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The Deep Dish

An insider look at food and farming from Civil Eats

 Issue 29, June 2024: A First Look at Our Summer Reading List

The Editors' Desk

To celebrate the first day of summer, and in anticipation of some long, languid afternoons spent reading, we’re bringing you a crop of excellent food and farming books we think are worth your time and attention. We've reviewed some new and noteworthy books, including a sustainable business how-to, a couple of culinary histories, memoirs, breakthrough science writing, and an unusual gardening guide. We’ve even included a few recipes to inspire your summer cooking.

The full summer reading list, with many more reviews from our contributors, will be online this Thursday, June 20. As with all our book coverage, our intent is to bring you new ideas and voices in the world of food, agriculture, the environment, and social justice.

Also in this issue, we’re including a profile of Civil Eats member Philip Lee, co-founder of Readers to Eaters, a children’s book publisher that joyfully invites little ones into the world of food and farming, and an interview with author and podcast host Nicola Twilley, whose book Frostbite traces the rise of refrigeration and its immense impacts on our food system and beyond. You’ll also find details about our upcoming Books Salon on July 2—please join us for what promises to be an eye-opening conversation about the world of plants.

We wish you time to rest, relax—and read!—in the weeks to come. If you want to suggest a book we missed, please let us know in the Civil Eats Member Slack channel or by email.

Thanks for reading, and for being a Civil Eats supporter. If you'd like to increase your support for our work with a tax-deductible donation, please click the button below.

~ The Civil Eats Editors

In This Issue

• Member Updates
• Book Recommendations From the Civil Eats Team
  • You Can’t Market Manure at Lunchtime by Maisie Ganzler
  • Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land by David Gilbert
  • The Good Eater by Nina Guilbeault
  • Insatiable City by Theresa McCulla
  • On Gold Hill by Jaclyn Moyer
  • Plant Magic by Desiree Nielsen
  • The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger
  • The SalviSoul Cookbook by Karla T. Vasquez
  • Into the Weeds by Tama Matsuoka Wong
• Member Profile: Philip Lee Champions Food Literacy for Children
• The Check-in: Look What Nicola Twilley Found in the Fridge
• Delicious Recipes from Notable Cookbooks
  • Bombay Grill Sandwiches from Amrikan
  • Purple Rain Salad from Appetite for Change
  • Sumac-Roasted Eggplant with Maple-Tahini Drizzle from Plant Magic
  • Pastelitos de Hongos from SalviSoul
• In Case You Missed It: Some of Our Latest Books Coverage
• Past Issues

Member Updates

Civil Eats Salon: Revelations About the World of Plants

July 2, 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern

Join Civil Eats Editorial Director Margo True in conversation with Zoë Schlanger, author of The Light Eaters, and Tama Matsuoka Wong, author of Into the Weeds, as they upend our most basic ideas about the role of plants on Earth—and show us how to snap out of "plant blindness." Register now!

After the interview, we’ll invite our members to join a Q&A with Schlanger and Matsuoka Wong in our Slack community. To join us there, please review these Community Rules and Agreements and accept this invitation link. (Here are the instructions if you’re using Slack for the first time.) You can send us your questions for the authors in advance by Slack or email us at members@civileats.com.

Have you joined our Climate Solutions Crash Course?

This month we launched our Crash Course: Climate Solutions in Food & Farming, a month-long email series that covers the basics of how climate change is affecting the food system. Participants are getting up to speed quickly on climate change and sharing thoughts in our special Slack group. We’ll wrap up with a live Zoom discussion on July 11 with our Senior Staff Reporter and Contributing Editor, Lisa Held. You still have plenty of time to join us and get caught up!

Share your Civil Eats experience with others

What do you value about Civil Eats? How has our reporting impacted you? Why do you think Civil Eats reporting is important? Send 1 – 2 sentences along with your name and title/company to members@civileats.com and we may highlight your testimonial in a future newsletter. (Please note: responses may be edited for publication.)

