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‘New Yorker’ Food Issue: Plenty to Digest

This week’s special food issue of The New Yorker would be worth reading without any specifically New York–oriented content. But fans of the locavore movement will probably want to flock to Adam Gopnik’s long piece on eating the fruits of the five boroughs (if you consider live poultry from the Bronx fruit, that is). Friend of Grub Street Gary Shteyngart has a moving little memoir about his boyhood love of McDonald’s that got us right in the kishkas. (Similar essays are by Anthony Lane, David Sedaris, and Nell Freudenberger.) But most enjoyable of all was Calvin Trillin’s essay about Singapore street food.

We actually thought of Trillin when reading the Gopnik piece. Gopnik’s young daughter refuses to eat pigeon; and no reader of Trillin’s New Yorker pieces from the seventies, which basically invented the genre of first-person food writing, can forget Trillin’s daughter Abigail’s love of squab. The issue is great, but also a reminder that, with all due respect to Gopnik et al, there’s only one Calvin Trillin.

The Food Issue [NYer]

‘New Yorker’ Food Issue: Plenty to Digest