In the past month on Substack, several articles have been making the rounds that make sweeping generalizations about entire continents. One was about body image and European women not hating their bodies, which ended up going viral because of the many European women who wanted to point out that women in their respective countries do in fact hate their bodies. was pointing out her own observation about her experience in the United States vs her new life in Italy and how it feels liberating to see women of all body types in bikinis or topless. It was far from superficial or a sweeping generalization, actually. helped me see this through that lens, and it made me understand that the entire article was extremely valid, and it was just the title that got people into an uproar. I think this was missed by most readers, including myself, cause I was like, hey, wait a minute, I got here during the Berlusconi years, and they were detrimental to Italian women. wrote a beautiful article about this called Italians have a problem with women’s bodies a few months prior that talks about that. There was a lot of uproar about the whole thing and hot takes against generalizations or making Europeans a monolith, and yet, almost every single hot take made sweeping generalizations about Americans. Like all Americans behave in a certain way that Europeans deem wrong, or Americans making observations about their life in Italy is unacceptable. In this case, Rachel wasn’t Amerisplaining Italy to her readers; she was letting the reader know how liberating it was to see women who didn’t seem bothered and how she planned to convey this to her daughter. I wish more mothers would do this, and not just with their daughters, but with their sons, because I listen to teenage boys talk about girls in piazza when we go out for a gelato, and it is mostly disgusting. This isn’t an Italian thing; it is universal Patriarchy. The most disgusting comments were from European people who thought they were clever making comments about the obesity epidemic in North America. Like, oh my gawd, Americans wear full-piece bathing suits because we are all obese. The United States doesn’t rank in the top 15 most obese countries in the world.

I am sick of the hot takes, and I am embarrassed to have participated. I think Rachel makes astute observations about life and she is willing to write them down and share on an account that is not her wine account. When I spent my first summer in Italy in 2003, one of the hottest on record (fresh by today’s standards), I also made these observations, but I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. My Italian was not good, so I couldn’t have these discussions with Ettore’s family or female friends without him translating, and having a man there talking about such things didn’t really work. By the time I was more integrated and had my own friends or was fluent enough to eavesdrop on public transport, I realized that actually Italy does have a problem with women’s bodies and that made me depressed. But that didn’t invalidate my previous feeling. It simply made me more aware of the complexities regarding body image.

By the time I moved here in 2005, my main hot take on the beach or at the pool was, Jesus, Italians don’t care about skin cancer or sun damage. We spent two weeks in Puglia in 2006 on the beach, and I came back with sun damage on my face despite using creams. I don’t know what came over me. I had always worn rash guards, UV clothes, huge UV hats, and gloves when I garden, but that summer I decided to trust in the cream. Now I trust in Retin-A. Yes, I looked gorgeous, all sun-kissed like that with highlighter on my cheekbones. The spitting image of health. 20 years later, I am still getting laser treatments. Now I am back to my Burkini ways, and it’s not because of body image. I wear a bikini with my Ostomy bag when I am in the shade, no shits given. I don’t want melanoma, one of the deadliest cancers, because it is usually found too late. I also don’t want to look like a worn leather bag. I am sorry if that comes across as vain. I don’t. I don’t want to remind people of a saddle.

Dr Michele Fresiello

Il paese del sole con il 50% della popolazione carente di vitamina D e con circa 13.000 nuovi casi di melanoma ogni anno.

La disinformazione esisterà sempre, ma va combattuta…

Read more

20 days ago · 80 likes · 16 comments · Dr Michele Fresiello

All these generalizations about millions of people culminated in honestly one of the worst hot takes about North America I have ever read, called North Americans have depressing relationships. If you didn’t spit your coffee out while reading that title, I assure you it gets worse. And because of how algorithms work on Substack, I kept getting notes or articles in the same spirit. As summed it up:

North Americans have no soul.

North Americans can’t behave in public

North Americans don’t exist

why do you hate yourselves so much? So much (not in your case) self flagellation for engagement bait :(

Gaaaaawwwwddddd.

At first I thought to myself maybe it is true, maybe our relationships are depressing. I probably even agreed at first, because I have even thought that about the British at times, which was wrong of me. Lots of Americans abroad with superiority complexes did. And then I thought long and hard about my friendships of twenty to forty years and though, fuck. that. shit.

I have written about how my Italian friends will send me screenshots of sweeping generalizations about Italians, or this weird fetishization of nonnas making pasta, the constant le dolce vita content ad nauseum, and how it makes them feel like objects. Nobody we know is living this lifestyle unless they are wealthy, and I don’t know any wealthy people here, or at least not wealthy enough for that lifestyle.

Imagine reading multiple times in different ways that your relationships are depressing, or fake, or superficial. Americans don’t know how to have deep and meaningful relationships; Americans don’t understand community; they don’t go into relationships with the entire community in mind.

What the hell are these people talking about?

Most of these pieces are written by European immigrants to anglophone countries. It isn’t limited to Canada and the United States. And yes, Angelica is correct: these are engagement rage-bait pieces, which is not what Rachel’s piece was by any stretch. To compare them is intellectually deceptive.

I always fall for rage bait of this kind because I am neurodiverse. And by neurodiverse I mean I was diagnosed in fifth grade by a team, not self-diagnosed on TikTok. People with ADHD and Autism have a heightened sense of justice and fairness. That’s why when you look into liberation activists, many leaders of movements are neurodiverse, or we end up in animal rescue. When someone says such sweeping generalizations, it feels personal.

This also includes the articles that rage-bait about tourists from an entire country that fail to make a few observations. One, does alcohol make people obnoxious? Yes. Do people on holiday often drink more than they would at home? Also yes. I hate to break it to you, but tourists from everywhere are annoying. And drunk tourists are the worst. I worked as a barista when I was in college in one of the most touristy areas of San Diego. I had customers from all walks of life. In the morning, they were fine; they were sightseeing and getting some caffeine before going off to Seaport Village or Pacific Beach, but at night? That was an entirely different beast. It became party central and, in my observation, 90% of the people going to the clubs and restaurants were not from San Diego. We don’t hang out there, and the majority of the non-San Diegans were foreign tourists from everywhere, and I can say with full conviction; whatever country you are from, one of your fellow country folk was an obnoxious piece of shit to me, especially if they were male.

But this is beyond tourists and the rage many people feel about Amerisplaining of a culture. If you are an adult immigrant somewhere and find it hard to find community, it is not because people in your new country are incapable of depth and intimacy; it is because you are an adult.

I wrote this as a note, but above all, if you don’t have close friendships, that is probably a you problem. Expecting intimacy and the village in a short amount of time isn’t reality. Someone who is from California (like me) is not like someone from Iowa or New York. French Canadians are not like people from Vancouver. Have you heard of Appalachia? Its own culture. Creoles? Who are you talking about? Someone from Boston is just as foreign to me culturally as someone from Saudi Arabia.

It’s not that people don’t know how to have the close bonds people claim to have in their home country. Making friends as an adult is hard everywhere; it’s universal. It’s hard to break into a friend group of people who have known each other since they were five.

Once you are out of school and university and starting your working life, it is really hard to establish intimate relationships as an adult. We are all busy, and we all have family or more established friendships that take priority over new ones. When I first moved to Italy, I felt lonely and isolated, and it was hard to connect, and I made these same generalizations about Italians. They don’t have real friendships, women don’t know how to be friends with each other, etc. I was on the outside and made a lot of assumptions because of it. To this day, most international people I know here say it is really difficult to make friends with locals. Well, of course it is! We are all over 30, have careers, kids in some cases, and our own friend groups that we don’t necessarily want to add new people to or have the free time it takes to establish intimacy.

I would die for my best friends. They can have my organs. I will also run errands with them and decorate their Xmas tree, dog-sit when they have to work, sit with them in grief, respect them if they don’t have time for me, go to their kids’ sports matches, and FaceTime the births of their children. If three of them die, I get their kids. If one of them dies, I get his dog. My best friend regularly goes and takes baked goods to my mother with dementia. It’s for me, since I can’t be there. When I was in the hospital for 6 weeks this past winter, a few were willing to drop everything to sit with me, and I discouraged it because I don’t want to disrupt their lives first, and the logistics would have sucked for Ettore. My friends here are amazing people who show up, but it wasn’t automatic. It took years of cultivating the friendships, and no, just because I am American, it doesn’t mean they are transactional for me.

I didn’t have close friends in Italy for the first ten years of my life here, and so yes, at first I thought it was Italy, but now I know better.

In his article Making Friends as an Adult is Hard, cites a study by renowned psychologist Jeffrey Hall, pointing out that,

The picture his research gives is a little sobering if you’re an adult trying to make new friends. In a 2018 study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Hall tracked how much time people needed to spend together before an acquaintance became a casual friend, and a casual friend became something closer. The rough thresholds he identified: around 40 to 60 hours to move from acquaintance to casual friend; 80 to 100 hours to reach genuine friendship; more than 200 hours before someone became a close or best friend.

When I was 10 and met my best friend Lorelei, we probably reached that 200 hours of time together within the first year. It is easy to do when you are ten years old. That is much harder to do as an adult. My other best friend, Rhiannon, moved from San Diego to another city and, in a few years, had established these friendships because she was heavily involved with her kids’ school and the PTA. My own immigrant mother always had a tight group of friends in the United States, although she has told me that the first ten years of her life in Canada and the United States were the most difficult because she was extremely lonely and back then, there wasn’t all the texting and free calling services we have today.

My mother is now 86 years old and has dementia. If I call her, she won’t remember. And when I do call, I ask if she has seen her friends lately, and she always says no. But I know that is not true because I also talk to her caregivers. They pick her up for dinners. They stop by, they call. They know that she can’t have the kinds of conversations she used to, but they show up, and guess what? They are American. I remember when I was about eight years old, and all of a sudden my mum’s best friend’s kids were living in our house. They were the same age as my sister and me, and the daughter was my sister’s best friend at the time. I came to learn that they stayed with us because my mum’s friend went to rehab for her severe alcohol problem.

I grew up with a community like that, and my mother valued her community of friends because she didn’t have family around to be her village. I didn’t grow up with cousins and aunties and uncles and my grandparents. We’d be lucky if we visited them for an extended amount of time once every five to six years. And when we were there, it was awkward. My sister and I were different, had weird accents, our parents were divorced, and that just wasn’t a thing in their small farming community.

Also, since when are acquaintances bad? I like having lighthearted friends in a book club; I like to have wine nerd friends. Wine is boring to most people. I like going to the dog park, seeing the same people, and having mundane conversations about our dogs. Those aren’t ride-or-die people; they are people with common interests, and they are important. One of the reasons I started Women Who Wine Rome was so women who were having a hard time meeting women could meet each other casually and enjoy conversations. From that group, I have made several good friends. Friendship and community require time, and time is a precious resource for most people these days.

Nobody owes anyone closeness or friendship. And just because a person doesn’t have close bonds with people where they live, that doesn’t mean those people don’t have close friendships. We just aren’t privy to them. While I don’t think there is anything wrong with criticizing culture, I think we all need to take a step back and realize we only live in our own reality and we make this reality up as we go; that doesn’t mean that is absolute truth. Most of us do not have the skills to observe without judgment, and to observe our own thoughts and experiences from the outside. Feel free to criticize American gun violence, Italian rates of femicide, food apartheid, global obesity rates, the American healthcare system, American and NATO partner countries and their undying support of Israel with our taxes, how propagandized people are, but, please stop telling me all I eat is McDonald’s, I don’t know how to have meaningful relationships, or that having boundaries means I have no culture, or close ties to my family. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

Subscribe now

When I planned my July Digest in my head, I wanted to write about what I am reading, eating, and drinking, but I just don’t have the stomach for it today. Nobody is going to give a shit what I read in July 2026 anyway. I spent three days in the hospital for a procedure, and these heat waves are hell for autoimmune diseases. Hell.

