humanity

Humanity topics include pieces on the real lives of chefs, professionals, amateurs, inspiring youth, influencers, and general feel good human stories in the Feast food sphere.

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When your heart races a mile a minute with the thoughts in your head and it seems like it matches but there is this fear as big as the love that goes with it. My passion and this huge huuuge excitement.
By Deborah De Lorenzo4 years ago in Feast
Legal Violations of the Food Industry:
Western society, and social endeavours generally, revolve largely around food, meals, and consumption. We host luxurious family dinners for notable holidays, have business meetings over lunch, meet friends for weekend brunch, serve refreshments as incentive for participation, and go so far as to organize our entire days around where we will eat, who we will eat with, and what we will be eating. The food industry prioritizes speed and convenience, reinforcing its active participation in almost every aspect of our lives. Vending machines, convenience stores, fast food establishments on every street corner, and the ability to order dinner with just a few clicks or swipes at the palm of our hand ensure our next meal is never too far from our thoughts.
By Tia Foisy5 years ago in Feast
Black Nothing
What had once been created could have been a mistake. It did not know. It did not care. Below it was nothing. Above was also nothing. Surrounding it was nothing. It did not know if it truly existed or something else.
By Rebecca Slack5 years ago in Feast
Summer
I was 4 and a half years old when my brother was born. I was not at all happy about it. He was a chubby little thing with a perfectly rounded head and rosy cheeks that I would kissbite whenever mom wasn’t looking. He would cry of course and mom would say that she was going to put him outside in the trash can for the fairies to take him away. I actually liked the idea of that. I would ask her if they would feed him? I wasn’t evil after all.
By Karolyn Denson Landrieux5 years ago in Feast
Spaghetti Aglio Olio e Peperoncino
Three times a week for dinner my dad makes his current favourite dish, spaghetti aglio olio e peperoncino (pasta with garlic, oil and chilis). It is a sublime dish that brings comfort and positive emotions. You know he's cooking it because the house gets this warm and strong scent of garlic and you might cough at times if he’s put too many chillies. I don't remember him being so obsessed with it when we used to live in Milan so I finally asked him why he was so enamoured with it. Before answering it he gently put the fork down on his cotton napkin, swallowed the pasta, took a sip of wine while swishing it in his mouth (as if he had mouth wash) and finally swallowed it all down. He tells me it was one of his favourite dishes his mother used to cook for him when he was a kid. This dish reminded him of those warm days in Mogadiscio while coming back from school.
By Joshua Kauten5 years ago in Feast
Don't Let Them Eat Cake?
Tina Fey says that the most important rule of beauty is this, "Who cares?" And thank God for wisdom like that, because when it comes to baking, "Who cares?" really captures the aesthetic I'm (not so purposefully) going for. My work is not elegant, or beautiful, or even consistently tasty, it's more the product of a woman who gets into the kitchen and wings it while drinking wine and blowing off steam. Not everyone loves what comes out of my oven, mostly because it’s either burned or according to my daughter, tastes like “sweet dirt” (whatever princess), but that's what's great about being an amateur baker like me. You pretend to be learning, until you can go fake pro. And even though I believe I’m ready now, people tell me I still need to work out some of the kinks. It's hard to understand the logic entirely, as I’m pretty sure that Duff guy bakes a salty cake every now and again, but fine, I’ll be patient. Taking the time to solve why my biscotti taste metallic, isn't the worst idea ever.
By Abigail Saunders5 years ago in Feast
How Cooking Lets Me Be an Imperfectionist. Top Story - July 2021.
I am a perfectionist with almost everything I do. And while some might consider it my superpower, it gets exhausting. I constantly revise and rewrite drafts of pretty much all my writing. I only ever paint landscapes or flowers because I can never get noses right. Sometimes I even refold the laundry when my husband isn’t looking.
By Sarah Shea5 years ago in Feast
A Piece of my Memories
One of the first things I wanted after giving birth to my second daughter was a piece of cake. The cake was called Chocolate Lasagna, offered back in the 1990s by a popular chain restaurant. While pretty to look at, it wasn’t really that fancy; it was simple, in fact, with 5-6 layers of dark chocolate cake interspersed with buttercream frosting and topped with white chocolate shavings.
By Cheryl Wray5 years ago in Feast
Baking My Way To A Happy Life
Jack of all trades, master of none. That’s how I started my life. I bounced from hobby to hobby, sport to sport, but nothing ever stuck. That is until the day I threw my leg over a thousand-pound animal for the first time. From the moment my butt hit the saddle, horseback riding was my passion. I took lessons, I leased horses, I owned an off the track thoroughbred. I even went to college for equestrian studies. I found my passion at nine years old and I knew what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I’m now 38 and haven’t been on a horse in more than 2 years. That’s the danger of turning a hobby you love into a career, I guess, you run the risk of burning out. I will probably get back on a horse someday but for now my peace lies elsewhere.
By Sarah Aldrich5 years ago in Feast
Casting Spells
Cooking is a kind of slow moving, deep seated magic. I have always thought of it this way...it is passed down through generations, taught with kind eyes over a bubbling stew pot and whispered in secret, absolute trust over the sizzling of onions and garlic in olive oil. Whenever I think of home, it is the food that comes to mind first. The food and the people that make it, the kitchen and all it stands for. I think that is what so many have tried to convey through food writing…that specific kind of kitchen magic that can seep into your bones and cast a hazy spell, making everything else seem distant, and secondary.
By Hannah Warry-Smith5 years ago in Feast
No Chocolate In This House
My mother never liked chocolate. She claimed it gave her terrible headaches. Aside from the fact that she usually had headaches, I took her choco-abstinence as an excuse to have more for myself. Someone had to make up for the average chocolate family intake.
By Oneg In The Arctic5 years ago in Feast
A Slice of Chocolate Cake
A Slice of Chocolate Cake In the middle of a sleepless-night, edging towards an “early” early-morning at 3:46 am, an anonymous refrigerator-door opened and inside was a plate (covered with a stretch of plastic-saran-wrap) centered with a slice of chocolate cake. Not any chocolate cake, but chocolate cake with chocolate icing (with chocolate sprinkles) where the cake itself was made with milk-chocolate in a semi-swirl pattern with dark-chocolate having semi-sweet chocolate-bits mixed-in with bitter-sweet chocolate, sweet German-Chocolate, and white-chocolate, while the icing was made up with Couverture Chocolate (Footnote #1), and with the sprinkles made up with Compound Chocolate and Ruby (Pink) Chocolate.
By Albert Gavalis5 years ago in Feast