This week, for our collaborative ‘architecture of food’ issue with chlorophyll magazine, we have an essay by Rebecca Thimmesch on what gets lost when global dishes are given English-language names.

No English Menu, Please

By Rebecca Thimmesch

I don’t consider myself a neurotic traveller, despite being a neurotic person. I don’t overplan, I’m not dead set on certain activities or attractions: in fact, I’m quite chill. But where my neuroses come out is in my pathological need to be the waiter’s favourite foreign table. The prize? Being handed the native language menu.

There’s an element of tourist shame here. I know that travel contributes on some level to gentrification, housing crises, rising costs, et cetera, and that many aren’t happy to hear American accents in their neighborhoods. In some ways, the local menu is an attempt to assure my hosts – and perhaps also myself – that I have good intentions within a problematic industry, that I do not expect that my language is always the lingua franca.

But there’s also a practical aspect.

Culinary language learning is its own form of phonics. When we learn about a new dish in another language, we learn it as more than the sum of its parts – imbued with meaning via flavour, not merely translation from English…

READ THE REST OF THE ESSAY ON CHLOROPHYLL.

Rebecca Thimmesch is a writer and cook based in East London. Her newsletter Chic! focuses on food, culture, hospitality, and having fun.

This week’s essay — part of our architecture of food issue published in collaboration with chlorophyll magazine — is a portrait of the ways that women can build worlds with their hands (and a bit of semolina).

By Lina Saad

The first architecture I ever understood wasn’t a building. It was a pastry.

Growing up in Beirut, I remember my grandmother making maamoul in quantities that felt industrial in scale, trays upon trays of them, stacked like edible bricks across my grandfather’s home. The air was thick with the scent of pistachios, rose water, and orange blossom, a perfume that seeped into the walls and into my memory. I was too young to grasp the full meaning of what I was witnessing, but those wooden moulds, carved with ridges, lattices, and tiny sunbursts, were my first lesson in how women build worlds with their hands.

Maamoul has existed in the Levant for centuries, its origins stretching back to ancient Mesopotamia and the early Arab empires. Historically, it was a celebratory pastry, made for Eid, Easter, and other religious feasts. It was also a pastry made by women, who gathered in kitchens, courtyards, and balconies to shape hundreds by hand at a time. The work was repetitive, physical, and communal: mothers taught daughters, grandmothers taught granddaughters, neighbours taught neighbours. Even when war, migration, and displacement threaten the communities that make them, maamoul carry a lineage of ritual, relationships, and cultural continuity.

Maamoul structures time, marking the rhythm of the year. It appears every year at the end of Ramadan to signal a transition from fasting to feasting — from restraint to celebration. As a child, to me Eid morning meant waking to the sight of stainless-steel trays, each one holding dozens of pastries shaped, filled, and pinched shut by the women of my family. Their labour was quiet but immense, a choreography of kneading, filling, moulding, and baking that began days before the holiday.

When my mother moved to London, she carried those memories with her like a second spine. Her own mother had died while she was living in West Africa, building a business and raising a family far from home. Maamoul became her way of keeping that connection alive, a ritual that refused to let distance or loss erase the women who came before her.

In London, our kitchen became a reconstruction of Beirut, not in its layout or its appliances, but in its rituals. My mother’s maamoul-making was an act of rebuilding, a way of creating a familiar architecture in an unfamiliar city. She sat on the carpet because that’s how her mother had done it. She used the same wooden moulds she had brought from Lebanon. She insisted on resting the semolina overnight, even when time was tight, because some structures cannot be rushed.

I remember returning from university one year to find her sitting cross-legged on the carpet of our London kitchen, a large bowl of semolina in front of her. She was kneading it with rose water, orange blossom water, and ghee, her hands moving with muscle memory. She covered the dough and left it to rest for twenty-four hours.

“The longer it rests,” she told me, “the more rewarding the taste.”