People argue endlessly online about the need for air conditioning in Europe, and yes, that is true, but the AC argument fails to evaluate the root of the problem. It’s not just that houses in some parts of Europe aren’t built for heat. It is that politicians across the globe have done nothing infrastructurally to give human beings relief in the form of cooling centers or AC, but they have also done nothing in the seven decades climate scientists have been giving them the data that always had the same conclusion: extreme weather events like we are seeing now. And have been seeing for at least the last two decades. Does nobody remember the fires in Australia in 2020? What about the flooding in Pakistan that flooded one third of the country? They haven’t done anything to prepare us, and we still think we live in a democracy.

Subscribe now

I went to my first Earth Day event in 1990 with my best friend Autumn and listened and read every pamphlet I got my hands on, and even then, I knew and believed the science. Human activity- particularly the use of fossil fuels -is what brought us here. It’s the food chain, it’s the transportation chain, and above all, it is the military-industrial complex. Governments in the West serve oligarchs, corporations, and the military-industrial complex, which for us means the United States military and NATO, and of course making sure Israel can commit genocide and ecocide with our tax dollars and euros.

At the beginning of the month, Ettore and I went to Trentino for a week-long holiday. We went to hike and eat. It was important for me after such a long convalescence to be able to prove to myself that I still can do long-distance walks. I can accomplish a 1200 ascent and not be hospitalized. And I did. We went on some beautiful hikes that took us to beautiful valleys and lakes, away from crowds. In some parts though, it felt like a disaster zone. The quick retreat of Alpine glaciers should be of the utmost importance for Europeans, and it isn’t just the AC argument. Once the glaciers are gone, the rivers that supply water to the most important farmland will be dry. And that is the same for the Alps, the Apennines, the Himalayas, etc. We focus, rightfully, on polar ice melt because when the ice caps melt, it disrupts the jet stream and creates extreme weather. The glacier melt is an immediate threat to life around many parts of the world.

You can look on the NASA fire map and see where there are fires in real time. Have a look at sub-Saharan Africa. I beg you. This is the direct result of Western hegemony and capitalism, and none of us is willing to take even simple steps to mitigate this even a little bit. There isn’t enough pasture in the world for all the animals we eat. Everyone wants to chomp on meat, and even if they believe it is from a sustainable source, it simply cannot be. 40% of deforestation on planet earth is caused by clearing land for grazing animals. There is not enough room on Earth to produce the volume of meat we eat in a sustainable way. Just stop. If you eat meat, don’t dare talk about AI water use. AI data centers are a drop in the bucket compared to livestock. And most of that water is used to water crops for their feed, not for the animals themselves.

I will die on this hill. If you are still consuming more than 10% of your calories from animal sources, you are a big part of the problem. I personally can’t stop the military-industrial complex, but I can control what I eat.

The one thing we do actually have control over still is what we consume, and honestly, wine people? You suck the worst. You work in an industry that is at risk of extinction due to climate collapse, and you keep ordering your charcuteries and steaks because that’s what some shitty bold wine needs. The forecast isn’t great for our future, and the vanity it takes to convince oneself that this is ok is just pure narcissism at this point. Why do your taste buds matter more than a kid in a tent in Gaza with heat stroke? I am not even saying stop eating meat. If you limited your diet to 10% or less of your caloric intake, you’d be able to support sustainable regenerative farming in a real way.

I have been vegetarian since 1990, with occasional fish eating, I was 14, despite having silent generation Aussie parents, despite going to Catholic school, despite living in America where it is seen almost as a national duty to eat beef. It isn’t that hard. And it is better for your health by all measures.

Maybe I am the delusional one? I think about all those pigs, chickens, and cows on farms around the world, standing in their own shit, with no real freedom of movement. Or the ones coming from better pastures still being loaded into trucks in this heat for transport in deathly heat. I think about the dogs in canile with no relief; I think about the fish in lakes that are too warm or without oxygen. I think about old trees being slated for lumber and their connection to the forest and their neighbors and what that means. I will never forget koalas on fire, seeing horses on the loose in Bordeaux as their owner gives that at least a chance to escape. I think about old people who will die alone and rot in their apartments in Europe because of outdated infrastructure. I think about my friends Tareq and Mahmoud in Gaza who are in flimsy tents suffocating in this heat (like omg, the heatwave is not just affecting white folks in Europe), and their children getting heat blisters and the camps being overrun with rats, and how Tareq and I talked about the blessing he had recently when a cat gave birth in their tent and how that could at least mean pest control and he is giving what little water they are rationed to the mamma cat. And for what?

Greed.

Please consider leaving shallow bowls of water around your area for animals (wild and domestic)

I’ll be offline for August.

These are some great articles on here.

Can you PLEASE consider donating to my friends Tareq and Mahmoud in Gaza? Tareq is trying to raise funds for a fan that will cost around $500 thanks to the US Israeli blockade. Mamhoud’s fundraiser is just to get basics. If everyone who reads this donates $5 to each family if would made a huge different in their lives.

Share

Climate Revolution Now

It's Not the Heat - It's the Stupidity

It’s hot in London right now. HOT. This - the 2nd European heatwave of 2026 - might not be front and center in the news in the US, but here in Blighty blast furnace heat is dominating the airwaves and the internet…

Read more

2 months ago · 53 likes · 40 comments · Kira Thomsen-Cheek

Grounded

Heads Above Water: Why It Looks Like Americans Don't Care

The dad works from morning until night. The mom works from night until morning. The mom grabs as much sleep as possible, then she picks her kid up from school. She runs what errands she can with the energy she has. She picks the dad up from work. They share one late dinner, then she goes back to her job…

Read more

2 months ago · 426 likes · 111 comments · Jessica

The Swine Republic

The Real Reason Farmers Aren’t Adapting to Climate Change

Note: If you don’t know her or of her, I’m very happy to introduce Wendy Johnson to my Substack readers. She contributed this heartfelt and informative story you’re about to read. Her bio is at the end…

Read more

2 months ago · 1453 likes · 187 comments · Chris Jones

Bramble & Briar

Gardening while the planet burns

It was the height of the pandemic, 2020, and in the middle of lockdown, there was a lot of interest around gardening creators. I’d been contacted by a literary agent from one of the big London outfits on the back of the podcast – still going, by the way, next ser…

Read more

2 months ago · 46 likes · 28 comments · Andrew Timothy O'Brien

Plant-Based Times

🟡 Plant-Based Protein | A Comprehensive Guide

🟡 Discover Plant-Based Protein…

Read more

2 years ago · 176 likes · 12 comments · Plant-Based Times

The summer period in the garden is when I think about Carla the most. She was well known as the muse, collaborator, and inspiration for many an anglophone food writer, and around Rome, she was known as the Vegetable Whisperer. I met her at the Market to Table at Latteria cooking classes with Rachel Roddy and Alice Adams Carosi. She brought fresh vegetables from her garden that were better than anything from the market, and I think everyone who tasted them became much more curious about gardening themselves. She gave guests a true soil-to-plate experience.

All gardens are different, and all gardeners struggle with one vegetable and fruit or another. Me? I can’t grow root vegetables directly in my soil. I have clay soil (which has its benefits), and even after years of amending it, potatoes are and probably will always be a container vegetable. I have struggled for years with artichokes, and even though I still haven’t had success, I have my voice messages from Carla that I like to listen to, which remind me of how much care she put into hers.

Zucchini grows easily almost everywhere. I have had only one year when the zucchini harvest failed, and after questioning my neighbors and Carla, it seems to have been the case across central Italy that year. Carla did give me a great technique that she learned from an older man in her neighborhood on watering zucchini. Instead of watering them directly at the root, water them in a circle around the root, and they will grow upward rather than sideways as they tend to do. Genius. I have been using this technique for years now, and it never fails.

Eggplants were a mystery for me when I first started gardening. They always ended up having rough skins and got seedy. The eggplants were never enjoyable to eat, and for a few years before I met Carla, I stopped planting them altogether because they felt like a waste of effort.

My relationship with Carla was slightly different from the one she had with the food writers and gourmands of Rome. Most of our conversations were not about cooking; they were about gardening. Well, let me be real. They were based on me having panic attacks and sending her messages and getting voicemail replies almost immediately on solutions. I didn’t always agree with her. For example, I am a no-dig and no-till gardener, which isn’t very common in Italian household gardens. Most gardens are started after a plot has been tilled or hoed until it becomes a blank canvas of dirt and that was hers, a very traditional style. I am a mulcher, and I believe in super dense planting to create a canopy that shades the soil and therefore keeps root systems moist. Carla was also not averse to using organic sprays on ants or other pests like aphids. But she respected my choice, and she would give me advice that was based at least on principles of organic agriculture. I have hours and hours of voice messages from her regarding help with the garden. And I am so happy to say I was able to pay it forward when she got her avocado tree. Avocado trees are not common here, and they don’t do well in our climate and soil, but she was determined. I am no avocado expert, but my father is, so I became the middleman between her and my father on how to get an avocado tree to flourish, and as far as I know, that tree still lives.

Carla enabled me to grow eggplants again. Her advice was so simple. Eggplants love to be fed, so they need a lot of nutritional input, and they love water. So basically, she told me to add chicken shit and to water more, and that was the trick. For the last few years, I have been able to grow eggplants without a hitch. I grow many types because I love to make pasta alla norma, which does best with the thick, round fruit. A summery classic is caponata. Georgian nigvziani badrijani require long eggplants; Japanese eggplants; and the round, light purple ones for some Palestinian dishes. Eggplant is so versatile, and I love that when stewed, it becomes earthy and umami, so it has been an important vegetable for me when I want something heavier or “meatier” with a red wine.

I attended a number of cooking classes with Carla in the years that I knew her, and I became a better cook for it. Not just because of the flavors and ingredients I could add to my repertoire; she really gave me essential skills that make cooking so much easier and more efficient. After all, she worked in professional kitchens for thirty years. It would not be hyperbolic to say that Carla made hundreds, if not thousands, of her students into better cooks. She always sent her recipes to students after the class and often added extra for good measure.

Her friends created an archive of her recipes at Cooking With Carla Project

And with that, in the heart of summer, I give you Carla’s Eggplant with lemon recipe in her own words.

Eggplants with lemon, capers, mint and olives

This is the only recipe that I know, for an eggplant dish with no tomatoes or cheese happens when they are grilled .

This is a very pared-down recipe for eggplants ‘ in bianco ‘ ( no tomatoes ), but very delicious and goes well with either grilled fish or roasted lamb or fried halloumi, marinated feta, a fried egg. As you can see, I love this recipe.

Make more than you might need for your meal because yet again another dish that keeps well in the fridge for lunch on a sunny day (with stuffed pitta)

I would say that for 4 pp as a side dish you will need

3 medium sized eggplants-or whatever you feel is right

EVO oil + sunflower oil

Fine sea salt

Wide strips of zest from 2 lemons, juice from one of them

1 tablespoon of capers

2 tablespoons of green olives

Large pinch of dry oregano

There are two ways this recipe can be made.

The eggplants are cubed and fried until dark in a mix of EVO and sunflower oil. Alternatively, the cubed vegetable is placed in a bowl, coated with oil, and baked (single layer) at a very high heat.

If you decide on frying, after you have cooked it all, just drop the strips of lemon zest in the oil for a few seconds and then fish them out. If you decide to bake, mix the lemon strips with the cubed eggplant before they are placed in the oven.

Salt the eggplants as soon as they are cooked and then mix with all the rest. Tinned or pickled fish also pairs well.

