Author: Mildred Bell

When a slow cooker is working, a certain type of silence descends upon a kitchen. In the afternoon, you pass by it, lift the lid for a moment, and the steam fills the rest of the house with something warm and briny. It’s difficult to ignore how that one appliance has altered how people cook on weeknights, particularly when seafood is involved. Seafood used to seem like a Friday night indulgence, something you saved for visitors, or a weekend endeavor. That rule has been subtly rewritten by slow cookers. After you’ve tried it, the appeal makes sense. Almost no babysitting…

There is a small business selling something that shouldn’t really be able to be sold somewhere between Dutch Harbor and the docks at Kodiak. It’s a boat seat. A couple of hours on the water. A brief window during which a paying visitor—typically a tourist arriving by plane from Texas, Frankfurt, or Seoul—can witness a steel pot the size of a refrigerator rise over the rail, dripping seawater and snapping with red king crab. The total cost is higher than that of most cruises. Nevertheless, it always sells out before the previous season is even over. When I first learned…

On a Kraken game night, the noise from the upper bowl and the ice are not the first things you notice when you walk through Climate Pledge Arena. It’s the aroma emanating from Fork & Fin, the Trident Seafoods marketplace hidden inside American Express Hall, where Wild Alaska Pollock is being seared, battered, and folded into tacos at a rate that ten years ago would have seemed unimaginable. Pollock was marketed as a headline protein in a hockey arena. It’s a little telling and a little surreal. The nameless white fish inside the fast-food fillet and the anonymous flake in…

Long before anyone awakens, the smell of bacon fills the kitchen. The slow surrender of a peaceful home to the scent of fat hitting a cast-iron pan is what Chef Linton Hopkins seems to enjoy most about Sunday mornings. His daughters can almost precisely predict when he will begin grinding pepper into the pot because he has been preparing shrimp and grits on Sundays for so long. Although the term “tradition” seems too formal to describe what truly occurs in his Atlanta kitchen, it is tempting. No recipe card is affixed to the refrigerator. There are no measuring cups arranged.…

A subtle form of annoyance has been growing somewhere between the cold line at the Folkestone Eurotunnel terminal and the espresso machines at Charles de Gaulle. Travelers from the United States who have just gotten off ferries or long-haul flights have been stuck in lines that didn’t exist a year ago. They came for the grilled octopus in Athens, the oyster bars in San Sebastián, the seafood, and the leisurely lunches in coastal Brittany. In many instances, they learned an unexpected lesson about border policy in Europe. After years of delays, the Entry/Exit System, or EES, went live on October…

The Choptank River appears brown-green, choppy, and slightly metallic in the light on a rainy morning, just like it always does in late spring. While two underwater drones hum across the riverbed, a graduate student named Keshav Rajasekaran is bent over a laptop, his T-shirt tied around his head like a hood, trying to keep the screen readable. He’s trying to find oysters. He continues to find sand. As you watch him work, it’s difficult not to consider how much unseen infrastructure lies beneath that one annoying sentence: “sand, sand, sand,” and how a century-old food safety system contributes to…

The South seems to deliberately slow down on a certain type of Saturday in May. It takes longer than usual for people to select their hats. Bottles of bourbon emerge from cabinets where they had been stored since Christmas. There’s a roast in the oven somewhere, and someone’s spouse keeps asking if the mint is fresh enough for the juleps. The first Saturday in May has always felt more like a minor national holiday, mostly observed by visitors from outside of Kentucky, than a sporting event. The food is more important than you might think if you’re hosting this year.…

When a serious chef comes across an ingredient so honest that it disproves everything they believed to be true, a certain kind of silence descends upon them. According to most accounts, Ferran Adrià experienced something similar on the day he strolled through one of Copenhagen’s central fish markets. This is the kind of low-key, unglamorous place where the fish appear to have been swimming twenty hours ago and the cold comes off the ice before you even reach the stalls. which they were, for the most part. You wouldn’t expect Adrià, the Spanish chef who spent twenty years at elBulli…

When something that was consistently present—quietly, dependably, generation after generation—suddenly announces its departure, a certain kind of grief descends upon a neighborhood. That’s what happened in Kalihi when Tamashiro Market announced that it would close on April 30, 2026, following 85 years of providing services to the people of Hawaii out of that distinctive pink building. The community’s reaction was not merely cordial. Even the family didn’t seem to be ready for how overwhelming it was. The owners, Cyrus and Guy Tamashiro, who centered their retirement around this occasion, most likely envisioned a low-key farewell. Instead, thousands of people abruptly…

It doesn’t take long to sense the gravity of what’s going on when you stand on the docks in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, on a Tuesday morning. Beyond the effects of sun and salt, the shrimp boats are weathered in a way that happens when no one has the funds to repair them. Some captains stay close to the water, doing mental math that never quite works out in their favor. This is the up-close appearance of decades of inexpensive imported shrimp. Not a figure. Not a graph from NOAA. However, a man is gazing at his boat and questioning…