Here’s what other members have said:

“I'm excited to stay up to date on all the latest news in sustainable and equitable food production and farming. These are topics I'm passionate about.” —Ryan Cope

“I’m a member of Civil Eats because I want to support critical journalism about our food system for my awareness and activism.” —Betsey Suchanic

Book Recommendations From the Civil Eats Team

You Can’t Market Manure at Lunchtime: And Other Lessons from the Food Industry for Creating a More Sustainable Company

By Maisie Ganzler

Ganzler, who leads the sustainability efforts of Bon Appétit Management Company (BAMCO), knows what she’s talking about: BAMCO is recognized as a leader in sustainable food service, especially in the areas of climate-consciousness, local food, animal welfare, and worker rights. In You Can’t Market Manure, Ganzler showcases the commitments of high-profile companies like Stonyfield, Whole Foods, Clif Bar, and others, walking readers through how to best pursue corporate sustainability, set meaningful goals (and adjust when you fail), collaborate with partners and adversaries alike, and sell their company's story.

While Manure is surely useful for sustainability leaders—and I also would have found Manure a priceless tool 15 years ago, when sustainability concepts and practices were fledgling—it also underscores the shortcomings of market-led sustainability. An early chapter focuses on improving chicken farming, touting the success of ambitious projects like No Antibiotics Ever and the corporate Better Chicken Commitment. At the time Ganzler wrote the book, these projects were still on a path to success, but, as we reported last month, have since taken a turn for the worse. Despite all the promises, corporate sustainability commitments will only become reality through consistent pressure and vigilance, and they all too easily devolve into mere lip service. —Matthew Wheeland

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Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography

By David Gilbert

An environmental anthropologist and scholar of social movements, Gilbert meticulously traces the two-decades-long effort to reclaim land that had been violently wrested from the local community by Indonesia’s New Order regime. Now the land is marked by a gate that reads “Tanah Ulayat” (Collective Land), leading into a vibrant, shared food forest where small vegetable plots are sheltered by a canopy of trees.

Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this book offers a vivid, intimate microhistory of the village of Casiavera, where once-landless workers and peasant farmers created “a new political agroecology.” This scholarship is a work of trust, even capturing the eco-political movement’s emotional undercurrents. “We no longer trembled with fear. No, we were not afraid anymore,” said one resident of Casiavera, recalling a blockade they formed to take back the plantations.

Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land is a profound story of what a “land back” movement can look like in practice, reaffirming the possibility that violently occupied land can be reclaimed, from Palestine to Crimea. —Grey Moran

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The Good Eater: A Vegan’s Search for the Future of Food

By Nina Guilbeault

Thus began a global journey to research vegan movements. Guilbeault ventured to Silicon Valley to examine veganism’s transformation from a social movement to a market-based model, and inside the U.S. “vegan mafia” to grasp the millions of dollars behind it. Guilbeault’s personal journey ends up being far more nuanced and complex than she ever expected. “A book I thought would be about veganism turned out to be about the much larger quest of discovering what kind of food system I wanted to build, and how,” she writes. In the end, The Good Eater is a worthwhile examination of eating well in a food system designed for the opposite. —Naomi Starkman

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Insatiable City: Food and Race In New Orleans

By Theresa McCulla

Each chapter captures a different historical aspect of New Orleans’ food and people. One chapter describes the slave trade blocks that were an attraction for tourists, and another juxtaposes luxurious hotels and food with the atrocious cruelties behind the scenes—laborers eating scraps, or no food at all. “Field and Levee” focuses on the huge sugar industry that dominated New Orleans’ economy and the laborers who worked hard on the boats. And “Mother Market” introduces the Choctaw, who established a public market that became a place for Black Americans to trade and sell goods until they were barred, and the market became a place for travelers and the elite to shop. To top it off, McCulla masterfully ties images to newspaper excerpts and individual stories, dipping you into an earlier time in New Orleans. —Kalisha Bass

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On Gold Hill: A Personal History of Wheat, Farming, and Family, from Punjab to California

By Jaclyn Moyer

The couple decided to grow, in addition to vegetables, an heirloom variety of wheat called Sonora. Moyer soon learned that this variety of wheat originated in Punjab, the region in northern India where her mother was born. “Might this obscure wheat contain within it a door to my own heritage?” she asks. “Could cultivating it offer me an opportunity to make up for all that had not passed down to me?” 