I really loved this tribute by

Notes from Emiko’s Kitchen

Things I learned from the great Roman cook, Carla Tomasi

Carla Tomasi was one of the greatest cooks that I have had the pleasure to know and cook with; she cooked exactly the kind of food I love — unfussy, frugal, but completely moreish and achievable. She lived simply, tending to her beloved, abundant vegetable garden mostly alone (not for nothing is she known as…

Read more

2 years ago · 236 likes · 38 comments · Emiko Davies

And please enjoy these recipes by some of my favorite food writers on Substack. and two from

Simply Divina- My Tiny Tuscan Kitchen

Celebrating the Garden: Eggplant

I am sending out this email on Ferragosto, summer’s biggest holiday. August 15th is the religious holiday of the Assumption of Mary into heaven. Living in a Catholic country, there is a holiday every day for the patron saint as well. Most Italians don’t take the entire month off anymore, but this is like labor day weekend…

Read more

a year ago · 26 likes · 3 comments · judy witts francini

La Tavola Rurale // The Rural Table

Grilled Aubergine and Courgette Parmigiana

It turns out that I remembered it wrong. Somewhere in Instagram squares, I have written about Roberta, my Italian sister friend from Trento who came to our private Catholic school in Springfield, Massachusetts as an exchange student. In history class, she sat two rows down from me on the right, and apart from Mr. O’Shea, and Ukraine as the breadbasket o…

Read more

3 years ago · 1 like · Jessica McCannon Micheli

Tea & Oranges' Substack

Shaanxi Crispy Eggplant in Sugar Glaze

I’ve long been fascinated by the way eggplant is treated in Chinese kitchens. I think it’s because in the UK, without a greenhouse, they’re difficult to grow, and our recipes tend to reflect that: often soggy, bland and underwhelming. But in China, I’m always encountering new methods that transform the eggplant into something extraordinary. On a recent …

Read more

a month ago · 14 likes · 5 comments · Tea & Oranges

Vittles

Archana Pidathala's Vankaya bajji or bashed aubergine chutney

A Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year. If you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running — it will give you access to the whole Vittles back catalogue — including Vittles Restaurants, Vittles Columns, and…

Read more

3 years ago · 51 likes · 3 comments

Vittles

One-Hour Vegan: Toban Djan (Doubanjiang) Aubergine

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today, Samuel Rawat-Fisher shares recipes for an aubergine-centric vegan feast with fragrant coconut rice and a refreshing cucumber salad that only takes an hour to cook from start to finish…

Read more

a year ago · 45 likes · 4 comments · Vittles

Share

When I got up at 8am (I slept in!) it was already 30° inside the house. I quickly shuttered everything. I woke up feeling hung over despite not drinking alcohol. I was sweating profusely all night.

I have seen a few other people on here who live with auto-immune disease write about how this heat is impacting them. Having constant inflammation, a lower than normal body temperature, low blood pressure, and in the case of Crohn's, night sweats, it's is very dangerous for us. I feel like I am about to pass out if I spend more than 10 minutes outside. I cancelled all sorts of plans to go to Rome to listen to classical music in the ruins or see old horror films in an ancient temple because it is truly unbearable for me and people like me.

We go to the lake at around 530 pm because that's when it is hottest in the house. But the lake is quite warm. Thank baby Jesus Ella moved closer to us because otherwise it would be just Ettore and I and he is gone guiding under the heat in Rome all day. I feel bad for even mentioning how awful I feel when I know there are people who have no choice, but I want other people with health issues to feel less alone. We have to right to do zero. Actually don't push through it.

I take the sali minerali, I drink water, I eat watermelon, I eat Vegemite, I take vitamins. I sit in a dark room. The internet connection barely functions because the provider had to lower it's capacity because of the heat. I am writing this from my phone. 25/27 cities had high risk alerts this week. For people like me and your elderly relatives.

Twenty-seven cities are now under daily heat-risk bulletins with color-coded warnings; red alerts signal severe danger for vulnerable populations.

When they predict millions of people are going to die in the next ten years as a result of the climate crisis or when you read reports about thousands of elderly people dying across Europe, I realize I could easily be one of those people. I'm not exactly elderly, but I am fragile at the moment.

And I feel like when I have to cancel with friends on activities they just think it's because I'm uncomfortable in the heat. This is not just being uncomfortable. I feel that for people like me, with invisible disability, there is a total disregard for our health. This expectation to just push through it like a normal person. I have to justify my weakness.

I have started hoarding medicine and ostomy supplies. My last MRI did not give me good news and I feel like I will be an ostomy patient for much longer than I hoped. Maybe forever.

But do I want to actually struggle to survive as a sick person? I'm also hoarding medicine that would help me take myself out if need be. I don't want to be a burden. And no, I'm not depressed, I don't need a hotline number, I am being realistic. I don’t think westerners are prepared at all for the inevitable future that will include water and food scarcity. That doesn't include medical supplies. Should I walk around with feces coming out of the side of my body when supplies run out because of some Judeo-Christian sense of the value of life? What if I value everyone else enough to not be a burden on their basic survival. Don't cry for me, trust me.

In the meantime, within the next year, we plan to install solar panels and rain cachement systems to help us get by as this becomes the new normal. I want to plant more fast growing trees this winter to create more shade because I see that tightly packed polycultures grown in full or partial shade are doing best in these conditions.

The garden is exploding, and we are eating loads and loads of zucchini, eggplant, salads, and the first tomatoes. I write in the garden every morning and use a sprinkler system so I don’t have to hand-water everything and can focus on writing. I’m currently finishing up a natural wine guide to the Castelli Romani for ’s publication, and writing a wine memoir that will be an e-book this fall. So having an irrigation system, both drip and sprinkler, has freed up a lot of my mornings that I would otherwise spend watering.

We need a lot more water than years past. June has been the hottest June I’ve ever experienced. I am sure you’ve all read about the European heat waves either by people living here or snarky asshole from like Florida who don’t understand that, especially in northern Europe, the architecture was designed to retain warmth, rather than stay cool. But as said in a Note here, “A few hours of rainfall this morning barely broke the heatwave we are experiencing. Can you believe 35+ temperatures in Sweden? Compared to more southern countries we have many more hours of daylight which makes the heat build up for a lot longer and feel quite intense. And then very few nightime hours to dissipate that heat.” We don’t have it so bad down here, even if the temps are up in the Castelli. We have shutters and can keep the house cool during the hottest hours. I live 10 minutes from a lake; there are agriturismi with pools, and we can go to Terracina in 45 minutes. I eat loads of fruit and drink Polase daily, and I am keeping my dogs inside as much as possible. They go out for the toilet needs, and that’s it. The cats don’t seem to care.

Climate Revolution Now

It's Not the Heat - It's the Stupidity

It’s hot in London right now. HOT. This - the 2nd European heatwave of 2026 - might not be front and center in the news in the US, but here in Blighty blast furnace heat is dominating the airwaves and the internet…

Read more

2 months ago · 41 likes · 31 comments · Kira Thomsen-Cheek

Next year I want to invest in an underground rainwater catchment system to help mitigate my water use in the garden. I am learning that densely planted polycultures down with companion plants seem to be doing best in this heat, so that will be the way forward in the summer.

The highlight of June has been taking ’s five-week food essay course. It’s not only made me a better reader and more media-literate; the discussions and weekly reading have helped me become a better writer and better know my voice. It’s been a priceless investment in myself, and bought as my birthday gift to me. I’ve also learned the value of a good editor, and I hope that I can work with good editors in the future, even if I am sick to death of pitching in a media landscape that feels like it is in its death throes. I believe in editors!

I celebrated my 50th birthday on June 21st with friends and family at a lovely agriturismo above the magical Lago di Nemi, the home of the Temple of Diana, center of Italian witchery, and the most magical place on earth.

I had an MRI last week, so I am awaiting the results for that, and unfortunately I did not get around to this month’s Grape Love Stories of Lazio for June. I had guests, medical visits, and it is frankly too hot to think some days. I’ll catch up in July.

Inspired by on summer salads.

Simply Divina- My Tiny Tuscan Kitchen

Summer Salads

When I was invited to join Frank Fariello of Memories of Angelina, and Giovanna Solimando of My Half Apulian Table, on a LIVE last Friday, I began to think about some of my favorite summer dishes…

Read more

2 months ago · 19 likes · 10 comments · judy witts francini

Remember, this is the coolest summer we will have for the rest of our lives.

For decades, South African cuisine was globally synonymous with the Braai (outdoorsy American-style barbecue).

Today, a new generation of chefs want to tone down the fire— experimenting with indigenous flavors hidden in the roots, herbs, and drought-resistant grains native to the South African soil.

This is the story of a culinary spirit that is de-colonizing the plate by turning ancient African meats and flora into the future of fine dining in Africa’s wealthiest nation.

Wandile Mabaso, a Black chef in Johannesburg, South Africa’s commercial capital, strolls around his elegant kitchen. He prides himself in “flipping the dishes” as he says: going beyond the typical European, Asian or Latino menus offered in South Africa’s fine dining, and bringing in African ingredients once shunned and demoted as “rural foods” by colonialism.

“I am rooting for the likes of amadumbe (yam), morogo (wild spinach), and water berries. These are healthy, super-tasty indigenous South African foods that must be brough back to Western starters, 5-courses, desserts in the kitchens of South Africa’s hotels like Holiday Inn, Hilton, etc,” he says proudly.

Mabaso, a multi-award winning chef, born in Soweto, the biggest low-income city township created in the 1950s to relocate Black South Africans, is one of South Africa’s most talked about chefs who is revolutionizing the way diners think and savor modern African food. He is the owner of Les Creatifs, a sleek eatery in Sandton, the ‘Manhattan’ of Johannesburg, South Africa’s commercial capital. He is highly regarded too in New York’s food circles where he graduated at Capsicum Restaurant, went on to work in Paris at Le Meurice under renowned mentors like Ducasse and Jocelyn Herland. However, the pull of Africa kept swaying Mabaso and he returned home. On return, he opened up Les Créatifs in a former corporate office where he excels in mixing the finest French techniques with local ingredients and African influence.

“African food has been an equal victim of colonial conquest just like the African person,” he says of his daunting to ask to make African cuisine more visible in South Africa’s top-end culinary scene which is heavily European-influenced.

The colonial marginalization of African food in the last 100 years has unfolded on two fronts – the farm and the plate, says Shamiso Mupara, an award-winning organic food leader in Southern Africa who is out on a mission to regrow climate-resistant organic food forests. First European colonialists embarked on industrial agricultural programs that banned the growing of indigenous African crops like amadhumbe and cleared stolen lands to plant imported commercial crops like Cocoa whose harvest would be shipped back to serve the confectionary food processors of Western Europe. This – highly chemicalized Western cash crops – are at the heart of global C02 emissions rise and the climate crisis, she says.

“They then attacked and demonized the indigenous African food cuisine by using colonial education and religious systems to label African dishes as as “uncivilized” or “unhygienic”, she adds of what she says is the emotional blackmailing of African cuisines.

Mabaso agrees. In his native South Africa, where colonialism only ended in 1994, this led to a “culinary amnesia” where traditional knowledge regarding wild foraging, heirloom seeds, and ancient fermentation processes was not passed down to younger generations, he says.

So – reformist Black chefs like Mabaso – despite running high-end Western restaurants that are mostly patronized by an affluent clientele with a Western education, are getting deliberately experimental with their menus. It’s acts like like teasing his menus with indigenous grains making sure European starches are sometimes replaced with Africa sorghum and millet, using them in risottos or as textured crusts for meats. He goes further and infuses what he calls “heritage proteins”. That means refining “tougher” traditional Africa meats through long-form French cooking methods. Examples are the African Kalahari Goat (often slow-braised for 8 hours), Krugersdorp Beef Tongue, and Hardbody African Chicken, which he serves as a 48-hour clarified broth. On the wild and foraging side – Mabaso deliberately does “impepho” – traditional African ritual incense – deploying it to smoke meats, oils, and sneaking in that distinct, earthy South African aroma to dishes. “My favorite is “Amadumbe” he says of the starchy tuber similar to taro, which he transforms into silky mousses or purées. “I don’t stop there – I scrounge around for okra and morogo (wild spinach) – using them to provide structural contrast and deep vegetal notes in my main courses”, he says.

His peers are noticing. For example, “food scientists-in-training,” such as South Africa MasterChef winner Bridget Mangwandi are who are bridging the gap between ancestral knowledge and molecular gastronomy. It isn’t just about cooking these native ingredients; it’s about chemistry, she says. Her pride, for example, she says, is turning foraged wild fruits like the water berry into high-acid, tannin-rich vinegars that rival European imports, she says. She goes further and dabbles in traditional fermented milk, which is a staple in her desserts, tart indigenous African fruits like Marula, Baobab, and Natal Plum (Amatungulu) to style gels, caviars, and gastriques.

