Food Travel

“Food and travel are natural companions,” writes guest editor Padma Lakshmi. From this pairing comes “the possibility of seeing anew, of examining how we make and assign meaning.” The essays in this year’s Best American Food and Travel Writing circle the world—from Dakar in Senegal, to Michoacán in south-central Mexico, to the Camino de Santiago in Spain—and deepen our understanding of our place in it.

An innovative new take on the travel guide, Rice, Noodle, Fish decodes Japan's extraordinary food culture through a mix of in-depth narrative and insider advice. In this 5,000-mile journey through the noodle shops, tempura temples, and teahouses of Japan, Matt Goulding, cocreator of the enormously popular Eat This, Not That! book series, navigates the intersection between food, history, and culture, creating one of the most ambitious and complete books ever written about Japanese culinary culture from the Western perspective.

One life-changing night, reeling from her beloved brother's sudden death, a devastating breakup with her handsome engineer fiancé, and eviction from the apartment they shared, Emily Nunn had lost all sense of family, home, and financial security. After a few glasses of wine, heartbroken and unmoored, Emily - an avid cook and professional food writer - poured her heart out on Facebook. The next morning she woke up with an awful hangover and a feeling she'd made a terrible mistake - only to discover she had more friends than she knew.

From brass knuckle beatdowns on the schoolyard to showdowns with the SEC on the national news, every second of Deaton’s life has been a fight for survival. This book is the raw, wild John Deaton story, straight from the source. Born in one of the worst neighborhoods in Detroit--the kind of place the city cordoned off with warning signs--and growing up surrounded by hustlers, addicts, abusers, gang bangers, and the downtrodden, Deaton became a fighter, with violence becoming second nature.

Town by town, bite by bite, author Matt Goulding brings Italy to life through intimate portraits of its food culture and the people pushing it in new directions. From the pasta temples of Rome to the multicultural markets of Sicily to the family-run, fish-driven trattorias of Lake Como, Pasta, Pane, Vino captures the breathtaking diversity of Italian regional food culture.

In Ruth Reichl’s latest book—one that will delight her fans and convert those as yet uninitiated to her charming tales—the author brings to life her adventures in pursuit of good meals and good company. Picking up where Tender at the Bone leaves off, Comfort Me with Apples recounts Reichl’s transformation from chef to food writer, a process that led her through restaurants from Bangkok to Paris to Los Angeles and brought lessons in life, love, and food.

Calvin Trillin proves that he is one of America's funniest food writers, while recalling his efforts to write a definitive history of the Buffalo chicken wing to his attempts to lure his older daughter back from California by finding an irresistible bagel.

At the school gate, when she accidentally kissed one new friend on the nose and called another a "beautiful man-horse", Rachael realized that small-town France could hardly be more different to Australia. The smell of cigarettes replaced the tang of bone-broth and sprouted sourdough, the neighbors sometimes came to blows and under no circumstances would anyone wear active wear in public. Muddling through in terrible French pushed Rachael's family to their limits. Some days, everybody cried and ate their feelings with croissants. But the town of Sommières embraced these ragtag Australians.

Ever wish you can leave the rat race for the simple life? Here's some inspiration. On Mexican Time is Cohan's passionate, evocatively written memoir of how he and his wife found a new home - and a new lease on life - in the charming 16th century hill town of San Miguel de Allende.

Patrick E. McGovern takes us on a fascinating journey through time to the dawn of brewing, when our ancestors might well have made a paleo brew of wild fruits, honey, cereals, and botanicals. Early beverage makers must have marveled at the magical process of fermentation. Their amazement grew as they drank the mind-altering drinks, which were to become the medicines, religious symbols, and social lubricants of later cultures.

Did you know that oatmeal actually isn't a healthy way to start the day? That milk doesn't build bones, and eggs aren't the devil? In Food: What the Heck Should I Eat?, Dr. Hyman looks at every food group and explains what we've gotten wrong, revealing which foods nurture our health and which pose threats. He also explains food's crucial role in functional medicine and how food systems and policies affect our environmental and personal health.

Ask any self-respecting Louisianan who makes the best gumbo and the answer is universal: "Momma." The product of a melting pot of culinary influences, gumbo, in fact, reflects the diversity of the people who cooked it up: French aristocrats, West Africans in bondage, Cajun refugees, German settlers, Native Americans-all had a hand in the pot. What is it about gumbo that continues to delight and nourish so many? And what explains its spread around the world? A seasoned journalist, Ken Wells sleuths out the answers.

Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to the small, rural, scratchy-hot village of Autignac in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks he’s made a terrible mistake.

Get ready to devour America. Adam Richman, the exuberant host of Travel Channel’s Man v. Food and Man v. Food Nation, has made it his business to root out unique dining experiences from coast to coast. Now, he zeroes in on some of his top-favorite cities - from Portland, Maine, to Savannah, Georgia - to share his uproariously entertaining food travel stories, top finds, and some invaluable (and hilarious) cautionary tales.

What does it take to master French cooking? This is the question that drives Bill Buford to abandon his perfectly happy life in New York City and pack up and (with a wife and three-year-old twin sons in tow) move to Lyon, the so-called gastronomic capital of France.

Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are stark: Of the roughly 6,000 different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these - rice, wheat, and corn - now provide 50 percent of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome still.

Grape, Olive, Pig reveals hidden gems and enduring delicacies from across this extraordinary country, contextualizing each meal with the stories behind the food in a cultural narrative. Whether you've visited Spain or have only dreamed of bellying up to its tapas bars, Grape, Olive, Pig will wake your imagination, rouse your hunger, and capture your heart.

Hot dogs. Poor people created them. Rich people found a way to charge fifteen dollars for them. They’re high culture, they’re low culture, they’re sports food, they’re kids' food, they’re hangover food, and they’re deeply American, despite having no basis whatsoever in America's Indigenous traditions. You can love them, you can hate them, but you can’t avoid the great American hot dog. Raw Dog is part investigation into the cultural and culinary significance of hot dogs and part travelogue documenting a cross-country road trip researching them as they’re served today.

A celebration of 25 years of Provençal living - of lessons learned and changes observed - with his final book, Peter Mayle has crafted a lasting love letter to his adopted home, marked by his signature warmth, wit, and humor.

American food is the story of mash-ups. Immigrants arrive, cultures collide, and out of the push-pull come exciting new dishes and flavors. But for Edward Lee, who, like Anthony Bourdain or Gabrielle Hamilton, is as much a writer as he is a chef, that first surprising bite is just the beginning. What about the people behind the food? What about the traditions, the innovations, the memories? A natural-born storyteller, Lee decided to hit the road and spent two years uncovering fascinating narratives from every corner of the country.