The best American food and travel writing

Identity politics and social justice are on the menu in this hit-or-miss installment of Mariner's annual anthology of the year's best culinary and travel writing. Noting that "any discussion of food (or travel) that ignores power is incomplete," editor Terry (Black Food) highlights themes of resistance, survival, queerness, and "the politics of pleasure." Some of the essays explore sociocultural material with aplomb, including John Paul Brammer's memoir of eating rattlesnake as part of his raucous coming of age as a gay boy in Oklahoma, and Henry Wismayer's withering, incisive critique of the banality of modern tourism. Others amount to stolid soapboxing; Ayurella Horn-Muller, for example, hammers home the irony that some American farmworkers are food insecure, proving mostly that poorly paid people are poor without revealing much more. Some of the best essays focus raptly on the food, among them Giri Nathan's shell-shocked homage to Ugly Baby, a Thai restaurant in Brooklyn known for its bizarre, searingly hot dishes. ("In Ugly Baby's strange crucible, all my rules are suspended: I ate brain, and would probably eat human if it were wrapped in a banana leaf and sold to me with deceitful slivers of lemongrass, kra pow, and kaffir lime leaves.") The result is a hodgepodge of the delectable and the dreary. (Oct.)