“The Africaness in me comes vivid alive not only skin – but on the plate”, she says. “The more we do this – the more truely “African” food gets the respect it craves for,” she says.

At a time of global water scarcity, this story explores how ancient, drought-resistant grains like sorghum and millet are being repositioned as the climate-smart superstars of the future in South Africa, sums Mupara, the regenerative food leader. Ancient meats, grains, fruits serve as a blueprint for local food security solutions she adds.

“Introducing more native dishes on South Africa’s menus is not only a matter of culinary pride but reducing heavy water use, reducing intense kitchen emissions, and making sure overprocessed Western diets get minimized,” she says.

May began with a lively May Day celebration in true Campagna Romana style: Carciofi alla matticella, a spring tradition from Velletri tied to pre-Roman culinary history. It is my favorite day of the year, which I have hosted or attended since moving here, usually at Barbara and Roberto’s off-grid home. We use the last of the Roman globe artichokes, stuff them with wild mint and garlic, cover with olive oil, and roast them over last year’s vine prunings (matticella). This year, my friend Ella and I were the preppers, so it was wild to me that some city folk who came down for the day were watching us prep the artichokes like tourists do in Rome when they film the pasta nonnas displayed in restaurant windows like zoo animals.

We drank Roberto’s homemade wine, a field blend of Malvasia Puttinata, Trebbiano, and Bellone, which I always help harvest. It’s a simple vino contadino, and a wine I would choose over any wine in the world. It was a good day for me to chat with friends and take my mind off reality. We had to say goodbye to Chardonnay a few weeks earlier, and his birthday was May 1st. He would have been 18. It’s been a hard few months. I lost my cat Giovanni in November, then my soul cat Flora in February, and Chardonnay in April, but nothing as shocking as what happened to me last week.

Then we lost Baby. We adopted her during lockdown, and she was the most angelic and joyous being we have ever met. If love were incarnate, it would be her. She had Leishmania, an endemic disease in the Mediterranean spread by sand flies. Baby was from a poor shelter in southern Lazio, where a lack of protection and bad diets worsen disease. Her kidneys were stable but declined suddenly. We started a 28-day treatment, but she developed an eye tumor. Surgery was declined due to her kidneys’ ¼ capacity. We hoped IV fluids would help, but after a day, Baby stopped eating. She slept with me, went downstairs, and by morning, I found her gone. I didn’t get to say goodbye. Losing her was unbearably cruel.

I’m no stranger to death. I’ve always thought I would have been a great hospice nurse if I didn’t have to go to medical/nurse school. Helping someone you love transition and holding space for them is a beautiful experience. I am not a religious person, but I am transitioning to reality. This life is just transitory and a simulation where we come to learn whatever lessons we have to learn, and the purpose of life is to love and be loved, from entropy to pure love, and to create rather than destroy. Dogs embody this more than any other beings. Baby dying so young was offensive. I can’t think of a better word for it.

In the midst of heartbreak, I still had to care for my other dogs and cats. On one trip to get food, as I was turning from my country road onto Appia Nuova, a Range Rover sped toward me. I had an urge to drive out in front of it. The worst kind of intrusive thought. It was just a thought, and I resisted, knowing it wouldn’t be fair to the other driver. As someone with ADHD, I am prone to intrusive thoughts, but usually not violent or suicidal ones. Many of us mask our lack of impulse control or channel it into creative work. This felt different from teenage suicidal ideation, which was ego-driven; now, it was about wanting erasure. And much different than wanting the right to medical euthanasia should my disease become unbearable. For two hours, the entire drive to and from the store was filled with these thoughts, something drawing me in. I wanted to join Baby.

I’ve lost two good friends to suicide, and known a few others. One was like my sister, and I always wondered what the hell she was thinking. Now I wonder whether it was just these intrusive thoughts after tragedy that got louder and louder like the devil?

Don’t worry, I am no longer in that state of mind, so please do not contact me about seeking mental health help. I’ve been in and out of therapy since I was ten years old. I don’t need therapy, I need community, I need a priest, I need a connection to something bigger than me. I always found that in dogs, who I find are perfectly connected to Christ Consciousness. They are gifts. Baby was the biggest gift of them all.

May has been challenging, so I found comfort in reading and allowing myself a weekly bottle of wine with Ettore or friends. We joined Guides for Gaza at Ostia Antica as a family. I am working to be social despite feeling drained as recovery continues. Writing about Bellone took weeks because everything felt heavy, but I eventually managed.

What I am reading, watching, and drinking

I am currently enjoying ’s memoir On Eating, which intersects food, politics, feminism, grief, and love, and it’s brilliant. I read one chapter at a time and then close it, so it is a slow read for me.

Alexander Hemon’s The Word and All That It Holds was brutal and devastating. Jesus Christ. Love pouring out of the text amidst such violence and crazy circumstances. It hurt me and healed me at the same time.

I read ’s How to Drink Natural Wine. It’s a great companion for anyone learning about wine. I’ll recommend it to my wine club. Those with conventional wine experience will benefit, as natural wine is important for industry professionals.

A few essays on Substack stood out for me this month. wrote a killer piece on how the industry treats Gen Z on ’s Everyday Drinking. It should be required reading for anyone who works in wine. Its a response to how the boomers are still blaming young people for bad sales. They did it to millennials and now they are doing it to Gen Z. Its all very infantilizing and they rarely take into consideration the economic times young people live in, instead they treat them like total idiots.

’s piece on eating in a changing world was thought provoking, and made me think about my own role. I garden, but I still have to go to the market two or three times a week, I use gas, I eat bananas and I drink coffee. I want to do the least harm, but I know unless I grow all the food, store all the food, make all the food, I am still participating in a system that is literally suffocating us. Sometimes I think that my asking for no straw with my drink is a waste of time in the face of so much destruction. The billionaire class seems determined to not only extract every ounce of energy and life from this planet, they want to take us all down when they go down. But they are the ones who profit off the system as it is, and the least I can do is not eat meat. The very least.

I was proud to publish piece on the illusion of choice in the food system. We are all prone to thinking we have free will, but in a global system, who decides what is available and where?

Recently, Ettore had a four-hour break between tours, so we went to see a new Michael movie. It rekindled memories from my past and, though joyful, brought on a sense of grief. Others have experienced this too, and I’m reflecting on it more in my journals. I have noticed a similar tone from millennials with The Devil Wears Prada 2. Gen Xers came of age during the height of Michael Jackson’s rise to fame, he was important to us. He had angelic status for us. I don’t know anyone of my peers who didn’t have Thriller and wasn’t obsessed with him at some point. His Bad era is the height of fashion for me. I loved him and I love his music, and I am starting to appreciate his older music more as well. Stranger in Moscow is on repeat in this house and we are a No MJ slander household. You Are Not Alone has been on repeat since Baby died. Michael, I just can’t stop loving you…

I wrote about the Bellone wine grape this month. I enjoyed lunch with Elizabeth at DLR – dopolavoro ricreativo and drinking Umbrian rosato. I opened an Areni from Armenia, which was impressive and should appeal to fans of robust reds.

I haven’t been out much this month because Ettore and I have been busy planting the summer garden. I am focused on polycultures and companion planting, and my goal is to sow and plant every month this year. I want to have a year-long garden from seed.

If you are in Rome on June 10th, I’m hosting a tasting of some of Lazio’s tastiest pink wines on June 10th at 18:30pm. The cost is €35 per person including four wines and some food, plus guided tasting by yours truly! We will also have a discount offered for bottles if you want to buy some for your holidays this summer. We’ll be tasting Cesanese, Aleatico, Sangiovese, etc. all Natural, of course. At @langolo_divino_roma

Looking forward to seeing you all. Sign up at the link.

Looking forward to June. I’m turning 50 and writing a book and I signed up for one of classes.

Issue 2 of Tomato Tomato is out and I wrote an article about not eating for a month. You can read my article here.

P.S. I received a bit of pushback on here and in private DMs for saying I plan on taking up smoking and tanning when I turn 50 as a reply to ’s piece on smoking. I am still planning on doing those things, but I don’t plan to be a chain smoker. I plan to enjoy a rolled cig when I have a good coffee with a friend, or with a passito after dinner. As for tanning, yes you can tan and use SPF and protect yourself from skin cancer. I didn’t say I plan to burn. Honestly, some people could use a little bit of Vitamin D. I have been wearing UV protective clothing at the beach since I was a kid. My entire family is Australian. I know about the risks of UV exposure and the link between sunburn and skin cancer. My whole point is, I DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT PRESERVING MY YOUTH. THE JIG IS UP. I AM 50 AND I WANT TO LOOK 50. STAI CALMO!

Subscribe now

Bellone

I don’t know how Bellone, an inconspicuous and relatively unknown grape, became one of my grape loves, but it did. It sometimes feels like a personality, which I hate, since interests aren’t personalities. Wine isn’t a personality. Still, Bellone captured my fascination early; by 2008, I even named a rescued puppy after it. Ettore and I were on level two of our sommelier course and were visiting nearby wineries and tasting rooms. I believe Bellone found its way into my heart around 2007-2008. Bellone was my first grape love story.

While doomscrolling a couple of weeks ago, I saw that Vinoporzio would be hosting a wine fair dedicated to Lazio wines in Frascati. Alongside producers sharing their wines, there were also a number of seminars dedicated to our region and grapes, and when I saw there was a seminar on Bellone on its own, I jumped at the chance and immediately signed up, thinking, hmmm, maybe others are finally understanding the potential of this grape (and Lazio as a wine region in general).

Roughly translated as “big and beautiful,” Bellone is a wine grape from Lazio that grows primarily in southern Lazio, specifically in the Castelli Romani and around the coastal area of Latina. In the Castelli Romani, it was primarily used in blends with Malvasia Puttana and Trebbiano. It is also one of the official grapes allowed in the Frascati appellation. In the coastal south, it is more likely used in single blends. It is a very versatile grape, as it can be used for sparkling, orange, and passito wines. I think it shines as a sparkling wine, but we will get into that.

The history of Bellone is fascinating. Not only is it historical to Lazio, it is ancient, with mentions dating back at least to Pliny the Elder, which means Romans have been drinking wine made from Bellone not just for centuries, but for millennia. This grape flourishes in the mineral-rich volcanic soils found in the Lazio region, where its robust vines demonstrate significant vigor and adaptability. Known by different names across Italy, including Cacchione in the Colli Albani, where I live, and Arciprete in Cori. It is called this because it was used to make communion passito wines. Recent initiatives have focused on reviving Bellone’s historic legacy, including the replanting of young vines near the Colosseum, symbolically reconnecting contemporary viticulture with Rome’s past. My friend and I attended a conference on archaeology and wine, where they presented this project alongside other archaeo-wine projects from around the world. The Cincinnato winery in Cori, with EU funding, brought this project to life.

While it is not so much in fashion today, winemakers in Lazio have rediscovered the value of our autochthonous varieties, as have Roman drinkers. And as I always say, it is Romans themselves who dictate what regional winemakers produce. Thankfully, a handful of producers never gave up on Bellone, and now different winemakers are using it not only in blends but also in single-varietal wines. And as a grape that likes to be near the sea, there are numerous old vineyards of Bellone in the coastal south that are in their own rootstock, thanks to the protection sandy, coastal soils give against Phylloxera. In my opinion, old vines are one of the keys to the wine industry surviving in the future. They are the most resilient.