In On Gold Hill, Moyer weaves together her attempt to grow the grain with the story she unearths of her family through the generations. She layers these personal narratives with the larger histories of wheat cultivation over the millennia and the more recent organic farming movement. Moyer writes with beautiful, evocative prose. She does not romanticize her own farming experience, or the global chain of events at the center of today’s food and farming systems. This well-researched memoir about identity, heritage, and the systems that feed us is sweet, insightful, and challenging from the first page—and very much worth a read. —Christina Cooke

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Plant Magic: A Celebration of Plant-Based Cooking for Everyone

By Desiree Nielsen

Nielsen shares her joy for getting more nutrient-dense plants into our diets, with some helpful insights. Chew on a few fennel seeds after dinner to ease digestion and freshen your breath, for example, or incorporate cumin for its anti-inflammatory and digestion-soothing properties. She leans hard into tahini, pairing it with tomatoes and dates; transforming it into a ranch dressing to coat a broccoli salad; or whipping it with sweet potato and harissa for a spicy dip.

If you're new to plant-based cooking, you may need to add some new ingredients to your pantry, such as spelt flour or hemp hearts. But doing so will open up a new world of meat-free possibilities, and Nielsen promises they will taste good. “If it's not delicious,” she writes, “what's the point?” —Tilde Herrera

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The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

By Zoë Schlanger

For environmental journalist Zoë Schlanger, this was a story “too good to stay locked in the realms of academia.” She embarked on a years-long journey, interviewing scores of scientists all over the world and describing, in shimmering prose, their findings: Plants can communicate with one another—and even other species—by releasing chemicals into the air, or through a network of underground fungi. Some plants can recognize genetic kin, arranging their roots and leaves to hospitably share light and soil. They can hear sounds. Plants have recent memories that they pass on to their seeds. A few are able to shape-shift, mimicking the forms of other plants around them.

A rigorous thinker and gifted, expansive storyteller, Schlanger gives us the context to understand what we’re learning, interspersing details of plant physiology with sweeping overviews of how life evolved on Earth, the history of the scientific method, and the place of plants in Indigenous cultures. This stunning book upends our take-them-for-granted view of plants and encourages us to really see them—to our profound benefit. —Margo True

[Note: Schlanger will be joining our next Civil Eats Salon for members on July 2—sign up here!]

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The SalviSoul Cookbook: Salvadoran Recipes and the Women Who Preserve Them

By Karla T. Vasquez

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Into the Weeds: How to Garden Like a Forager

By Tama Matsuoka Wong

Many people around the world, she explains, have long both collected and tended to plants, and we can follow that example to create “wild gardens of the middle ground.” Into the Weeds unpacks this philosophy and acts as a guidebook for applying it to any backyard. Instead of clearing expanses of arable land, she says, we can plant gardens that build on the existing natural elements of a place, forage for wood sorrel on the edges of garden beds, and gather purslane that’s poking through cracks in cement.

Given Matsuoka Wong’s credentials as forager to renowned New York City restaurants, including Daniel and Atomix, one might imagine her approach to be entirely aspirational. While that’s partly true, the book is also filled with practical advice, like simple instructions for collecting and storing seeds and how to use chicken wire to protect crops from deer. Plus, the entire premise should help relieve the pressure traditional gardeners often feel to create neat, weed-free rows and maintain clearly delineated divisions between what we grow and what grows around us. “In the end, she writes, “nature slips through the boundaries and blurs them.” And that’s a good thing. —Lisa Held

[Note: Matsuoka Wong will be joining our next Civil Eats Salon for members on July 2—sign up here!]

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Member Spotlight

Philip Lee Champions Food Literacy for Children

Philip Lee thinks libraries are missing an opportunity. Lee, co-founder of the San Francisco children’s book publisher and food advocacy organization Readers to Eaters, points to library free meal programs as an ideal chance. Lunch literacy programs give librarians a way to open kids’ eyes to the connections between growing, cooking, and eating food—and to the way the food system works.

Lee, who grew up in Hong Kong, got his start in the New York magazine world, co-founded Lee & Low Books—one of the first children’s publishers to focus on diversity—and went on to become the host of KBCS radio in Bellevue, Washington, where he began covering education. He quickly realized that learning depended on having access to good food. This awakening led him to start Readers to Eaters in 2009 with his wife, June Jo Lee, a food ethnographer.

