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 ...

EVERY MORNING OF MY CHILDHOOD, I sat at the kitchen table and tried to keep still as Abuelita plaited my waist-length hair. Water droplets fell on my neck, making me flinch, and she sighed in ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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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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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

THERE’S HONEY BETWEEN MY TOES. I see it before I feel it. Dripping down between the big and second toes of my left foot, bits of wax adhered to the knuckle and toenail. Chelsea walks through the front ...

IT TOOK SOME CENTURIES, but humans are finally wising up to the wondrous ways of the octopus clan. Clever predators with big-brained prowess, these cephalopods are champion problem-solvers, masters of ...