It was a lesson in patience, but also in inheritance. Some things need time to become themselves.

Maamoul moulds encode a visual language that women have preserved for generations.

Maamoul come in different shapes, but these variations are not arbitrary; they are a form of code, telling you what to expect before you take a bite. A diamond shape signalled a luxurious filling of pistachios, often reserved for guests or special occasions. Domed, mountain-like maamoul held walnuts, a humbler choice. Flat, stamped discs were filled with dates, the most ancient of the three variations. As a child at my grandmother’s house, I learned to read these shapes long before I learned to read words.

Maamoul moulds are also carved with patterns that echo Levantine tile work and ancient motifs. Like my mother’s moulds from Lebanon, they are often passed down through generations, meaning their motifs can take on a particular familial resonance. For families and communities who have been scattered around the earth due to war and conflict, these traditions remind us of the homes and people we left behind. When I press dough into my mother’s moulds, I feel the importance of these legacies, and awed by how a simple pastry can carry history in its geometry.

In Lebanon, maamoul-making is rarely a solitary act. Women gather in groups — sisters, cousins and neighbours — to make hundreds at a time. The work is divided: one person kneads the dough; another prepares the fillings; another shapes the pastries, another bakes. Conversations flow as easily as the rose water. Stories are exchanged, advice is given, grief is shared, laughter fills the room. The labour is heavy, but it is held collectively.

This communal spirit is not incidental. In a region marked by political instability, economic hardship, and repeated cycles of displacement, communal food labour becomes a form of resilience. It is a way of reinforcing social bonds, preserving cultural knowledge, and asserting continuity in the face of rupture.

In the diaspora, this labour often shrinks to the scale of a single household. But when my mother and I make maamoul together in London, we try to ensure that the collective and communicative spirit remains. We recognize that we are supporting a structure that has held our family for decades.

Watching my mother work the dough, I see that diaspora is not just about loss, but also about construction. From fragments — a mould, a scent, a recipe, a memory — we are building new worlds, tethered to those of old. Maamoul is our way of saying: we are still here, and so are the women who shaped us.

These days, at Eid, when I take my first bite, I taste not just pistachios or dates or walnuts, but the entire world that made me.

Lina Saad is a London-based Lebanese food writer and award-winning author of three cookbooks whose work explores heritage, migration, and the cultural memory of food. Through recipes and storytelling, she preserves and celebrates Levantine culinary traditions, with a particular focus on women’s roles in sustaining family, identity, and community across generations. You can find her on Instagram as @alebanesechef.

This week, for our collaborative ‘architecture of food’ issue with chlorophyll magazine, we have a work of magical realism on inconvenient truths by , as well as a poem by on the meaning and making of yogurt. Both pieces were published by chlorophyll and can be read in full on their site. Next week’s essay will be published by FFJ.

The Whistleblower

By Margaux Vialleron

On a western island lived a woman who was said to be older than anyone else. She walked on the balls of her feet, and her hair was as long as she was tall, dyed in green. She spoke in lullabies. She was a healer and a sea forager, grilling clams and oysters for her supper, painting their shells, which she crafted into jewellery before selling the wearables at the weekly market. She was a cold fire whom the islanders had nicknamed Mum. She bothered folks with her unkempt appearance and her memory that never forgot; she was notoriously unforgiving, but she was loved. Mum was good fortune.

Until the morning when a strange man landed on the most western shore of the island. His body was lengthy and bony like a broom, and his hair was straight, thick, and rough, the colour of wheatfields in autumn. Locals nicknamed the solitary lad the Feather Man. He was spotted hovering on the edge of the cliffs often, his gait awkward and near gale speed; birds quarrelled above his head. Everyone in town talked about the Feather Man, but few folks had met him in the flesh…

READ THE REST OF THE STORY ON CHLOROPHYLL.