Readers to Eaters titles are often colorful stories about the people who work in the food system, like their latest release, Farmer Eva’s Green Garden Life, which will be published on June 25. Lee says it’s the first children’s book about a woman farmer, and tells a story that connects farming with ecology, nature, and science.

An award-winning title from 2017 is Chef Roy Choi and The Street Food Remix, about the noted Korean-American chef who kickstarted the gourmet food-truck movement. While the story focuses on Choi's life journey, the book also highlights the influence of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which allowed more Asians to come to the U.S., bringing with them a host of new cuisines.

Lee’s books use food, and a focus on people, to talk about issues that kids might otherwise glaze over. “It's kind of subversive in that way. I mean we never want to start by saying, let me teach you a lesson about immigration or social justice or climate issues,” he says.

One of his next projects is a book about what astronauts eat in space. “It’s not just about the science of food, it's also about the culture behind the food,” he says. For instance, he plans to include the story of Ko San, the first Korean astronaut, and how Korea’s top scientists created a space-ready version of kimchi so that Ko would be supplied with Korea’s beloved national dish.

Lee thinks differently about diversity now, compared to his earlier days at Lee & Low. “The conversation about issues of race obviously has not gone away, and in fact, is as important as ever. But I also wanted to find a new way to talk about it. Diversity beyond race is really about connection.”

And ultimately, Lee says, that connection is food.

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Nicola Twilley photo credit: Rebecca Fishman

The Check-In: Look What Nicola Twilley Found in the Fridge

By NAOKI NITTA

In 2012, the Royal Society—the British equivalent of the National Academy of Science—declared refrigeration “the most important invention in the history of food and drink.”

Polemic proclamations aside, refrigeration speaks volumes about our food system, says Nicola Twilley, seasoned journalist and co-host of the podcast Gastropod. The ability to manufacture cold has shaped not just our diet and health, she argues, but our economy, landscape, and geopolitics. “Its fingerprints are everywhere, from the height [increases in] 19th-century army recruits to Irish Independence and women’s liberation.”

Her new book, Frostbite, plunges readers into the chilly depths of the cold chain—the refrigerated infrastructure that envelops our food as it moves from farm to table—and the far-reaching consequences of developing a food system utterly dependent on cold preservation, storage, and delivery.

As the cold chain continues to expand at a frenzied pace, it comes at a shiver-inducing cost, Twilley says—to our health, the socioeconomic and geopolitical landscape, and climate change.

Civil Eats spoke with Twilley about her book, how refrigeration has transformed our relationship with food, and the implications of feeding the world’s seemingly insatiable appetite for manufactured cold.

What exactly is the cold supply chain?

It’s an interconnected network of refrigerated spaces, trucks, shipping containers, and air transportation. About three-quarters of everything on American plates passes through it, starting on the farm, extending to the supermarket, and ending at your fridge. The cold chain has created this vast artificial winter and the global food system that we have today—a world with out-of-season produce, [imported] meats, and Alaskan salmon that’s pin-boned in China, then sold in the U.S.

Can you explain the logistics of creating a cheeseburger entirely from scratch, and how the refrigerated food system makes that possible?

I tell the story of [open-data activist] Waldo Jaquith, who went off the grid with his wife in 2010 to test the limits of self-sufficiency. They built a home in rural Virginia, growing their own vegetables and raising chickens, and set off on a mission to make a cheeseburger—this sort of pinnacle of industrial food—from scratch.

He outlined the steps: He’d grow his own tomatoes, mustard plant, and wheat for the buns. It was the meat and cheese, though, where things fell down. In a pre-refrigeration scenario, you’d slaughter the cow in the cool winter months, but to make cheese at the same time as the beef, you’d need another [cow] that’s nursing [to get the milk and rennet].

“Bringing [cheeseburger] ingredients together in a pre-refrigeration world would have been like dining on a peacock stuffed into a swan—an incredible feat of food sourcing that requires a lot of preparation and planning.”

Then if you want a tomato on your burger, that’s a late summer produce; if you want lettuce leaf, that’s spring or fall. Without refrigeration, none of those things can be ready at the same time. Sure, you could turn the tomatoes into ketchup and age the cheese. But when you think about how many cheeseburgers Americans eat, bringing those ingredients together in a pre-refrigeration world would have been like dining on a peacock stuffed into a swan—an incredible feat of food sourcing that requires a lot of preparation and planning.