One of the first wineries I tasted a single variety Bellone (arcipreti) wine was at the winery Marco Carpineti, where they make a 100% Bellone classic method spumante called Kius, and in some years a passito called Ludus (as in gladiator school). Marco Caprineti was the first winery I visited in those old days that had dedicated its production to local autochthonous grape varieties, including the black grape known as Nero Buono. This was at a time when wine production in Lazio was still very much focused on quantity over quality, and it was common to see internationals growing everywhere. Lazio was not yet famed for the natural winemaking in Gradoli, and Rome certainly wasn’t a hotspot for these kinds of producers. I would say that my curiosity piqued when I tasted their wines at an AIS event dedicated to the wines of Lazio, and when I visited them and learned why they were so passionate about their wine history and dedicating their land to unheard-of varieties. Their wines have changed a lot since then. They have expanded, and they even make two amphora wines.

Bellone is quite vigorous and drought-resistant. It is a light yellow grape with high acidity, making it versatile and a dream for vignaioli to work with, although I think it is best either as a sparkling wine or an amber wine. Citrus peel, stone fruits, mango, and floral notes are common, but I think it is the mouthfeel and taste I love best. When made in the right vignaioli’s hands, it is fresh, waxy, and saline, evoking the sea, or a warm summer night on holiday in Sperlonga. As a skin-contact wine, it pairs with anything, and its aromas become more pronounced. But that hint of sea and salinity is always there, whether it is made in the volcanic hills of the Catelli Romani or by the sea in coastal Latina. The first time I ever worked a harvest in Italy, it was in an old mixed vineyard in Lanuvio. There were Malvasia Puntinata, an autochthonous Laziale Malvasia, Trebbiano Giallo, and Bellone. The Bellone bunches were enormous and plentiful. I have to admit I struggled with the weight of them. Truly big and beautiful.

I asked Marco Tomei of Tomei winery in Sezze, Latina, why he works with Bellone and what it was like to work with. He told me, “It is a generous variety, though it does have complications due to weather and climatic conditions. We utilize spontaneous fermentation to maximize the expression of the grape and terroir in which they are grown.”

While researching, I contacted Gianmarco from ICaro, here in Castelli Romani, because they produce a macerated Bellone called Bellisimo in 2024, and I wanted to reach out. to acquire a bottle. They were out, so he suggested others in Castelli Romani. I reached out on Instagram to Jacobo of DLR (Dopo Lavoro Ricreativo) in Frascati to see if he had a bottle. He checked his cellar, called others, and had it delivered to me. Many in Castelli Romani deeply love our territory, and I’m proud to be part of it. If you’re wondering what to pair it with, my advice is to eat what we eat in southern Lazio. If it grows together, it goes together.

When I found those puppies and gave them wine names, I didn’t know that Bellone would have such staying power in my heart and palate. It turned out to be the perfect name for my dog, Bellone, who was fun, charming, life-loving, sometimes salty, versatile, and a man of many interests. His brother’s name was Chardonnay because of his consistency, and he was loved by everyone who met him. Both of them have passed on in the last 2 years; may their memory always be a blessing to me.

In the coming months, I’ll spotlight Lazio’s wine grapes. Lazio is Italy’s most biodiverse region, thanks to its varied terrain-coastal dunes, swamps, volcanic lakes, and the Apennines-with about 85% of the region covered by rolling hills. Soil types and altitudes vary widely. Lazio boasts the greatest diversity of autochthonous wine grapes in Italy. They’re worth celebrating. It’s easy to do, with winemakers, wine lovers, and restaurateurs collaborating to promote the region.

Tomei Winery

Sezze, Lazio

Fertile 2024

Ettore and I shared this bottle at lunch in Saubaudia at a beautiful trattoria called Trattoria Buccia after we had spent the moring in Circeo sunshine inhaling sea air. Every time I see a bottle of wine from Tomei winery I order it because I know I will love it, and this was no exception. An explosion of summer peaches, citrus peel, orange flowers, mountain herbs, and river stone that at first sip evokes the sea. It is fresh and saline with really lovely mouthfeel that goes on and on. It paired perfectly with out hummus that was made with fermented lemon and my cacio e pepe. If you know me, I use fermented lemon in almost everything these days. It is my version of MSG.

ICARO

Genzano di Roma, Lazio

Bellissimo 2024

As I mentioned above, this was hard to come by. There was one bottle left in the entire Castelli Romani and Jacono managed to get it in my hands. Wine folks in the Castelli Romani all support each other. It is communal effort rather than competition and I love that.

I love that I managed to get my hands on this wine because it really demonstrated to me that within 20 km, this wine can be completely different when grown on volcanic soils. It took a bit to open up, so my assessment was better after the bottle had been opened for a few hours. Very fruit forward on the nose, Loquats, stone fruits, a hint of lemon and loads of field flowers and chamomile. The taste was bright and fresh, with a lingering taste of roses and almonds. Quaffable and easy to drink. I’d love to take a bottle down to the lake, but I will have to wait for the next vintage.

Marco Carpineti

Ludum Bellone Passito ( I did not note the vintage)

Cori, Lazio

Look, I am a passito lover. I love sweet wines like this because they are enjoyable at the end of a meal and can be paired with hard cheeses and blue cheeses and even dark chocolate. Plus, they are historical in Lazio. I am sad they are out of fashion and most wine makers do not make them any more.

Nutty, candied citrus peel, desiccated apricot, early season figs, acacia, summer honey. It was a much lighter bodied wine than I was expecting. It was not cloying, but it almost didn’t meet the mark for me, but perhaps my dessert was overwhelming it. What I loved it that it had a vibrant acidity that balanced the sweet. Overall not my favorite passito, but I do believe my chocolate on chocolate dessert may have been the issue, not the wine. Perhaps it would have been better with a local pecorino.

Which Laziale wine grape would you like to learn about next? The rarer the better or ones that are readily available?

Share

Thank you so much for reading. my goal in the next two years is to plant a small Bellone vineyard on my property or find an old Bellone vineyard in my area. Help me achieve my dream with a little donation!

Thank you for reading, please share and subscribe if you haven’t already!

Subscribe now

Every week, an expert, an influencer or some new headline from reputable publications tells us to eat better. Buy organic. Cook from scratch. Read the label. Avoid ultra-processed foods. The message is always the same: you are in control. You just need to make better choices.

But here’s what that message leaves out. The single parent working two jobs who lives in a neighborhood with no grocery store. The teenager who wants to eat healthy but passes seven fast-food chains and zero produce markets on the walk home from school. The family on food stamps who can afford a bag of rice and beans but not the fresh vegetables sold at double the price across town.

When we blame hunger and poor diet on individual choice, we are blaming people for problems they did not create and cannot solve alone.

The Blame Game

Let’s be honest about how this works. Public health campaigns tell us to ‘choose water’, a clear and simple thing to do. However, soda companies spend billions on advertising in low-income neighborhoods. On nutrition matters, labels assume everyone has time and the capability to decode ingredients after a twelve-hour shift. Likewise, wellness influencers preach ‘clean eating’ from kitchens most people could never afford to stock.

The person who buys cheap, shelf-stable food is not making a bad choice. They are making the only choice available.

And the consequences fall the hardest on those already carrying the most weight. Women are blamed for feeding their families poorly. Low-income parents are shamed for buying fast food. Entire communities are labeled ‘unhealthy’ while the systems that put cheap processed food on every corner go unquestioned.

How the System Is Engineered

None of this is an accident. It is the result of decades of deliberate decisions.

Government subsidies overwhelmingly support corn and soy, rarely fresh vegetables. These two are the main raw materials of processed food. Zoning laws let fast-food chains and dollar stores replace grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods. Food assistance programs often make fresh produce harder to access than chips and soda.

Food companies are spending billions to engineer products that hit the same pleasure centers as sugar and salt, then market them directly to children and low-income families. The result is not a failure of willpower. It is a system designed to make cheap, addictive food the easiest and most affordable option.

When a family buys that food, they are not choosing poorly. They are acting rationally inside a game that is already rigged and fairness non-existent.

Who Benefits from ‘Personal Responsibility’

This is the part people don’t like to talk about. The ‘choice’ narrative is incredibly useful for the institutions that profit from the current system.

If hunger and obesity are caused by bad choices, then governments don’t have to fix food deserts. Food companies don’t have to change their products. Employers don’t have to pay living wages. The problem belongs to the individual, and the individual alone.

This is why the same corporations that sell ultra-processed food also fund ‘healthy eating’ campaigns. They get to look helpful while nothing changes. They get to blame you for buying what they engineered you to want.

It is a perfect system, for them.

What Real Change Looks Like (And Who Is Already Building It)

But here is what also happens: people fight back.

Organizations like the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network have not waited for government or corporations to fix things. They run a seven-acre farm called D-Town Farm, operate a food co-op in a neighborhood without a single grocery store, and train young people to grow their own food. They don’t pretend choice doesn’t matter. They just know that real choice starts with access, which they have committed themselves into building for the vulnerable majority.

Or consider Feed the Soul Foundation in New Orleans, which provides grants and business development specifically to minority-owned food businesses and restaurants. They understand that when the system is rigged, you don’t just ask people to choose differently. You help them own the system.

None of these groups alone can fix food apartheid. However, they prove something essential. Change does not require waiting for permission. It requires organizing, resources, and the simple belief that people in food deserts deserve more than blame. They deserve power.

What Real Choice Would Look Like

Let me be clear, personal agency matters. People make meaningful decisions every day within the constraints they face. However, real choice requires real conditions.

Real choice means a living wage so parents aren’t forced to choose between rent and vegetables. It means public transit that reaches grocery stores, not just liquor stores. It means school lunch programs that serve real food to every child, regardless of the zip code. It means ample time to cook, rest, and shop without exhaustion.

When people have those things, they make good choices. When they don’t, blaming them is not just cruel. It is a lie that shields the people who designed the system from accountability and responsibility.

A Different Conversation

What if we stopped asking “Why don’t they just eat better?” and started asking “Why is better eating so hard?”

What if we measured success not by how many people read nutrition labels, but by how many neighborhoods have a real grocery store? What if we held food companies accountable for what they sell instead of shaming families for buying it?

The solution is not to tell people to try harder. The solution is to build a system where trying is enough.

That starts with honesty. Hunger and poor diet are not failures of character. They are failures of policy, power, and profit. And until we stop blaming individuals for structural problems, nothing will change.

Because here is the truth no wellness influencer will tell you: choice is a privilege. Access is the real right. And hunger has never been a personal failure. It has always been a system working exactly as designed.

Charles Okila is a medical writer and publication strategist working at the intersection of health, systems, and society. His work explores how evidence, institutions, and everyday life interact, translating complex ideas into clear, engaging narratives for a broad audience.

Share

It has been nearly three months since I was dismissed from the hospital, and my life has been both difficult and magnificent. I am adjusting to a new way of living, and being a sick person is now my main role, and I hate it, so I try to find joy in life and abundance where I can, because I am in a lot of physical pain, and I am tired, I am so tired. I have been trying to write and nothing comes out.

I am adjusting to life with an ostomy bag. My surgery consisted of removing a stenosis in my intestine and creating a hole on my left side where I attach an ostomy bag. Before the surgery, I went online and read or watched stoma patients talk about how it made their life better, they can eat what they want, it made Crohn’s less debilitating, and I am wondering when that will happen for me? My experience has not been like that. Before the ostomy, I thought the biggest hurdle would be the psychological adjustment. And while that is a part of it, the worst part has been the physical pain. Because mine is concave, it’s very difficult to find adhesives that protect the surrounding skin, which can become irritated and infected. Sometimes it feels like someone is pouring battery acid on me. It burns, it itches, it is hard to sleep, and it is accident-prone.

Have you heard of an ostomy accident? Maybe not because we are embarrassed to talk about the dark side of having them. Those of you with babies will understand. We have blowouts and leaks. Usually, it is an adhesive issue, so it is important to find the right match for your skin type and output. My first blowout was in the hospital about 3 days after my surgery, before I had my Ostomy nurse consult, so I didn’t really know how to work the bags yet and had to rely on nurses to clean me up. I had a full-blown panic attack because I am a 49-year-old woman, and I don’t need full-time nursing. It was humiliating. The nurses were all very discreet and kind to me as I cried over and over, “I don’t want to live like this, I don’t want to live like this.” And I don’t want to live like this.

