It’s that time of year again—that much-anticipated time when the New Yorker’s food issue hits the newsstands. The Nov. 24th issue is out today and it’s filled with tantalizing stories from the likes of Calvin Trillin and Jane Kramer. I’m particularly intrigued by Kramer’s piece, summarized below, which focuses on the cultural forces that produce a particular cuisine.

Speaking of which…I’m writing a culinary history of ice cream (Reaktion Books). Stay tuned for the publication date.

Here are links to several pieces in the New Yorker’s food issue. The excerpt from Kramer’s piece follows below:

Podcast Bilger on Beer
Ask the Author with Calvin Trillin:
Slide Show- Photojournalists talk about memorable on-the-job meals

Exploring the World Through Its Food

In “The Hungry Travellers” (p. 100), Jane Kramer profiles Jeff Alford and Naomi Duguid, the award-winning authors of cookbooks such as “Hot Sour Salty Sweet” and “Beyond the Great Wall,” who, Kramer writes, “have been called culinary anthropologists, but culinary geographers is at least as accurate.” “While their books are undeniably cookbooks,” Kramer writes, “they are also cultural encounters—travel journals, stories, history lessons, and photographic essays that, taken together, explore the imagination and the exigencies that produce a cuisine and, in many ways, define the people who create it.”

“We write to travel” is how Duguid describes their life. James Oseland, the editor of Saveur, tells Kramer, “It’s their overriding sense of humanity that sets them apart from the flock. They’re taking the exotic out of the everyday in every sense, not simply the recipe sense. They’re telling you, ‘It’s just the world. The world won’t hurt you. Don’t be scared.’ ”