Margaux Vialleron is a French-born, Glasgow-based interdisciplinary writer. They’re the author of the novels Breaststrokes and The Yellow Kitchen, short stories, and the newsletter The Onion Papers, which explores the various aspects of life, from literature to cooking, language, philosophy and seasonal patterns. Find her at @margauxvlln or margauxvialleron.com.

Culture Club

By Apoorva Sripathi

READ THE REST OF THE POEM ON CHLOROPHYLL.

Apoorva Sripathi is a writer, editor, poet, and artist from Chennai, now based in London. Her projects include shelf offering, an archive of food, art, memory, history, and politics and the grounded report, a repository of her writing, art, and everything else. She is the co-founder and editor of CHEESE, the magazine of culture, and her writing has been published in Kinfolk, Vittles, Wellcome Collection, and Feminist Food Journal. She is also the co-founder and co-editor of chlorophyll.

This week, for our ‘architecture of food’ issue, published in collaboration with chlorophyll magazine, we have an evocative and visceral poem on the ritual, sacrifice, and performance of domestic labour.

ON YOUR HEART / على قلبك

by Hena Mustafa and Nasma Kublawi

like sandpaper on my palm, she slurps water out of cupped hands–
my offering to her before she’s offered to mine.

for mercy, for dignity, and for sanctuary, my back turns to her.
i tease the edge of the blade with my finger,

testing its sharpness, testing your will.
it’s your turn now. hesitation has no place in this process.

did your mother ever teach you how to forage a lamb? did she ever preach
that if you’re okay to chew on her belly, you must be prepared to sever her vein?

now, give her a kiss and repeat after me:
in the name of God, God is greatest,

in the name of all that is delicate, of a blushing bride, and of your clutched pearls,
one swift stroke and a steady arm swords through.

her jugular splits like a pea, her carotid arteries
hemorrhage, and her trachea takes its last heavy breath.

seven seconds only, and her consciousness melts.
three more minutes, and her body is barren.

the hunt and the gather both fall on our plate:
i tie apron strings around your waist, you roll up my sleeves, and

together we smirk at the winnings sprawled on our kitchen marble,
tenderise her flesh in laban and vinegar, let them shelter together in a ziplock bag.

carcass naps in a cool box to be fired only moments before the guests take seats.
we move on to the remainder: herbs to pluck, wicks to trim, aromatics to bloom–

a clean knife dismantles an onion and your tears spill: a moment to grieve,
a scant pause to honor, and we shift our mourning to motion and to bounty.

i finger out the zucchini’s insides, replace them with flesh and root,
submerge them in a broth of bone and bathwater,

stain my wood with sumac and blistered berry,
knuckle the yeast until it springs to genesis,

let pomegranate molasses trickle down the neck of its own bottle,
stick my finger in your pursed lip and ask if it needs more acid,

sing my feminine’s lessons in your ear,
measured only by zeal and gut.

we compose the table, and a pang reminds me of my mama’s warns:
we must architect for abundance, overflow for ease, and let our sacrifice remain unseen.

so i portion out pulverized walnut and pasted red pepper,
another bowl of pulsed lentils, another heaping of crimson,

then i catch a crust of red jabbed beneath my fingernail.
i pick at it, methodical, like a slinging prayer bead, and i let soap censor the kill.

i coat my lashes with ink of peppercorn,
adorn my body with petaled linen, fresh and unsullied,

ready to feast with friends, foes, and foreigns,
welcome the applause, light the match, ladle the celebration,

let their jolly fill our lungs, feel breaths of garlic,
breaths of praise, breaths of one thousand vitalities,

let them suck on the fruit of our invisible labor,
nourish from its sticky, spit the pit into a silver dish.

let the laughs of cigarette smoke ripple the room, let our people gnaw
at the marrow of our efforts, let them tongue its flavor from the ash.

i dip a piece of bread in honeyed blood and earthed oil,
we let the ram, the cheer, and the flattery heal our mortality.

savory swaps for sweet, crumbs brush off laps,
mistica chills the throat, and qahwa seals the eve in warmth.

