Fifteen pieces on food, home, and love
September 12, 2022
This list is part of the celebration of the tenth anniversary of The Margins, which highlights portions of the magazine’s archive organized around a theme.
Food is the first way we learn love. We seek the tastes that bring us home. Palms full of rice, a mango sliced crosshatch, fingers to lips, the ripest persimmon, the pungent salt of fish sauce. Cooking is muscle memory. We make the tastes that bring us home. A bubbling pot, without a recipe, only history, trying and trying again. A shared meal is the purest intimacy. We share the tastes that bring us home. We share the tastes that nourish our bond with our community in a land far away from home.
We invite you to taste the last ten years of food writing on The Margins, immortalized as essays, poems, and fiction.
Read the full list below.
Pieces from top to bottom, left to right:
- “Nimboo Paani: Spiced Limeade”
by Humera Afridi (2012) - “Turkey Pho Sunday”
by Phu Diep (2013) - “The Roast Duck Bureaucracy”
by Evelyn Chao (2014) - “To Eat, Drink, and Gyaff”
by Nadia Misir (2015) - “Cha Time at Home”
by Sonny Singh (2016) - “Fish Paste”
by Nay Saysourinho (2018) - “Baklava That Tastes Like Home”
by Maryam Mir (2019) - “The Absence of Atta and the Dearth of Dal”
by Astha Rajvanshi (2019) - “Food, Fingers, and What (Not) to Touch”
by Carmen Nge, Joseph Gonzales, and Natasha Krishnan (2019) - “If You Don’t Want to Try This at Home”
by Hannah Bae (2020) - “Dirty Kitchen”
by Jill Damatac (2020) - “Self-Portrait as Love and Its Offering”
by Meher Manda (2021) - “Fish Sauce: A Recipe”
by Ryan Nhu (2022) - “Lechón”
by Stephanie Simpson (2022) - “Spice Story: The Hunt in New York City”
by Teresa Mathew (2022)