So, the cheeseburger couldn’t have existed without our refrigerated supply chain, and they didn’t; the earliest records are from the 1920s.

Like so many innovations that we consider essential, including the internet, refrigeration comes at a steep price.

It's a fascinating conundrum. Refrigeration has been seen as an unarguable benefit to society—without it, a third of everything [grown] used to go bad before it could be sold. Food waste has huge environmental and economic impacts on food security, water use, and methane emissions from rotting food, so on that level alone, it's incredible.

Refrigeration allows apple farmers in Washington, for example, to store their annual harvest and spread out sales over the next year. Cold transport allows banana growers in Central America to access a huge export market. People now talk about eating seasonally without having any idea of how it used to be. Historians think that much of Europe used to be pre-scorbutic (a pre-scurvy condition due to vitamin C deficiency) right before spring, from the lack of fresh fruit and vegetables. So, manufactured cold has given us the abundance that we have today, including sheer cool delights like cocktails and ice cream.

Still, a century of refrigeration has also revealed equally enormous downsides. For growers, the economic benefits aren’t so long term: Once the market opens up globally, the money and opportunities tend to go to whoever can do it for the absolute least, and that pushes prices and revenue down for everyone. Refrigeration has contributed to unsustainable monocultures that promote pests, diseases, and resource depletion; although we can have asparagus out of season in the U.S., exports from Peru are draining that country’s aquifer.

The global domination of bananas—the world’s most popular fruit—is made entirely possible by refrigerated shipping and [artificial] ripening. But through consolidation and dependence on a single crop, big plantations in Central America and the foreign corporations that run them have also [left a legacy of] political monoculture in the region.

“As consumers, we’ve voted with our dollars to have [produce that’s] cold and sturdy—rather than tasty or healthy.”

There are also subtle downsides to taste and nutrition. Fruits and vegetables have been reshaped to fit into a refrigerated supply chain, and part of that has removed flavor—literally switched off genes responsible for producing it. There’s also evidence that nutrient levels have fallen as crops are bred for the cold chain. Yet as consumers, we’ve voted with our dollars to have [produce that’s] cold and sturdy—rather than tasty or healthy.

At the planetary level, refrigerant gases and the energy used for cooling are among the biggest contributors to climate change. Astonishingly, refrigeration hasn’t reduced food waste—it’s just moved it to the other end [of the consumption pipeline]. In overstuffing our fridges and supermarket shelves, we’re chucking a third of our food supply and [creating even more] greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, the global cold chain keeps expanding—between 2018 and 2020, world [refrigeration] capacity increased nearly 20 percent. I think it’s a potential time bomb.

What is refrigeration’s role in transforming the beef industry?

A lot of the beef industry’s development was driven by the need to feed an increasing urban population. Historically, cattle would walk themselves to market—losing weight en route—and get slaughtered in the city. The cold chain allowed livestock to be raised far away from cities and put meatpacking plants in places where you could bypass pesky things like a unionized workforce. It took skilled butchering jobs away from urban stockyards and made [slaughterhouses] more dangerous.

In the big picture, I think refrigeration contributes to the detachment we have from our meat supply and what happens to these animals before they arrive on our plates. That fosters an approach that says, “I just want the cheapest price possible,” because essentially, that’s the only information we have about the meat.

It’s also led to massive industry consolidation, with four companies now controlling more than 70 percent of the U.S. beef market.

The cold chain only makes economic sense at a certain scale, one that tends to rule out small producers. Cattle farmers in New England, where land is more expensive, can’t compete with those in the American West, who have economic advantages that come with being big. That spurs consolidation: Along with gigantic industrial feedlots, meat processing plants capable of slaughtering thousands of cattle a day have become the norm.

What are the implications of the rest of the world rushing to build U.S.-style cold systems?

Currently, 70 percent of all food consumed in the U.S. passes through a cold chain, while in China, less than a quarter of meats and 5 percent of fruits and veg are sold under refrigeration. With mechanical cooling already responsible for [a significant portion of] global greenhouse emissions, the implications are you can’t build an American-size [system] around the world using current technology and stay within the 2-degree [Celsius global temperature] threshold of the U.N. Paris Climate Agreement. It’s literally not possible.

