. “They are very versatile because they have their own digestive system. They can break down a variety of different carbon sources, sugar sources in order to convert it into energy and ultimately grow and produce more proteins.” Fungi come naturally equipped with the biological capabilities cultured meat startups are still trying to get animal cells to replicate. 

At the same time, the ability to subsist on sugar water may give fungi steaks a sustainability advantage over plant-based burgers. Standard plant-based meat replacements tend to be made of soy, wheat, and pea protein, as well as other grains, legumes, and pulses. These commodity crop ingredients not only require lots of land to grow, which can lead to deforestation, but they  also tend to require synthetic fertilizer, herbicides, and insecticides, which can lead to environmental problems of their own. 

Huggins says that his mycelium, in contrast, can live on ingredients other companies might throw out. In theory, he imagines a system where he can feed his fungi on the sugar-water created as a byproduct of the beer-making process—a natural resource that is in abundance in Colorado. Since the Brewers Association, an industry trade group, estimates that breweries waste seven barrels of water for each barrel of beer produced, Emergy could become a badly needed customer. From there, Huggins says, the production process creates no waste byproducts that can’t be plugged back into the system—for instance, residual sugar water that can be fed back to the fungi.

“Basically, we just need a sugar source,” Huggins says. “That’s true whether we buy that at a grocery store or, ultimately, down the road, partner with another food or beverage processing company and use their residual sugar that goes to waste. That’s still food grade, and still very nutritious. We could use that as a feedstock and create a truly circular-based protein production process. That would be a game-changer in this space.”

In an interview by email, Nicole Civita, an attorney and educator who leads the sustainable food systems curriculum at the University of Colorado, Boulder, expressed some doubt about this approach. 

“I’m a little skeptical about the notion that the ‘sugar water’ feedstock can be sourced via brewing by-products, as the brewing process generally consumes the sugars in the grains,” she writes. “But maybe I’m misunderstanding the intended sugar-source here.” While the Brewers Association writes that brewery wastewater can contain sugars, proteins, carbohydrates, and yeast, it’s yet unclear whether that supply would be consistent enough to feed Emergy’s mycelium. Still, Civita feels the company’s model may one day fit nicely into a larger landscape of sustainable food sources. 

“While I am not in a position independently assess the claims being made about Emergy’s products, I can say that I believe that there’s a place for vat-grown mycelium-based protein sources in healthy and sustainable diets,” Civita writes. “The shorter and relatively simply supply chains they describe are appealing because they have the potential to be far less input and energy intensive than other traditional animal protein sources and plant-based alts. The sustainability proposition gets even stronger if the mycelium can be safely and efficient grown out using co-products from other food manufacturing processes.”

As they grow, the mycelium also naturally solve another problem cell-cultured meat companies are still struggling with: the challenge of mimicking muscle tissue. When replicated in a petri dish or steel vat, animal cells make only more animal cells, and not sinew, tendon, muscle, bone, or fat—the things that make a steak feel like a steak. That’s why the experimental cell-cultured meats currently being developed (and fed to curious reporters) tend to be foods like sausages and chicken nuggets, which can absorb a certain amount of shapelessness. While scientists are exploring a number of methods to make cell-cultured meat more steak-like, including using scaffolds made from decellularized plant husks, they haven’t yet succeeded. But Emergy’s mycelium naturally grow with a structure that lends itself to the steakhouse. 

“It’s not easy to do and it’s taken us almost over two years in order to develop,” Huggins says. “But what’s so great about mycelium is it has a fibrous nature that mimics muscle structure.”

While the texture is more inherently meat-like, Emergy faces a different hurdle: taste. While plant proteins can be broken down into different molecular components, isolating or highlighting certain sensory characteristics, mycelium tend to have no flavor. When I asked an Emergy spokesperson about this, she confirmed that the product’s main ingredient is tasteless. It’s a completely blank gustatory canvas. 

The challenge, then, will be to make Meati steaks taste like something people want to eat. Huggins suggests that, eventually, the company may be able to impart more flavor through the fermentation process. For now, it uses a variety of vegetables and spices to create flavor; the final product, which Emergy says includes fewer than five functional ingredients, is a blend of 90 percent mycelium and 10 percent other ingredients. Emergy wouldn’t tell me the exact recipe, citing the fact that the formula is still evolving. But company representatives did confirm Meati products aren’t made with soy, wheat, or pea protein, which tend to be primary ingredients in plant-based alt-meats.

What does the result actually taste like? At a private lunch hosted by the company last week, I found out.  

Emergy’s headquarters is located in the Gunbarrel Tech Center, an office park a few miles north of downtown Boulder, where IBM copier machines were once manufactured. I saw logos for other local food and tech startups plastered on windows as I passed. 

At the door, I was greeted by Morgan Agho, Emergy’s director of marketing, who came to the company from Boulder Brands, the maker of Earth Balance plant-based buttery spreads. On the walls of the small, open floor-plan office—enough to house the company’s team of eight full-time staffers, five of whom have PhDs—large windows allowed a glimpse into Emergy’s modest manufacturing facility. Employees wearing blue food safety hair nets worked behind the glass. Beakers of liquid, presumably holding microscopic fungi cell, shook on swiveling trays, an aerating process that helps cultures incubate. 