صحتين. to your health. to your humble, to your refuge.
to her glory, to her return, to our seas.

HENA MUSTAFA (she/her) is a first-generation Palestinian-American lesbian poet and filmmaker. She uses words to create the homeland she craves. Her artistic medium is an attempt to visualize revolution. As the co-founder and brand director of BOYFRIEND co-op, a queer cafe/bar in Brooklyn, Hena fosters a hub for artistic connections and radical organizing within the SWANA community. She has published work in the House Anthology of Queer Poets of Color, and she has headlined performances at Banat El Hara and Kan Yama Kan. Hena’s writing is sensual, textured, and raw.

NASMA KUBLAWI (she/her) is a Palestinian writer and producer. Her poetry has been published in Chicago Quarterly Review, Calliope Art & Literary Magazine, among other platforms, and her short films, MAMA’S FATTEH and ORANGE BLOSSOM, have screened in festivals internationally. She also holds a Master of Social Work from the University of Southern California and practices psychotherapy full-time in New York. Nasma hopes to elevate & illuminate the Arab diaspora through advocacy, the written word, and the moving image. Nasma’s writing is intuitive, rhythmic, and sensory.

Hena and Nasma have been creative collaborators since 2024. Together, their craft and voice explore the ancestral femininity that binds them to their shared homeland. They have performed their works across leftist and Arab spaces in Brooklyn, NY, and are currently developing their chapbook, set for publication in 2027.

This week, for our ‘architecture of food’ issue, we’re sharing both an essay and a poem, which were published by our partner publication chlorophyll. Priceless explores the fascinating history of ladies’ menus, which omitted prices for women diners, while No Catch by Aileen McKay considers changing food practices in the age of technology and urbanization.

You can find short teasers below, and read them in full on chlorophyll’s site.

Priceless by Tien Nguyen

Tien Nguyen is a food and culture writer, an editor at Synonym Magazine, and the co-author of several cookbooks. She lives in Los Angeles.

On a Thursday evening in July 1980, Kathleen Bick and Larry Becker walked into L’Orangerie, an upscale French restaurant in Los Angeles. The two were business partners who’d had some success, so the dinner was to be a celebratory one, her treat. They were handed menus.

The restaurant was expensive, but how expensive, Bick didn’t know, because her menu did not include any prices. Becker’s menu, on the other hand, did. They learned that when men and women dined together, the restaurant gave men menus with prices; women, menus without. According to a discrimination lawsuit Gloria Allred later filed on Bick and Becker’s behalf, this policy ‘caused each of them severe humiliation’, so much so that they left.

When Allred asked L’Orangerie why it had separate menus, Virginie Ferry, who owned the restaurant with her husband Gerard, ironically invoked Gertrude Stein: ‘Because a woman is a woman is a woman.’

Allred’s response: ‘What does that mean, what does that mean, what does that mean?’…

READ THE REST OF THE ESSAY ON CHLOROPHYLL HERE.

No Catch by Aileen McKay

Aileen is a freelance editor and mentor. Her writing has found homes with little living room, From Glasgow To Saturn, Die Zeit, Common Weal, SNACK, Vegan Connections, Cosmofeminism, and Kendal Mountain Festival.

Previous inhabitants of this North Sea
neuk — Highlanders before me —
took quotidian care to use up every part
of their animals: unmeaty bits, too,
all grizzle and ruffage and gleam

swirled with meal and blood, then
sack-stuffed for boiling and boiling…

READ THE REST OF THE POEM ON CHLOROPHYLL HERE.

A classic symbol of sexuality, oysters are even more slippery than they look. Appreciated for tenderness but overlooked in strength, an ecological linchpin yet desired to the point of destruction, they embody the inherent contradictions required for any of us to survive in this changing world.