Conversely, reimagining and reinventing cold technology offers a lot of hope for building a better food system. Rwanda, for instance, is developing a National Cooling Strategy, the first of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa. Although there’s a minimum size required to make refrigeration work economically, in a country where small-scale farmers make up nearly half the population, the system has to be implemented so that it doesn’t throw people off their land or lead to monoculture.

Meanwhile, how can we make the U.S. system more sustainable? The Biden administration is investing in developing a more resilient meat supply chain, for example, largely by decentralizing the industry. Will initiatives like that help? 

It’s obviously harder in the U.S., where we have an entrenched system. But there are so many advantages to making things smaller—the industry will definitely be more resilient if one E. coli contamination doesn't shut down a tenth of your meat supply. While you need to have some level of aggregation, focusing on infrastructure like community refrigeration hubs can help bring the cost of the cold chain down and make [smaller producers] more competitive with agribusiness.

For perishable products, the mantra in the American food system is “the cold chain, the cold chain, the cold chain.” We refrigerate when we don’t need to. If the U.S. mandated salmonella vaccinations for chickens as the U.K. does, you wouldn’t need to refrigerate eggs. Also, there’s a company producing a permeable, edible coating for [harvested] produce that drastically slows ripening—essentially what cold does, with fewer impacts on flavor. Some European countries regulate supermarket size in order to preserve downtowns while curbing massive weekly shopping trips that encourage food waste.

There are solutions at all points along the chain that don’t require new technology. We’re dealing with an entrenched system, however, so we need regulation and incentives to make it work.

As you state, our country’s dependence on refrigeration is disproportionately high—the average U.S. fridge is 40 percent bigger than a French one, while one in four American households owns multiple units. What can consumers do to wean themselves off cold food?

Unplug that second refrigerator in your garage and recycle it properly to have the gases captured; you’ll find that it reduces food waste and electric bills simultaneously. And there’d be less wishful thinking if we shopped more frequently, in smaller amounts; we buy to fill the space you have. Go to the farmers’ market and buy what’s in season locally. Produce tastes better [that way], too—it’s not just some myth made up by Alice Waters [laughs].

Do you see any glimmer of hope in all of this?

Post-harvest science and technology is this Cinderella-like sector of research and development. There are people doing great work here, but almost nothing is being spent on it. If you want to enter a field that could transform the world, that’s a place where you’re needed.

There’s one striking aspect to note about our food system: It has only been refrigerated for a little more than a century. If it’s that recent, we can transform it.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Recipes From Some Notable Cookbooks

The Bombay grill sandwich is essentially a double-­decker club sandwich, but with Indian flavors. The standard pile of cold cuts and bacon strips is replaced with a mound of vegetables like boiled potatoes, sliced cucumber, and onion. (Some like to add a layer of thinly cut cooked beets, too.) Mayonnaise is swapped out for cilantro chutney, and the whole thing is grilled at the end to gently melt the cheese and give the bread more texture. The sandwiches pair well with a pile of your favorite potato chips and a Shikanji Pimm’s Cup.

Ingredients:

• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature

• 6 slices white sandwich or sourdough bread

• 3 tablespoons Cilantro-­Mint Chutney

• 2 slices mozzarella or provolone cheese

• 2 red potatoes, boiled, peeled, and thinly sliced

• 2 tablespoons Chaat Masala

• 1/3 English cucumber, thinly sliced

• 2 Roma tomatoes, thinly sliced

• 1/2 medium red onion, thinly sliced

• Ketchup, for dipping
  

Butter both sides of each piece of bread and place on a clean surface. Spread 1/2 tablespoon chutney on one side of each piece of bread. Add a slice of cheese on top of the chutney on 2 pieces of the bread. On those same pieces, divide and layer the potato slices. Add a generous sprinkle of chaat masala, then top each with another slice of bread, chutney side up. Add a layer of cucumber on top of the chutney, then sprinkle generously with chaat masala. Add a layer of tomatoes and onions and another generous sprinkling of chaat masala. Top with the remaining pieces of bread, chutney side down.

Heat a grill pan or large skillet over medium heat. Add the sandwiches and cook until the buttered bread is golden brown and the cheese is somewhat melted, about 3 minutes on each side. Cut in half and serve with ketchup for dipping.