Since I have been home, I’ve had a few blowouts. My favorite: deciding I felt good enough to take the train to Rome to meet a friend and see the Mucha exhibit. Wanting to look cute, I wore vintage Jordache jeans, which was a big mistake. Older jeans are 100% denim, with no stretch. My ostomy is on the left side, at the waist. Sitting on the train, the hard denim pressed into the bag until I felt a warm liquid run down my leg. It was rush hour, and there was no toilet on the train. I brought extra bags and equipment, but no change of clothes. At the station, I panicked in the bathroom, trying to figure out what to do. After half an hour, I cleaned up enough to go outside, buy baby wipes and disinfectant, then went to another store—still in dirty jeans—to buy a sweat suit. Back in the bathroom, I changed clothes, disposed of the underwear, and wrapped the dirty ones in plastic. It was a tough lesson: I have to wear very loose clothes. Thankfully, in a big city station, anonymity means people forget you as soon as they pass.

I don’t want to live like this.

I can’t really talk to anyone about this feeling because it’s been drummed into everyone that thoughts about not living are the worst thing ever, and that you should reach out to a hotline if you have them. I am told I am strong. How marvelous it is that I seem to be so positive, and how, “I don’t think I could be as strong as you are if I went through this,” is something I am told over and over again. It says a lot about a person’s view of disability. The expectation is to keep these thoughts to myself and to put on a show for everyone around me for their comfort. I feel like I am expected to manage other people’s feelings about my illness. My sister makes it all about her. Some people are so deeply uncomfortable with illness that they can’t even ask me how I am. I have lost a lot of weight. At one point in the hospital, I was down to 53 kilos when my normal weight is about 62. So, of course, I get the comments from women about how maybe they need to get Crohn’s disease so they can lose weight, oh hehehehe. My favorite is when someone has some sort of diarrhea, indigestion, or even stomach flu for a day or a weekend, and tells me they were thinking of me because now they know how I feel. As if my illness is just like intestinal flu. Is it so hard to go on Google and research for five minutes what an autoimmune disease is? I am tired of explaining it. I may be out of the hospital, but I am not disease-free, and no, whatever dietary or natural remedy you want to share with me is going to work. I have tried them all, and I still relapsed. Please don’t be that person who suggest natural remedies or a diet for a condition you don’t have. It’s rude, it is dismissive, it is arrogant, and it is patronizing. As if I haven’t researched every possible solution or tried them. But as woman, I am supposed to be grateful for unsolicited advise, otherwise I am called difficult.

I am very lucky, though, when it comes to friendship. I have four very good friends here who have really supported me during this time. And I have learned a lot about boundaries and asking for help. My best friend, Barbara, took care of my home and animals so Ettore could be at the hospital with me for a few hours each day. I needed that time. She deep-cleaned the house before I came home, organized my closet, and made sure Ettore was ok. It is hard to be sick and worried about how your illness impacts others. I was very happy to have visitors every day, and my friend Sergio would come in the evenings just to chat. He was a godsend, really. I think it also helped Ettore understand that I had a strong network. He had all my San Diego friends on chat, making sure they were updated because I just couldn’t do it. He had to deal with my sister, who had tantrums and made everything about herself. She even blocked him and told him not to contact her, and then messaged him two days later as if nothing had happened. At least now he understands why I keep my distance from her. Thank you to everyone who visited me and for all the books, games, Legos, tarot cards, and more. It kept me sane.

But also thank you to the people who I thought were friends but turned out to be terrible. My 40s have been about boundaries, and I cleaned a lot of house, making my circle smaller but better. I still have some friendships here in Italy from when I didn’t have boundaries. Timespan really doesn’t mean much. I am not saying every person needs to be my ride or die, but a simple “how are you?” goes a long way. If that’s too much, I don’t think I want you in my life, and that is ok. I have always felt so much guilt when I end friendships because I think of the time and effort I put into them, but when they aren’t reciprocated, it isn’t worth it. This doesn’t mean I don’t want acquaintances and light friendships. Of course, I do, but I just don’t want to be there emotionally or on a deeper level for people who don’t give back the same energy. For the last few years, I have been just giving back to people what they give to me.

I need people to understand that just because I might have a few good hours, it doesn’t mean I am better. It takes a lot of effort and spoons to get me out and socializing. The ostomy bag is ever-present, and so I need to be careful of what and when I eat. Since I want more control over my output, I have been intermittent fasting on an 18-to-6-hour schedule. And once a week, I do a 30 to 36-hour fast to give my skin a break. This is disordered eating, and I am well aware of it. It feels like anorexia. I’m in control, but you will still see me eating when I allow it. I didn’t eat for a month, so now 24 hours feels like nothing. I’ll even have a glass of wine if I go out because I want to feel as normal as possible, even though eating out means I will definitely elongate the next day’s fasting to make up for cheating. Everything I eat is monitored and controlled for minimal pain and output. It is exhausting to live this way. It is also exhausting trying to monitor my feelings for everyone else’s comfort. I can’t talk about death in the way that I want to. I am supposed to keep this mental suffering to myself because if not, I will be a burden.

Yes, I am lucky to be alive. If I had waited a day or two more, I would not be here writing this. But can we stop with everyone needing toxic positivity just to make it more palatable? Sometimes life is painful and shit and hard to manage, and if we can’t discuss this in our own communities, what is the point?

Death is not the worst thing. Life in pain is worse. I hope things will improve, but I also know my limits. I don’t want to keep pretending everything is fine. I hope time will help, but what if it doesn’t? Then what? Do I spend the next 40 years pretending to protect others’ feelings? Do I fast so much that I waste away? Do I withdraw even more?

For now, I will focus on my health and getting physically stronger. I will accept my limitations. I will work on transforming my house into a sanctuary, and I have time to work on my garden and create my dream food forest with Ettore’s help. I said goodbye to my soul cat, Flora, three weeks ago, and as I write this, my heart dog, Chardonnay, is dying; he will probably be buried by the time I publish this. I have no fear of death, to be honest. I have a fear of pain. We give our pets the gift of ending their pain, yet we are expected to endure. At the moment, I can. My life can be full when I can express my full self. It is ok to not be ok and I grieve for the life I had.

I didn’t grow up making fermented food. Rather, I grew up around it. My paternal grandparents kept a murătură jar, the kind that sits in the corner of a Romanian kitchen like furniture, full of brined peppers and cauliflower decomposing pleasantly in the dark. At the time, I never thought much about it. To me, fermentation was just a smell, a texture, a weird nameless thing that happened in jars. Still, it took me a long time to understand that this was the point I’d been missing.

This isn’t a piece about sourdough starters, though we’ll get there. It’s about what fermentation actually is: not a trend, not a wellness category, not a line on a menu, but the kind of infrastructure that predates every supply chain and outlasts every empire. And like most infrastructure that actually works, it was built by people who never got credit for it.

I should say where I’m starting from. As a Romanian, I lived in Bucharest until I was six, when my parents and I moved to America, which is long enough to carry a few things with you but not long enough to know what they mean. That jar belonged to my grandparents, not me. My dad buys sauerkraut and horseradish; he eats them the way you eat things you’ve always eaten. My relationship to fermentation is inherited but unclaimed, like a language you understand but don’t speak.

Like most things now, fermentation found me several years ago on my phone, somewhere between eleven and midnight, when I couldn’t have fallen asleep without consuming media first. As it turned out, I saw tons of videos where women named their sourdough starters. They coaxed kimchi into mason jars, rows of fermented hot sauce lined up on counters like trophies. Still, it wasn’t the food that caught my attention. It was the fact that overwhelmingly, consistently, women made it, and I went looking for why.

Preservation as Power

The first thing that surprised me was that long before lifestyle influencers aestheticized fermentation – before the linen-covered loaves and the branded crocks and everything – it did serious, unglamorous work in stabilizing food supplies, extending culinary calendars, reducing waste, and feeding people through lean seasons. Crucially, it did all this without a single central authority, imported ingredient, or industrial supply chain. A 2024 synthesis in the Journal of Ethnic Foods describes traditional fermentation systems as a “biocultural strategy for food security.” True, the phrase sounds academic, but it just means that communities who fermented survived.

What makes fermentation scientifically remarkable — and this is the part that genuinely hooked me — isn’t just that it works, but why it works how it does. It neither scales easily nor standardizes cleanly, and each batch responds to the specific conditions of a specific place: local microbes, local temperature, local season, even local humidity. In this sense, a jar of kimchi isn’t just a portrait of an environment, but also a living document of where and when and whose hands made it.

Writing about agricultural knowledge systems, the anthropologist Andrew Flachs argues that this kind of expertise is “continually produced through engagement with environments, materials, and labor.” He’s talking about cotton farmers, but the logic holds for a Japanese grandmother calibrating her miso by smell and feel – or to my father, who knows by taste what good sauerkraut is, and always has. Here, what makes such knowledge powerful is that it isn’t in a textbook, but in the hands.

Whose Hands

Social media had lit my fire, and as I researched further, a clear pattern emerged: Korea’s kimjang – the seasonal communal production of kimchi – was organized almost entirely by women. Japan’s tsukemono pickle traditions were maintained by women tracking seasonal rhythms and environmental cues long before refrigeration. Whether I read about Medieval European brewing, Mesopotamian grain fermentation, or Andean chicha, the labor that turned raw, perishable material into something nourishing and shelf-stable was women’s labor.

And equally remarkably, it was almost never recorded.

The anthropologist Deborah Gewertz has written that “domestic practices often encode complex, specialized knowledge that remains invisible because it is embedded in routine.” Thus, such invisibility wasn’t accidental, but structural. Work done in kitchens, hearths, and communal spaces doesn’t accumulate citations or patents, but accumulates in muscle memory, in knowing when something smells right, and in knowing when it’s turned. Similarly, I’d found the work of the food writer Psyche Williams-Forson the same way I’d found most of this, by researching food writing late, out of pure curiosity. To her credit, she’s even more direct: “The labor of feeding has long been feminized and devalued, even as it requires expertise, precision, and deep cultural knowledge.”

The more I read, the more this felt less like history and more like an argument that’d been there all along. Fermentation threatened hierarchical ideas about who gets to hold expertise, and when women produced fermented foods without formal credentials, institutional validation, or even the desire for such things, they were quietly demonstrating that complex, life-sustaining knowledge could exist entirely outside the systems built to contain it.

What Empire Did

Of course, this wasn’t a situation that empire could leave undisturbed. As industrial economies grew exponentially, they didn’t merely ignore fermentation, but actively displaced it.

Imperial economies were structured around extractable commodities, such as sugar, cotton, and coffee, that could be standardized, shipped, and sold at scale. In this calculus, the foodways that’d evolved over centuries to sustain local communities were obstacles, and the system took it upon itself to get rid of them. The historian Sidney Mintz writes that global commodity systems “transformed local food practices, subordinating them to the demands of distant markets.” A jar of sauerkraut couldn’t be stacked in a cargo hold. Kimchi couldn’t be priced into futures markets. Fermented foods were anchored to specific places, specific seasons, specific hands, which made them fundamentally incompatible with empire.

So naturally, empire did what it always does with things it can’t control. It pathologized them, and its institutions declared local fermented foods to be unsanitary, primitive, inefficient. Heather Paxson, writing about artisan cheese in America, traces how industrial systems reshaped not just production but perception – what food should look like, how predictable it should be, how long it should last. Standardization became a preference, and anything outside it was quietly pushed out of legitimacy.

Beyond the culinary loss, the consequence was also political disempowerment. To erase a food system is to erase the knowledge that sustained it, and the people who held that knowledge. Once I thought about that, my mind drifted to my dad’s sauerkraut — the jar he picks up without thinking most nights. I’ve never really asked where the preference came from, or who in his family ate it before him, or who made it, and how, before it reached the store.

The Political Case for Funk

is the one who dragged fermentation back into political consciousness — and I’m grateful for it, even when his work gets co-opted by the exact kind of wellness aesthetic he’s arguing against.

