Author: Mildred Bell

When you enter a seafood expo, you anticipate seeing the usual suspects: shiny salmon fillets, piles of shrimp on ice, and a few scallop vendors trying their hardest to compete. You don’t anticipate receiving something from a Taiwanese business that actually tastes like chicken tender. However, that is precisely what transpired at the Seafood Expo North America in Boston this past March, and it reveals something both unsettling and intriguing about the current state of American food culture. Salmon is not the trend. It’s not shrimp, which for decades has been the go-to seafood for Americans. Making fish completely vanish…

At 3:40 in the morning, the alarm went off, which felt more like being cut off in the middle of something significant than like waking up. By 4:15, I was watching deckhands load bait tanks with live sardines under yellow dock lights on a dock at San Diego Bay while the rest of the city slept. The scent of the boat was a mix of diesel, salt, and a hint of animal. Right away, it seemed like a place where no one was doing anything for anyone. Before dawn, we cleared the bay. The captain remained silent. Someone had left…

A certain type of recipe spreads through the more subdued channel of food people genuinely trusting one another, rather than through algorithms or sponsored posts. It is created on a Wednesday night, shared with a coworker, who then texts it to a friend. In just two weeks, it has spread farther than most viral content ever does. This summer’s dish is cold sesame noodles with crab. Not because it was promoted by a brand. Because those who work as cooks were always making it and talking about it. The recipe’s foundation is not brand-new. For many years, cold sesame noodles,…

Around Cinco de Mayo planning, a certain kind of stubbornness emerges. Every time, someone reaches for the ground beef. The rotisserie chicken is taken out by someone else. Additionally, the entire menu begins to seem less inspired and more like it was put together from a supermarket end-cap display somewhere between the sour cream and the shredded cheddar. It’s unfortunate because Mexican coastal cuisine, which features briny mussels, flaky fish, and fresh shrimp, is among the world’s most colorful. To cook like you do, you don’t have to live close to the water. The majority of home cooks haven’t yet…

Every January, a single auction at Tokyo’s Toyosu Fish Market in the wee hours of the morning sets the emotional tone for the year’s bluefin tuna trade worldwide. The highest bidder wins the ceremonial first catch of the year, a fish that can weigh several hundred kilos. This process has resulted in auction prices for a single animal topping three million dollars in recent years. The argument is that, by any reasonable measure of the value of a fish, the amount is ridiculous. It indicates that fishing fleets operating in regions ranging from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mediterranean…

Chophouse Row sits on 11th Avenue in Capitol Hill — one of those mixed-use developments that manages to feel like a neighborhood rather than a project, with its small independent tenants and ground-floor retail spaces that face the street at a human scale. It’s the kind of block that Seattle’s food community has been populating steadily for years, the kind of address that confers a certain credibility before anyone has served a single dish. The local dining discourse changed when it was revealed that Heong Soon Park will be launching Sea’d In there in early July 2026. This happens only…

When you arrive in Lunenburg on a summer morning, the color is the first thing you notice. When you realize that you are looking at 18th-century wooden architecture that the town has been maintaining and repainting for more than 270 years, with each generation adding another coat to the same boards, the buildings that run along the hill above the harbor in reds, yellows, and blues that seem too saturated to be real. The Bluenose II, the tall-masted schooner whose image you’ve been carrying in your pocket on the Canadian dime for years without realizing it, is located in the…

Enter a seafood restaurant in New Orleans, the kind with a handwritten daily menu on a chalkboard, a bowl of àouffée arriving in a cloud of steam, and the aroma of butter and cayenne reaching the table before the server does. Until recently, most diners didn’t think to ask where that crawfish actually came from, and most restaurants weren’t required to provide a clear response. The crawfish may have originated in the Atchafalaya Basin and been collected by a commercial trapper whose family has been working those waters for many generations. Alternatively, it may have come from a Chinese processing…

A flag arose somewhere in the FDA’s processing queue when the container reached a U.S. port, such as Newark, Los Angeles, or any of the dozens of entry sites where millions of pounds of shrimp from Southeast Asia are imported annually. A physical inspection of the shipment had been chosen. According to the lab results, there were traces of an antibiotic that is prohibited in food in the United States. There was an official rejection. The FDA’s OASIS system was used to notify the importer. After that, the container most likely spent a few weeks in a cold storage facility…

On a chilly morning, the first thing you notice when heading north out of Portland is how quickly the city vanishes. One moment you’re rolling past a food cart pod close to Burnside, and the next, long before you see the ocean, you’re rolling past wet pastureland with a subtle salt scent. In a sense, the entire journey is that scent. If you let them be, oysters are the route itself from Portland to Vancouver, not just a side adventure. Contrary to what the majority of glossy travel articles claim, taking this drive on a budget is not only feasible…