INGREDIENT NOTE: Traditionally, the sandwich is made with Amul cheese, a highly processed Indian cheese that is hard to find outside of an Indian grocery store. You can swap in another mild, sliceable white cheese like Gouda or provolone.

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Purple Rain Salad from Appetite for Change

By APPETITE FOR CHANGE, with contributions from BETH DOOLEY

Ingredients:

DRESSING

• 1⁄2 cup extra-virgin olive oil

• 1⁄4 cup pomegranate juice

• 1⁄4 cup fresh or frozen raspberries

• 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

• 1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh ginger

• 1⁄2 teaspoon salt

SALAD

• 1 cup shredded red cabbage

• 1⁄4 cup chopped unpeeled purple daikon radish

• 1⁄2 cup coarsely shredded carrots

• 1 cup halved red grapes

• 1⁄2 cup blueberries

• 1⁄4 cup finely chopped red onion

• 1 cup cooked brown rice*

• 6 cups mixed salad greens

• 1 cup finely shredded raw, peeled red beets

TO MAKE THE DRESSING

In a blender, process together the oil, pomegranate juice, raspberries, vinegar, ginger, and salt until smooth.

TO MAKE THE SALAD

In a large bowl, toss together the cabbage, daikon, carrots, grapes, blueberries, onions, and rice. Then toss in enough of the dressing to lightly coat. Arrange the salad greens on individual plates or a large serving platter. Pile the tossed salad over the greens. Drizzle with a little more dressing, then garnish with the shredded beets.

* TO COOK BROWN RICE

Put 1⁄2 cup brown rice and about 4 cups water in a saucepan with a generous pinch of salt. Set over high heat and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer, covered, until the rice is tender, about 40 minutes. Remove from heat and allow the rice to stand, covered, for about 8 minutes. Drain off any excess water.

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Sumac-Roasted Eggplant with Maple Tahini Drizzle from Plant Magic

By DESIREE NIELSEN

Ingredients

SUMAC-ROASTED EGGPLANT

• 4 Chinese eggplants

• 2 tablespoons (30 mL) avocado oil

• 1¼ teaspoons (6 mL) ground sumac, plus more for serving

• ½ teaspoon (2 mL) salt

• Freshly cracked black pepper

• 2 tablespoons (30 mL) tahini

• 1 tablespoon (15 mL) pure maple syrup

• 1 tablespoon (15 mL) water

• ⅛ teaspoon (0.5 mL) salt

FOR SERVING

• Flaky sea salt

• 1⁄3 cup (75 mL) packed fresh mint leaves, thinly sliced

Roast the eggplant: Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Cut the eggplants in half lengthwise. Using a paring knife, score the halves diagonally, spaced ½ inch (1 cm) apart. Place the eggplant cut side up on the prepared baking sheet.

Brush the eggplant with the avocado oil. Sprinkle with the sumac, salt, and lots of pepper. Turn the eggplant halves over so they are cut side down on the baking sheet. Transfer to the oven and roast until soft and golden brown on the cut side, about 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, make the maple tahini drizzle: In a small bowl, whisk together the tahini, maple syrup, water, and salt.

To serve, pile the eggplant on a serving platter. Spoon the maple tahini drizzle over the eggplant. Sprinkle with a bit more sumac, flaky sea salt, and mint. Store leftovers in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 2 days. (I like to chop and fry the leftover eggplant, then add a bit of water and any leftover maple tahini drizzle until warmed through.)

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Pastelitos de Hongos from SalviSoul

By KARLA T. VASQUEZ

This dish is usually made with beef, pork, or chicken, but I love mushrooms and needed to explore them when people requested more vegetarian options. This recipe is the result.

