MY NAME MEANS “BITTER,” is something I liked to say in high school, back when I was trying things out. It was one of many schticks; another was to look theatrically at the watchband I wore, its bezel ...

WE HAVE A SEASONAL RITUAL. Every summer when I go home to Massachusetts, I go back to Walden Pond and swim across the lake with my father, a man who once gave me the maybe misguided moral base line ...

IT’S SIX A.M. WHEN I drive my scooter from a rented flat in Siolim, North Goa, to the plateau in Thivim, where I am supposed to meet Jalmesh Karapurkar, an ecological researcher and educator. Before I ...

PARTWAY THROUGH MY CONVERSATION with food scientist David Zilber, he began reeling off the names of various fermented foods. It wasn’t until Zilber started going down the list that I realized just how ...

A POTATO SHOULDN’T taste like metal. Your first bite should hold a flavor lent to it by the earth itself—the rain trapped beneath its skin and the gentle warmth of the sun on a field. It should be ...

She had been up since six a.m., when she had risen to make the tortillas. I wanted to turn around, look into her eyes, and smile, but I waited until she patted me on the shoulder—her sign to let me ...

THE CLOCK STRIKES NOON in Sydney’s central business district. Dressed in black and white, with bald heads balanced atop long, elegant necks, droves of perhaps the city’s most distinctive ...

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Walk thirty minutes from my grandparents’ house in Chennai, past the Iyer Library, where palm leaf manuscripts from antiquity rest behind thin glass, past the LEGO bricks of the Murugan Temple, and ...

THE MILK TASTED SWEET. A little grassy. Warmer than I expected. I had been afraid to taste it. I noticed the fear before I understood it, some conviction that this was not something a person did. I ...

THE PIECE OF DRIED FISH I just put in my mouth refuses to bend. I’m stuck with my jaw half-open and awkwardly stretch my lips to hide the silver skin wedged between my teeth. I must wait for my saliva ...

WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, my friend Grace flew up from Tallahassee during her spring break to spend a few nights in my D.C. apartment. Her mother had sent her with an envelope containing two hundred ...