By Genevieve Bentz

I grew up shucking fresh oysters, only minutes out of the water. When shucking an oyster — leaning your body weight into the blade until it slides deep and far enough for its shell to finally, reluctantly part — it is hard to absorb how delicate they can be, the salty-sweet flesh splayed open, glisteningly alive. But to write them off as vulnerable is folly. These are creatures whose softness makes them tougher than one can imagine.

Our perception of oysters as defenceless perhaps comes from their reputation as the most “feminine” food that we eat, even more so than milk and eggs and chicken breasts. Their undeniable resemblance to the form of female genitalia peppers art from the Earl of Rochester’s “arch’d on both Sides, lay gaping like an Oyster. I had a Tool before me, which I put in / Up to the Quick, and strait the Oyster shut; / It shut and clung to so fast at ev’ry Stroke” to Jan Steen’s “Girl Eating Oysters,” where a young girl blushes at the viewer as she sprinkles a tray of soft wet folds with salt. Come, the painting seems to beckon. Taste this.

Yet beyond this sexualization, oysters are deeply tied to mythical figures and cultural traditions of womanhood, many of them strong and vital. In ancient Greek mythology, Aphrodite emerges, full-figured, from the sea on an oyster shell. Legends tell of mermaids bedecked with glistening pearls. In coastal Japan, Ama still dive in an over 2,000 year-old tradition. And in coastal New England, where I was raised, Native American women have gathered oysters since prehistoric times.

Female elders in tribes like the Mohegan, Wampanoag, and Pequot taught eighteenth-century European settlers to nurture the oyster reefs buttressing the shore from nor-easter tides and hurricane rip-currents. They bent green twigs into hoops, catching oyster larvae that latched and grew from these branches like leaves. Byssal threads and harvest nets stitched together in long, softly swaying lines which wove through the water. The larvae burrowed into the outside of both living and dead shells, anchoring there for the rest of their lives. Their crystals formed mounds of interwoven shells that spiral in three dimensions like tree rings — which, unlike clams or mussels or other deep-cupped mollusks, were edged by a jagged lip.

With the right conditions, a colony could quickly become a living breakwater, shells fusing into an almost impenetrably solid mass. These ragged, mottled, rock-like reefs created storm-stopping friction between angry waves and the smooth sea floor, and could repair themselves after a lashing.

Early colonists got the hang of the practice. Time passed. Bonds hardened. The cycle began again.

Like many precious things, oysters soon fell victim to their very appeal. As with wine or milk or honey, the flavour of an oyster comes from time and place. New England oysters are soft and sweet because beyond Long Island, there is only the empty Atlantic. The unhindered current brings a bright minerality and just enough turbulence from deeper waters, preventing them from becoming too large or tough. Abundant and cheap, easy to store in nets and baskets hung off decks and piers to open whenever convenient, and a tender meat substitute in stuffings and pies as well as stand-alone tavern snack — 19th-century cookbooks from the region include countless oyster recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Indigenous communities had farmed oysters on the coasts of the United States for thousands of years without causing a crash in the bivalves’ population. Once refrigeration enabled them to be shipped, voracious harvesting by colonizers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rapidly depleted their stocks. When John Smith explored the Chesapeake Bay in 1706, the oyster reefs were so prominent his ships had to steer around them or risk running aground. Since the early days of oyster harvesting, there have been anxieties over their decline: by the 1760s, laws were in place to attempt to maintain population levels on the east coast. But they failed to stop overfishing, and increases in the coastal human population, industrialization, pollution, and marine traffic have all compounded the death spiral.

Today, local oyster populations are estimated to be at 1-2% of historical levels. This absence has effectively dredged the East Coast and turned once-fortified walls of submerged calcium into soft silt dunes. Reefs are crumbling, and floods are getting worse.