Makes 12 to 14 pastelitos

Ingredients:

• 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

• ½ cup minced white onion

• 3 garlic cloves, minced

• ½ teaspoon kosher salt

• 10 ounces cremini mushrooms, finely chopped

• 5 teaspoons chicken bouillon powder

• ½ teaspoon dried oregano

• 4½ cups water, or as needed

• 2 cups peeled and diced potatoes

• 1 cup peeled and diced carrot

• 1 cup chopped Roma tomato

• ½ cup chopped green beans

• 2 cups masa harina

• 2 teaspoons achiote powder

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• 2 cups vegetable oil or peanut oil

• Curtido and Salsa de Tomate  for serving (optional)

In a large saucepan over medium-high heat, warm the olive oil until it shimmers. Add the onion, garlic, and salt and cook until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Add the mushrooms, 1 teaspoon of the chicken bouillon, the oregano, and ½ cup of the water and cook, stirring frequently, until the liquid is mostly absorbed, about 7 to 8 minutes. Transfer the mushroom mixture to a mixing bowl.

In the same pan over medium-high heat, combine the potatoes, carrot, tomato, green beans, 2 teaspoons chicken bouillon, and 2 cups water. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat to medium and let the vegetables simmer until tender, about 10 minutes. Transfer the vegetables to the same bowl containing the mushroom mixture.

In a large bowl, combine the masa harina, achiote powder, baking soda, and remaining 2 teaspoons chicken bouillon. Slowly add the remaining 2 cups water to the masa harina and knead until the dough reaches the consistency of Play-Doh. (When the dough is pressed, its sides should not tear.) Pour some water into a small bowl and keep it handy for moistening the dough. Roll 1½ to 2 ounces of masa between the palms of your hands until it forms a completely round ball. Then start flattening it with the fingertips of your dominant hand. Rotate the round slightly so that it gets pressed down evenly and thinly. Repeat for the remaining tortillas.

Spoon 2 tablespoons of the vegetable mixture onto half of each tortilla. Fold the other half of the tortilla over the mixture and pinch the seam to close it. Repeat for the rest of the pastelitos.

Line a large plate with paper towels and set near the stove. In a large pot over medium heat, warm the vegetable oil until it registers 350°F on an instant-read thermometer. Add the pastelitos, two at a time, and fry until they turn golden brown, about 2 minutes per side. Using tongs, transfer the pastelitos to the prepared plate to drain and cool.

Enjoy the pastelitos on their own, or with curtido and salsa de tomate.

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In Case You Missed It

Some of our recent book-related reporting

We’re Born to Eat Wild

BY TILDE HERRERA

Maria Finn discusses her new cookbook, her approach to what she calls ecosystem-based living and eating, and why foraging can be controversial.

Cooking Kudzu: The Invasive Species Is on the Menu in the South

BY AYURELLA HORN-MULLER

In an excerpt from the new book Devoured, journalist Ayurella Horn-Muller examines the unexpected culinary applications of ‘the vine that ate the South.’

In Barons, Austin Frerick Takes on the Most Powerful Families in the Food System

BY TWILIGHT GREENAWAY

In his new book, the Iowa native and competition expert exposes the system that has allowed seven families, including those behind Cargill, JBS, Driscoll’s, and Walmart, to build enormous power.

That's all for this issue of The Deep Dish. Thank you for reading, and thank you for being a member of the Civil Eats community. If this is your first time reading The Deep Dish (welcome!), be sure to check out our previous issues:

• Issue 28: Plastic, Part 2: Same Problems, Some Solutions
• Issue 27: Revitalizing Home Cooking
• Issue 26: Fungi
• Issue 25: Indigenous Foodways
• Issue 24: A First Look at Our Holiday Book Gift Guide
• Issue 23: The Future of Eating Out
• Issue 22: School Food Access
• Issue 21: Urban Farming
• Issue 20: Dismantling the Food Safety Net
• Issue 19: Farming with Trees
• Issue 18: Water
• Issue 17: The Farm Bill
• Issue 16: Biodiversity
• Issue 15: 2022 in Review
• Issue 14: Soil Health
• Issue 13: Young People Changing the Food System
• Issue 12: School Food
• Issue 11: Growing Your Own Food
• Issue 10: Co-Ops
• Issue 9: Seafood
• Issue 8: Pollinators
• Issue 7: Rural America
• Issue 6: Labor
• Issue 5: Organics
• Issue 4: Food System Luminaries on the Year Ahead
• Issue 3: Food Security
• Issue 2: Plastics in the Food System
• Issue 1: Climate Change and Ag

If someone forwarded this email to you, please support our work and become a member today. Questions? Compliments? Suggestions? We love to hear from our members: Please send us a note at members@civileats.com.

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