Agho took me into a side conference room, where containers of cantaloupe-colored mycelium—not for eating, Agho said, but the result of some staffer’s experiment—collected in thick, cobwebby pillows on each windowsill. My meal was quickly brought out on a wooden cutting board: a mass of green beans, a large scoop of mashed potatoes, and six small cuts of steak. From where I sat, the texture actually looked quite steak-like, though the livid pink color made the experience feel more otherworldly than familiar. 

Agho said that these steaks had started growing the previous night around 5:30 p.m. The process takes about 20 hours. The fungi multiply so quickly that, ultimately, she said, a full-scale Emergy facility will be able to produce the protein equivalent of 4,200 cows a day. 

With that, it was time to eat.

The first thing I noticed was the way the outside of the meat managed to singe and crisp much like a real steak would, with a feel on the teeth and tongue like muscle seared on a grill. The steak’s flesh—I should say “flesh”—had a mild, savory flavor that was not unpleasant. It did not especially call to mind the taste of steer or, for that matter, mushrooms. It was slightly reminiscent of a soy nugget, with a subtle hint of malt. 

More interesting was the texture. The cuts weren’t bouncy, like a portabella mushroom, or spongy like soy protein. Yet they definitely lacked the layers of connective tissue that makes steak break into tender strings across the palate. The protein felt dense and tender and juicy, though it was hard not to miss the unmistakable blast of salty flavor that comes from biting into something pink and medium-rare. The overall affect was enjoyable, if subtle. But I never felt like I stepped into the uncanny valley. 

That allowed doubt to creep in. The more I thought about it, the more I struggled to classify my experience, scribbling phrases in my notebook, reaching for descriptions that made sense. That strangely unsettled feeling helps explain why Emergy used the term “plant-based” in its press release, even knowing the label doesn’t quite fit. It wants to provide customers with a comforting reference point, a way to make its product not feel quite so unfamiliar and new. 

In our email interview, Nicole Civita explained further. 

“Unfortunately, such foods are notoriously hard to market—‘fungal foods’ doesn’t sound terribly appetizing! And it’s not accurate to describe the protein rich foods made from mycelium as ‘mushroom-based’ either, because they are made from the precursor to mushrooms, not mushrooms themselves,” she wrote. “So, companies in this space have struggled to describe their products in ways that are both accurate and appealing.  And sustainable food advocates have favored the less accurate and insufficiently encompassing “plant-based” vernacular. While this drives biologists crazy and could run afoul of food labeling regulations, lumping myco-foods in with the plant-based alts is a reasonable shorthand.”

Maybe that shouldn’t matter. If the goal is to create a low-impact food source—and if Meati steaks really have the benefits its founders claim—then who cares if its steaks taste like the ones we grew up with? The challenge for Emergy, though, is that it’s going for a kind of holy grail here, trying to emulate the protein we eat at our plate’s center, unadorned. Even an Impossible Burger can hide behind its bun, distracting us with lettuce and tomato, or cheese, or whatever special sauce Burger King puts on its Whoppers. A steak just sits there, naked. 

“The theory of change of Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat is to just make life as easy as possible for the meat-eater by replicating price, taste and convenience,” says Pete Newton, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. (I’m auditing his graduate seminar on the environmental impacts of food production this semester.)

“If you can just drop in an alternative that is plant-based—or mushroom-based—then you’re asking very little of the consumer. But the second you start asking them to compromise on experience or taste or texture, then, the theory of change goes, it would be harder to convince large swaths of the population to start consuming it. I’d be curious to know from the Emergy folks what their aim is in that regard. Are they trying to create a product that is indistinguishable from meat? Or are they just doing something that’s good, and will capture some people, without being particularly committed to the cause of being able to compete in a blind taste test?”   

My sense, based on interviews and promotional materials, is that the company has its sights on the bolder, more difficult task of going head-to-head with steer muscle. And a limited number of Americans will soon get a chance to decide whether they’ve pulled it off. In just a few months—the first financial quarter of 2020, according to Huggins—Emergy Foods will pilot its first steaks in a select group of restaurants, likely in the Boulder area. 

“It’s a great way to give consumers the opportunity to try something that they’ve never tried before,” he says. “A restaurant’s a great place to do that. Then, once we can get enough acceptance in the market, and people are talking and excited about it, and we can build up scale, that gives us the opportunity to move into retail.”  

A steak is more than just delicious. It has always been an invitation to something primal, a way to press our teeth directly into flesh and be reminded that what we are eating was once an animal—that we, too, are animals. That may be an integral experience, or a problematic one, depending on your view. But the fact is, when I bit into a Meati steak, I mostly felt uncertain. What system, what network of relationships, was I joining myself to through food? The taste was almost irrelevant. I wasn’t yet sure how to feel. 

Not that we can’t be convinced. Time will tell if that ambiguity—rooted in the blank, flavorless texture of its still-mysterious main ingredient—is something Emergy Foods can overcome. 

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