We’re delighted to announce the launch of The Architecture of Food, a joint issue from Feminist Food Journal and chlorophyll magazine. chlorophyll is edited by Apoorva Sripathi (who has also done incredible writing, editing, and illustrating for FFJ over the years) and the wonderful Anne Wallentine.

For this issue, we asked writers to share prose, poetry, and essays about the structures and hierarchies of meals, menus, restaurants, and food systems, and they delivered a compelling array of perspectives. Coming up, we have:

It’s been a pleasure to explore this convergence of great writing in collaboration with chlorophyll, and we hope you enjoy the issue as much as we enjoyed producing it.

We’ll be publishing a new piece from the issue each week over the next few months, alternating between featuring the full piece on FFJ and on chlorophyll. In the weeks where content is not featured on our site, we’ll send a newsletter to direct you to chlorophyll to read the piece in full!

Today’s excellent first essay, launching on chlorophyll, comes from Beth Whelan and explores the significance of ‘meat and two veg’ in the industrial history of Northern England. Check out an excerpt below and read the full piece here.

Meat, Two Veg, and a Side of Comfort

by Beth Whelan | Read it now on chlorophyll

Meat and two veg is often dismissed today as a symbol of culinary monotony, an uninspired beige relic of a British past better left in the rearview mirror. But when I look at a plate of food, I rarely see a lack of imagination, I see my grandad and the fierce, quiet love of the woman who kept him alive. I am 35 years old, born in May 1991. Just two months before I arrived, the heavy iron gates of Agecroft Colliery, a coal mine in Pendlebury, Lancashire, closed for the last time.

My grandad had been an electrical miner there since 1940, navigating the labyrinthine depths of the coalfield for over 50 years. To the world, he was a skilled man, an electrician who crawled through gaps the size of a washing machine door to repair machinery in the damp, explosive darkness. To his family, he was the provider who carried the silent weight of the 1974 strikes, a time when he chose to cross the picket lines and accept the label of ‘scab’ to ensure his wife and three young children didn’t go hungry. That choice was made at the kitchen table, and it was the women of the north who ensured that the table remained a sanctuary.

If I ask any of my Welsh or southern friends who the best cook they know is, they’ll say their mum. But among my friends who grew up in the north, they’ll say anyone else…

Read the rest of this essay here and stay tuned for next week’s piece on FFJ.