The best American food and travel writing

Sacred places and cuisines both exotic and familiar are explored in this sumptuous anthology of the year's best essays on food and travel. Among the 22 entries selected by television host Lakshmi (Love, Loss, and What We Ate) and journalist Saxena (coauthor of Basic Witches) are food-focused explorations of political and social conflicts, including Sharanya Deepak's "India's Beef with Beef," which investigates how a right-wing Hindu nationalist movement to ban beef consumption in India has sparked violence against Muslims and other "beef-eaters." Elsewhere, Marian Bull's "Orange Is the New Yolk" examines how chicken-feed additives became necessary to produce today's now-ubiquitous bright orange yolks, while C. Pam Zhang's "Eating Badly," offers an affectionate ode to the "brown, salty," food of her grandmother's kitchen ("What I was fed matters less than that I was, by people who loved me"). Travelogues, of which there are fewer, range from Melissa Johnson's "The Hungry Jungle," an exuberant narrative of a lesbian wedding party held at a Mayan pyramid in Guatemala, to Ben Taub's "The Titan Submersible Was 'An Accident Waiting to Happen,' " a dark retrospective of the vessel's doomed voyage to the wreck of the Titanic. The sharp, vivid prose shines brightest when capturing food in all its materiality, bizarreness (see Karen Resta's visceral tribute to Kraft's Catalina salad dressing), and poetry ("Each grilled cheese sandwich is entirely itself, like the moon is its whole self in a barrel of water," Talia Lavin writes). Readers will devour this. (Oct.)