In my hometown of Stonington, Connecticut, my neighbour was the designated town shellfish warden. From the shore, you could see him puttering along foggy coves in a small outboard motorboat, hunched in a bright yellow raincoat, and armed with a flashlight, like an aquatic firefly searching for poachers. Ripples from the blades of his motor would fanned out on the water’s surface in an unmistakable shape — that of a silent, softly growing shell.

When found and wrenched from their colonies, oysters may refuse to go gently down our throats. Growing up in coastal New England, it was hard for me to miss signs dotting the beach after hard rains: “Beds: CLOSED. “Toxic: do not eat.” A salmonella outbreak linked to oysters sickened scores of people across dozens of U.S. states, causing twenty hospitalizations, in 2025. That same year six people died from a “flesh-eating” bacteria after consuming raw Gulf Coast oysters. A woman asks my suburban listserv for help installing a ramp for her now quadriplegic husband. Sepsis. A “lucky oyster.”

In small numbers, oysters are vulnerable to pollution rinsing off the land into the sea. One can filter gallons of water an hour, dutifully processing algae and bacteria that then accumulate on their outer shells or are digested into harmless sediment left behind in the current. But in high enough concentrations, a week, sometimes two, is needed for them to purge the pathogens like e. Coli, vibrio vulnificus, and hepatitis A. When they are overwhelmed, poisoned water pools in their flesh and unmoors the bonds inside of their shells. We contaminate them, and they, in turn, contaminate us.

With oyster populations over-harvested and sickened, surviving colonies are vulnerable to the very floods they are no longer able to help prevent. This cycle is quintessentially American: knowledge stolen from Indigenous communities, then forgotten, now begging to be remembered.

As hurricanes continue to rapidly intensify and travel further north into the United States, paying attention to the plight of oysters offers us a way forward.

The US Navy is tuning in, having created artificial beds to help protect its bases. Meanwhile, the Billion Oyster Project in New York City has restored over 150 million oysters to date, protecting the city from storm damage and providing a safe habitat for hundreds of species. The Oyster Institute is developing new oyster substrates out of vinyl, rip-rap, and 3-D printed concrete to foster new reefs, making sea-hives from hexagonal tubes stacked one on top of another and undulating tile forms. Some feature spheres with holes punched out as if wiffle balls for a giant squid; others are prisms with porous sides that look like the first layer of a plaster cast, webbed threads whispering of future support.

The many Indigenous communities known for careful oystering practices have remained key players in restoration initiatives. The Rappahannock Tribe has developed a mobile aquaculture unit to restore oysters in the Rappahannock watershed, while the Nansemond Indian Nation raises and seeds thousands of oysters in the Chesapeake Bay as part of their tribal commitment to river and waterway stewardship. Andfor individuals who want to get involved in oyster preservation, collecting oyster shells helps new reef construction; states like Maryland will provide equipment, support, and baby oysters for volunteers to grow in cages off docks and piers.

Above all, it would serve us to think harder about the oyster. Its story is one of subversion: while popular culture has immortalized their vulvic form, oysters are actually born male, and can change sex in response to environmental conditions, physiological stressors, or even the reproductive makeup of oysters around them. Some oyster populations have been shown to be able to do this even more than once, proving themselves endlessly adaptable and stubbornly resistant to definition.

The contradictions of oysters remind us how to handle incongruity, to move forward in a warming and storming world. While it was lust that doomed New England’s native reefs — our insatiable appetite for delicate flesh bringing us close to swallowing the species whole — the aphrodisiac oyster reminds us that things can be at once soft and hard, fragile and resilient, independent and communal, an emblem of both grit and beauty.

From the oyster we can learn how to also grow quietly, deliberately, and bravely in the face of potential annihilation. Herein lies their slick truth: while alone we may be fragile, together we might be able to absorb and divert some of the power in the floods to come.

Genevieve Bentz is a lawyer living in Washington, D.C. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Citron Review, the Nassau Literary Review and on Substack. She has previously worked as a staff writer for the Brooklyn Quarterly and a ghostwriter.

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.