Every story has a food angle, Kim Severson likes to say.
This thinking allows Ms. Severson, who covers the country’s food culture for The New York Times, to write about themes and topics that are larger than the portions on our plates. With that lens in mind, she reported that our pandemic-era isolation was driving America’s renewed love for the drive-through. After attending an organic farming conference in Georgia, she wrote about a farm’s history of slavery.
Last week, The Times published an article by Ms. Severson about a dispute between a vegetarian restaurant in New York City and a small farm in the Texas Hill Country that shared the same name: Dirt Candy. Inside a trademark fight between the Cutler family, who own the farm, and Amanda Cohen, who runs the restaurant, Ms. Severson found threads of what she calls “America’s crisis of mistrust,” the country’s reordered political spectrum and the developing ideology around organic food.
In an interview with Times Insider, Ms. Severson discussed the article, her role at The Times and the rapidly evolving culture surrounding food in the United States. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.
Your job is to examine food. How does your profession influence your eating habits?
I see eating as part of my work. Any time I have a chance to eat something that I haven’t tried before, I do that. If I come across something at a farmers’ market, or maybe I’m out in the country and somebody is making a dish I haven’t seen before, I’ll ask how they make it. Sometimes in the grocery store, if I see a person with something interesting in their cart, I stop them and ask how they’re going to use it. I understand and appreciate the artistry that goes into a four-star restaurant, but day to day, I’m with my teenager. We enjoy McDonald’s French fries. I cook dinner regularly. I review cookbooks and I test recipes. It’s all one big information stream.
When in your career did you come up with the philosophy that food could be a window into larger social issues?
I started writing about food when I was a reporter at The Anchorage Daily News in Alaska. I was the restaurant critic there. Food allowed me to get out on the Iditarod Trail, and to find out how people get groceries to the bush. Then I went to The San Francisco Chronicle, and the idea was to cover news around food. San Francisco is a great food town, and I had good editors who believed that you could tell any story through food. That really cemented it for me.
In your most recent article, you wrote that a dispute between a restaurant in New York and a farm in Texas was “rooted in America’s current crisis of mistrust.” When in your reporting did you recognize the opportunity to write about something bigger?
I was in Texas and met the Cutlers around the time when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was getting closer to being approved for Trump’s cabinet. Kennedy, and many of who we used to consider “hippie farmers,” are all about farm-to-table and clean food — as are some of the very best restaurateurs. It’s like a Venn diagram that you never would have imagined, with R.F.K. Jr. and Alice Waters in the same section.
When I talked to the Cutlers, they were part of the Make America Healthy Again world. They weren’t necessarily supportive of Trump, but they certainly had a suspicion of government, of medical studies, of Covid. The Cutlers and Amanda Cohen both believe in small farms and in not using pesticides, and how important the Earth is for our health. But they were completely on opposite sides. I think that’s where we are now. Everything’s scrambled, and you can’t categorize people as “left” or “right” anymore. But there is this distrust for the government, for one another, for the political process. That’s what really came through.
You mentioned Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Make America Healthy Again movement. He was recently approved by the Senate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Are you gearing up to report on his campaign to change America’s health and eating habits?
Along with my colleagues at the Well and Science sections, I’m going to dig into a lot of this. I imagine that he’s going to push against big agriculture a little more than anyone from the president’s cabinet has before. Will Make America Healthy Again mean we’re going to have more organic farming and more local food? At the same time, he’s against more traditional science and health theories. It’s going to be really interesting.
You previously covered the South for the National desk. How have Atlanta and the South’s food culture influenced your work?
I knew nothing about Southern food until I moved here. I had some broad thoughts about it, like Southern cooking and where soul food and agriculture fits into that. Now I talk about the American South as being sort of the Italy of America, in that each little region is so different from the next. It’s very agriculture-based here, with a lot of vegetable-based food, but how you make your collards in Mississippi could not be more different from how you would make them in Appalachia.
There are a lot of old, old food ways here. The story of race in America began in the South. From the kitchens where Black hands made the food came traditions that exist today. There are many stories to learn about food here.
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