Best American series

Culinary creator, writer and community advocate, Sohla El-Waylly selects the best twenty articles published in 2021 that celebrate the many innovative, comforting, mouthwatering, and culturally rich culinary offerings of our country

If silence is the cost of great ramen, so be it / Nina Li Coomes -- Limits of the lunchbox moment / Jaya Saxena -- Starving toward deliverance / Julia Sonenshein -- Man who didn't invent flamin' hot cheetos / Sam Dean -- Gatekeepers who get to decide what food is "disgusting" / Jiayang Fan -- Fruits of empire / Willa Glickman -- Chronicles of a bubble-tea addict / Jiayang Fan -- Let them eat fakes / Ligaya Mishan -- Queen of delicacies / Shane Mitchell -- Ghost acres: Tulare Lake and the past future of food / Tom Finger -- Revolt of the delivery workers / Josh Dzieza -- How Vietnamese Americans made San Jose America's tofu capital / Adesh Thapliyal -- I ate like a boy to avoid being a queer man / Logan Scherer -- Humble beginnings of today's culinary delicacies / Ligaya Mishan -- After a century of dispossession, Black farmers are fighting to get back to the land / Tom Philpott -- Innovation and the incinerated tongue: notes of hot chicken, race, and culinary crossover / Cynthia R. Greenlee -- A year of cooking with my mother / Eric Kim -- Other people's kitchens / Bryan Washington -- Margaritaville and the myth of American leisure / Jaya Saxena -- "It's hospital soigné" / Chris Crowley -- Wild and irresistibly saucy tale of the curry con man / Mayukh Sen -- Tokyo convenience store chicken gizzards saved my life / Andrew Keh -- I tasted Honda's spicy rodent-repelling tape / Liz Cook -- Grapefruit spoon makes life easier / Rachel Levin -- I was a lifelong vegetarian. I decided to taste what I was missing / Rajesh Parameswaran -- In my childhood kitchen, I learned both fear and love / Hannah Selinger -- I recommend eating chips / Sam Anderson