In The Art of Fermentation and the later Fermentation as Metaphor, Katz argues that beyond producing food efficiently, industrial food systems actively “deskill and disempower people,” severing connections to land, to microbial life, and one another. His counter-model isn’t nostalgia but interdependence, which helps us recognize that life is always co-constituted, always adaptive, always unpredictable.

Industrial capitalism presumes mastery over nature, but fermentation refuses it. A kimchi jar doesn’t care about your schedule. A sourdough starter will punish you for neglecting it. These are not design flaws. They are the whole point.

Katz connects this to what feminist theorist Donna Haraway calls sympoiesis, which means “making with,” as opposed to making alone. Nothing that lives makes itself alone, and fermentation makes that impossible to ignore. You press salt into the cabbage and feel it weep. You mix the paste and work it into the leaves until your fingers burn. You seal the jar and wait. For the next few days, something else takes over that’s been doing this far longer than we have. You didn’t make the kimchi. You only made the conditions possible.

What It Does to the Body

This isn’t only metaphor. Microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg describes humans as “superorganisms — collections of human and microbial cells functioning together.” The trillions of microbes that live in and on us participate in metabolism, immunity, mood, and health. Diet, Sonnenburg argues, is “one of the most powerful tools we have to shape the microbial communities within us.”

Research supports this. In controlled dietary studies, people assigned to high-fermented-food diets showed increased gut microbial diversity and reduced systemic inflammation compared to those on high-fiber diets. Fermented foods appear to reshape resident gut communities in ways that have measurable effects on immune function. Accordingly, what looks like eating kimchi is, biologically, a form of ecological maintenance, not to mention a wonderful way to explore the world’s diversity.

If you ask me, I think the most radical part of all is that the women who kept these practices alive weren’t just feeding their communities. Whether they knew it or not, the fact that they sustained the microbial ecosystems that human health depends on meant that they played a role in the delicate balance of life and death, which is incredible to think about.

Listening Again

But I’m still not going to start a sourdough starter. If I’m honest, I’m still not sold on sauerkraut or horseradish (the smell still gets me). But now, I think about that scroll differently. I used to read those women, with their jars and starters and patience, as lifestyle content, but I was so wrong. Now, I read it as what it is: they were practicing a form of ancestral feminine knowledge that male-dominated industrial systems tried their best to eliminate for over 150 years, maybe more. Despite their best efforts, though, it ultimately resurfaced on my phone late at night, one of the most banal places imaginable.

Admittedly, it might’ve been easy to mock the pandemic sourdough moment on Instagram, all gleaming and seemingly perfect. But underneath the aesthetic, I saw something real: a mass impulse for women to reclaim a form of food production that’s wholly ours from the merciless industrial systems that stripped it from us without our consent. In a moment like COVID, where everything felt more fragile than ever before, I completely understood how crucial it was to have as much agency as possible over your food, and whenever I saw these women, I supported them wholeheartedly.

Personally, I feel we should take this impulse seriously not because artisan fermentation will fix global food systems, and certainly not because we should romanticize the labor that sustained these practices; much of it was hard, unpaid, and structurally coerced. But if we put that negativity aside and make an effort to understand fermentation fully, we can see that it’s a model of how knowledge persists, how communities sustain themselves, and what we lose when systems built on extraction replace systems built on care.

Ultimately, I think about my grandparents’ murătură jar. I was six when my parents and I left Romania, so what I have is less a memory than an impression. Still, as far as I remember, nobody called it preservation, or maybe even anything. At the end of the day, it was just a jar of food, but if I focus, I can still remember how it sounded.

If I close my eyes, it sounds like a low fizz, a slow exhale. Yes, it’s quiet, but it’s alive, and that’s what matters most. As long as humanity has existed, that sound has existed, shaping our history, lives, and cultures in ways we never imagined.

Whether in Romania or America, I used to walk past it, ignoring it. I’m not sure I can anymore.

Maria Dominique Neatu is a Philadelphia-based writer, originally from Romania, working at the intersection of food, history, and literary criticism. Her essay “What Can James Joyce Teach Us About Virtue Ethics” was presented at the Macksey Undergraduate Research Symposium at Johns Hopkins University and published in The Macksey Journal in February 2025. You can find her on Substack at Substack Home - Letters From the Castle and

Bibliography

Flachs, Andrew. Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability, and the Human Cost of

Cotton Capitalism in India. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019.

Gewertz, Deborah. Home Cooking in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2011.

Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke

University Press, 2016.

Katz, Sandor Ellix. The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and

Processes from Around the World. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing,

2012.

———. Fermentation as Metaphor. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020.

Lee, Cherl-Ho, Junyoung Ahn, and Hong-Seok Son. “Ethnic Fermented Foods of the World: An

Overview.” Journal of Ethnic Foods 11, no. 39 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s42779-

024-00254-2.

Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York:

Viking, 1985.

Paxson, Heather. The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America. Berkeley: University

of California Press, 2012.

Sonnenburg, Justin, and Erica Sonnenburg. The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your

Mood, and Your Long-Term Health. New York: Penguin Press, 2015.

Williams-Forson, Psyche A. Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and

Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

The Artifact in Bologna

Back in 2017, I found myself in Caffè Terzi, a beautiful, well-worn café in Bologna that is unique in its own right. No spritzes, no sandwiches, only coffee and tea meant to be savored. As I sat at a quaint marble table with my cappuccino, my eyes caught a golden-framed poster on the corner of the wall that looked like a remnant from another era. In elegant script it proclaimed: Puerto Rico — el café más fino.

At first glance, it seemed like a throwaway relic, but the poster made a profound claim: that coffee, for Puerto Ricans, is an art form. It featured one of Puerto Rico’s most prominent painters, Francisco Oller’s El Estudiante, a painting portraying a medical student from a popular coffee-growing region—Yauco, a town that dominated global coffee markets in the 1800s—living in Paris. The two small coffee cups in the poster stood as historical evidence that the island’s agricultural and intellectual exports were once inseparable. Oller didn’t just paint a scene; he documented a unique identity forged in the mountains of La Cordillera Central.

Subscribe now

As a Puerto Rican, I felt a surge of pride. As a coffee enthusiast, I was puzzled. In most conversations about Latin American coffee, Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, and Panama are mentioned, but Puerto Rico is almost never included. I wondered why this poster would be here, in a country famous for its espresso culture, so far from my island.

That moment sent me down a rabbit hole. I soon discovered that, toward the end of the 19th century, Puerto Rico was one of the Vatican’s primary coffee suppliers, a testament to the supreme quality of its beans. This likely explains why that poster still graced the walls of a Bolognese café, but it simultaneously deepened my confusion: how does a place go from being ‘world-renowned’ to a point where, today, coffee roasters on the island struggle to source enough beans for their locals?

The Paradox of the “Golden Age”

Research revealed that the poster at the café wasn’t just another marketing tactic; it was a snapshot of Puerto Rico’s “Golden Age” of coffee. By the 1890s, Europe was demanding more than 50 million pounds of Puerto Rican beans, praising them as among the “world’s finest.” Yet behind that acclaim lay a landscape of struggle. As a Spanish colony, the coffee sector was profoundly top-heavy. While the elite consumed “the finest coffee” in Europe, those back in Puerto Rico lived with mounting debt.

For background, decades earlier, in 1868, El Grito de Lares erupted—the island’s first major revolt against Spanish rule. This fight for independence was deeply intertwined with the coffee industry. Wealthy European landowners concentrated land and capital in their own hands, while local Criollo farmers were marginalized. Many revolutionaries were coffee growers and laborers who were pushed to the brink due to falling prices, crushing taxes, and the oppressive libreta system—a mechanism of forced labor. El Grito de Lares became a catalyst for Puerto Rico’s enduring struggle for identity and freedom. For the Puerto Rican farmer, coffee existed in a brutal paradox: global prestige paired with local pauperization.

The ‘Golden Age’ of Puerto Rican coffee ended suddenly—and dramatically. El Grito de Lares was pivotal, but it didn’t achieve Puerto Rico’s freedom. By 1897, the last year of Spanish rule, the island exported over 51 million pounds of coffee to Europe. However, by 1900, less than five years later, that number had dropped to just 7.3 million pounds. Under a new U.S. administration takeover and in the wake of the San Ciriaco hurricane, Puerto Rico’s coffee exports collapsed by over 43 million pounds.

The agricultural shift away from coffee wasn’t just a matter of weather; it was a matter of power. After 1898, the U.S. colonial administration remapped the island’s geography to favor sugarcane plantations over coffee haciendas. By the mid-20th century, the U.S. introduced policies such as the Jones Act and Operation Bootstrap, which further weakened the agriculture sector, pushing Puerto Ricans away from local farming and toward industrial labor while mandating costly U.S.-only shipping routes (a restriction that still exists today, and was lifted only briefly after catastrophic Hurricane Maria in 2017). Together, these policies transformed an island that once supplied coffee to the Vatican and beyond into a place now dependent on imported beans just to fill its own cups.

Colonial exploitation is not a new story. Yet Puerto Rico’s version is distinct, as it is still the longest-lasting colony in the world. This raises urgent modern questions: when the colonial structure has never actually left, what does that look like today? How does a farmer reclaim their title as the ‘finest coffee’ in a territory that is still economically and politically constrained?

From surviving natural disasters to navigating global markets, Puerto Rican farmers balance heritage, quality, and survival in a landscape marked by economic vulnerability and colonial legacy.

The Corporate Monopoly

Today, Puerto Rico’s coffee sector is split between two realms: the “old school” and “new school.” This dichotomy defines the island’s struggle for identity. On one side are the “OG” brands deeply embedded in the island’s cultural psyche—Yaucono, Café Rico, Alto Grande, and Café Crema. These brands are dubbed “classic” and “premium,” yet they hold an identity that is unbeknownst to many of their consumers.

As of today, the colonial-era infrastructure has yet to be rebuilt for local sustainability. The government holds auctions for cheap, foreign beans (often from Mexico or the Dominican Republic) to be blended with a small percentage of local coffee. The blend of foreign and local beans allows these brands to add the label ‘Made in Puerto Rico.’

These brands are managed under Puerto Rico Coffee Roasters Inc., a conglomerate that controls 75–80% of the island’s market and operates as a subsidiary of Coca-Cola Inc. This concentration of power creates an “illusion of choice,” effectively gatekeeping the identity of Puerto Rican coffee while leveraging immense capital that threatens the survival of independent local roasters.

For the average consumer on the island, the coffee on the shelf is often a colonial facade: a local name on the bag, but a foreign bean inside. Now, this system may keep prices low, but it ensures that the art depicting coffee that Oller once painted in Paris remains a mass-produced outsider commodity rather than a celebrated heritage.

Sovereignty in a Cup

Against this, a “new school” mentality is emerging—one that pairs ancestral farming techniques with a “new peasantry” to combat the coffee monopoly on the island. High up in La Cordillera Central, where the Grito de Lares once echoed, a quiet revolution is taking place. A new generation of farmers and roasters is rejecting the auction system entirely. They are focusing on small-lot specialty coffee—single-origin beans that are grown with meticulous care in the ways of their ancestors.

One farm specifically captures this dichotomy well in how it moves between these two realms. Café Lareño is a fourth-generation, family-run farm. I remember my first visit there and the smell of fermented coffee pulps and the wetness of the morning mountain air. But even here, in the cool altitude of Lares, survival requires compromise. Like many producers, Café Lareño maintains a commercial brand that includes blended beans, a practical decision in a market shaped by auctions and price competition. After Hurricane Maria destroyed much of the island’s crop back in 2017, the family and their agronomist made a different investment. They began replanting higher-elevation, shade-grown lots, diversifying the ecosystem and focusing on 100% Puerto Rican artisanal coffee. Smaller in volume. Higher risk. Yet rooted in reclamation.

Café Lareño is no exception. Across the island, similar gestures are taking root. Farmers and roasters are reclaiming land and prioritizing single-estate Puerto Rican coffee. Many are diversifying beyond coffee—planting cacao, guava, and plantains—to buffer against market volatility and climate shocks. Agritourism has become less of a trend and more of a survival strategy: farm tours, cuppings, and direct sales create income streams that bypass the auction system. These efforts may seem small beside corporate scale, but they reassert something foundational—control over origin, narrative, and land.

However, even this resistance is fragile. Between U.S. labor costs, limited federal agricultural subsidies, and the ever-present threat of hurricane resets, producing 100% Puerto Rican specialty coffee becomes an act of defiance. There is rarely enough volume to satisfy the global market, or even the local one, for that matter, making every cup a rare, hard-won victory of visibility over erasure.

I think back to that poster in Bologna, to the two small cups in Oller’s painting. They weren’t just a memory of a ‘Golden Age’; they were a blueprint for a coffee renaissance. The road to reclaiming Puerto Rican coffee isn’t through the industrial mills of a global subsidiary, but through the small lots and the stubborn hands of those who still believe that coffee is an art. We may still be a colony, but in the stream of a 100% local cup, we are sovereign—if only for a moment.

Share

Amaris Mercado (she/her) is a Puerto Rican writer and researcher exploring coffee, culture, and sustainable food systems. She shares her work on Instagram @caffeologie

I used to do a lot of work prepping boxes for the following season such as laying down cardboard, adding heaps of straw, planting everything with compost. It worked, but it was a lot of labor and it was expensive.

I bought myself a small mulcher, so when we prune olive trees and fruit trees I mulch the branches I stead of doing the usual burning that everyone around here does. Olive leaf and wood mulch is INCREDIBLE. The soil in my upper garden is so soft now I barely have to do anything with it.

Mulching is the trick and now I don't really need any outside sources or compost to amend my soil. Now, I seed bomb sovescio or green manure. Sativa and Cecatori di semi offer seed blends to sow for different seasons. They are pollinator friendly and nitrogen fixers. I sow those in my beds. There are a lot of wild peas, borage, comfrey, mallow, and other native flowers.

In my upper garden I don't have beds. I have everything organised in lines, so I look back to the local ancestors and sow fava beans and peas which will be used for vignarola. Farmers have been using fava as a nitrogen fixer in vineyards for centuries, and to prevent soil erosion.

When it is time to plant my garden in May, I have my own mulch already growing. We will cut down all the green manure and leave them in the beds and in the lines and they will dry out and decay just like any mulch. The system stays circular.

I am writing this to say, you can garden with difficult soil. If there is a will there is a way. Mulching is the way.

Subscribe now

By Ray Mwareya

A new crop of millennial Western ‘food-and-travel-influencers’ who command millions of fans across YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook are trekking to Africa, and amplifying their followership by purposefully eating ‘organic dishes’ in slums, rural kitchens, and backstreet food stalls.

They performatively call this an experience of ‘real African food’.

Among the crop of these, and lately are iShowSpeed (a GenZ American YouTuber who is regarded as one of the most popular internet personalities alive), and Sonny Side, the American YouTube sensation with millions of digital fans. These two, feted like royalty, are among the most prominent Western YouTubers touring Africa.

The layman’s reaction is that these digital-age Western food influencers are ‘democratizing’ global perceptions of and acceptance of so-called ‘real African food’, helping reverse colonial prejudice against it. Reality is nuanced, though.

“We are proud to host iShowSpeed, see him eat our traditional Mopane worms and cowballs lunch. He beams our Zimbabwean cuisine to billions of viewers worldwide,” said Barbara Rwodzi, the Zimbabwe tourism minister, when iShowSpeed passed by Zimbabwe in his January whirlwind tour of Africa. Earlier on, Sonny Side had done a trek across Zimbabwe in 2022-2023, sleeping in rural huts and indulging in everything from opaque wheat beer to Gango (a Zimbabwe mixed meat stir-fry), sadza (cornmeal porridge), cow intestines, gearbox (cow testicles), pig head, mopane worms, and beef bone rice. In neighboring South Africa, Sonny had made it his habit to seek out informal open-air food stalls in the most dangerous slums, like Tembisa in Johannesburg, openly cajoling locals whilst sampling ‘ihloko’, the most popular street dish made from boiled cow head.

“On paper, it looks like these new-age YouTuber foodie-fluencers can’t get enough of ‘real’ African food, flying business class thousands of miles from Miami or London to eat dried pumpkin leaves and cow thick milk lunches in South Africa or Zimbabwe. It must be super lovely, isn’t it?” says Carl Josh Ncube, one of Zimbabwe’s most popular TV chefs, who also had lunch with Sonny Side on his visit to Zimbabwe.

This makes sense because to date, there are no Michelin-starred restaurants in Africa. However, the Michelin Guide (an elite European platform) has accredited African-owned restaurants based in Europe.

Legacy Western TV shows, whenever they visited African capitals, they have always restricted themselves to eating in ‘decent, safe’ Hilton or Bonvoy Hotels restaurants, says Sakhumzi Maqubela, a South African entrepreneur and owner of the legendary African-traditional-cuisine Sakhumzi Restaurant, which is located on the historic Vilakazi Street in Soweto, South Africa, the only street in the world where two Nobel Prize winners, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, have lived. There is, arguably, some good to be harvested from these tech-first Western YouTubers descending on the continent to sample dishes in front of tens of millions of global viewers, he says.

“Western audiences in California or Paris have grown up to assume that ‘nice’ foreign delicacies only mean Asian street dumplings or duck, or Indian spiced dishes. Nothing wrong with that, but African food has had almost zero visibility in the West until the rise of social media. Who among food audiences in Geneva, Switzerland, before YouTube, knew about amagwinya, the South African street pancakes dunked in traditional okra?” he asks.

Though welcome, these Western food influencers’ latest siege on Africa should be met with caution.

On the other hand, their live-streamed forays into (for example, African bus stations where unsanitary dishes are cooked) are reinforcing the same old, bigoted mistrust of African food among Western online audiences who view African food as associated with risks like being cooked in contaminated water, polluting firewood, or sometimes toxic ingredients.

“It doesn’t help that food-borne diseases like cholera are most devastating in Africa. When British food show crews visit the continent, they tend to err on the error of caution, and order dinners from Hyatt hotel kitchens - really Western-owned hotels operating in Africa. In their minds, to go out and eat maize cobs barbecued on the street in Nairobi, Kenya, is a gamble with cholera,” says Ncube, the chef and critic.

So, when American YouTubers like Speed and Sonny, for online ‘likes’, are filmed eating dried fish from pans lined on the sidewalk of an African street, they sometimes reinforce the same caricature of ‘real African food’ being unsanitary, and exotic in the eyes of Western audiences, he says.

Also, these new-age millennials are doing it for monetized clicks, not really a genuine desire to discover ‘African food’. By so doing, they further muddy the clarity around what is really ‘African food’, a question that Africa’s chefs at home and abroad have struggled to define since the end of colonialism. Since the advent of colonialism, African food lives between the racial, political, and tech faultlines of acceptability and Western bigotry.

I travel a lot in Europe and North America. Every time I stay in an Airbnb in Europe, I have to be extra cautious about what I cook. I have been politely sneered at several times for the Tilapia I cook smells too fishy. Each time I light up a pan to fry the fish, the host would pass by the kitchen and remark - What’s the name of that fish? Not out of curiosity, but a subtle reminder that - we Europeans don’t really do such dishes in our kitchens. I can’t forget my first foray out of Africa, in Germany, in 2016, when I was told by my elderly white host at dinner: ‘humans shouldn’t really eat with hands, here’s a fork’. For me, eating with bare hands is such a spiritual African practice, connecting my soul to the food.

Hence, these Western YouTubers, by waffling of ‘real African food’, are reinforcing ignorance about what African food is really about - parroting the attitude of Western audiences who want to superimpose themselves and define African food - rather than let us Africans do it.

Whilst YouTubers may have noble intentions to elevate the so-called ‘real African food’, they may fall into the trap of inventing a new problem, just as the Ritz-Carlton opened an eco-hotel in Kenya’s safari lands, only to block the migration routes of thousands of African wildebeest.

BIO: Ray Mwareya is an African writer, culture critic, and recipient of the 2016 UN Media Correspondents Association Award. His work appears in Newsweek, Reuters, The Guardian, China Dialogue, Christianity Today, The Telegraph, and other publications.

Share

I am not one for listicles of my top venues of anything, even if I have written them for pay for other publications. They feel clickbaity, and as much as I want readers, I also want my Substack to have more substance than the content publications I have written for. That being said, it has become important to me that if I have to live under capitalism and I need to spend money to live, and if I want to enjoy an evening with friends, the very least I can do is frequent venues that align with my own values. For me, Palestine is a red line. I will not support the Zionist occupying state in any capacity, so that means I participate in BDS, which on a surface level seems easy. Of course I don’t eat at McDonald’s or Starbucks. But then you dig deep and see how many businesses are owned by private equity firms that openly support Israel and genocide. Skin care products, Medjool dates in Arab shops in the United States and in Italy, and even those big bags of pistachios from Costco come from companies that support Israel.

My business is wine, specifically taking people to venues in Rome and wineries in Lazio, so it behooves me to know which enoteche have an openly pro-Free Palestine stance. I want to support them. And before anyone pulls a whatabout blah blah blah. Everything the IDF is doing to Palestinians is starting to happen to people in the United States under ICE. The genocides in the Congo and Sudan are directly linked to the Zionist state. The Italian government supports genocide financially and is the third largest provider of weapons to the genocidal forces.

On September 22nd of 2025, we had countryside strikes, and several enotecas participated by closing their doors to commerce and taking to the streets. That means no tax revenue to the state. All of these venues have not only spoken out against genocide, but also participated in actions, marches, organizing, and even fundraising. Cecafumo had a campaign to raise funds for the Global Sumad Flotilla. Despite what you may hear about Italy and its government in anglophone news, the people are sick of supporting never-ending wars. They oppose increases in military spending at the expense of healthcare, infrastructure, schools, and extremely low wages in both the public and private sectors. Italy has a negative birthrate because the cost of living is so high compared to salaries, and nobody can afford to have kids. It’s all connected. They can afford war mongering, but they can’t afford to pay nurses.

I want to be clear that frequenting these venues does not mean you are funding or supporting Palestine directly. As an ex-1990s punker, I have long known that what we eat and drink is political. Despite the trendiness and the marketing surrounding the natural wine movement today, for me, it has always been about drinking wine that aligns with my values or harm reduction on a local and global scale. This movement has indeed been a revolution that has pushed the industry into better agricultural practices, not the best, but better. Wine is an agricultural product, so I can’t sit on my high horse preaching about regenerative vineyard practices and holistic agriculture while Israel poisons farmland in Palestine and Lebanon with forever chemicals. At the same time, Israel destroys vineyards in Bethlehem, and while Israel bulldozes ancient olive groves in the Levant. We can’t be silent. Though today natural wine seems to be about targeting marketing and cute bottles for millennial Instagram feeds, the movement was and is a revolution that stands for something. It’s not just about not drinking poison, but about a holistic approach to how our food and wine choices affect the planet and the humans, flora, and fauna that live in it.

Palestinian wine exists. The levant is the second oldest wine region in the world after the Caucasus. Here is an interesting article. I will be hosting a tasting of Palestinian and Lebanese wines in March or April.

Natural Wine Venues in Rome that support Palestine

Cecafumo Vineria Via Asconio Pediano, 2

Another recently opened neighborhood wine bar is Cecafumo, but in Quadraro. It’s not central, so you’ll need to look up public transport to get there. Natural and biodynamic wines are once again the stars, accompanied by freshly prepared dishes and boards. A young and modern place that respects tradition and the local area. Cecafumo points out on social media, “We are convinced that good wine comes from deep roots.” It is an ideal place to toast, chat, and spend time together, leaving behind the everyday city rush. They organized a fundraiser to support the ongoing Global Sumad Flotilla. You’ll also find bottles from Molise.

Owine Via Guido De Ruggiero, 64

A charming little natural wine bar near the EUR in Montagnola owned by lifelong friends, where you can eat and drink well, and feel like you’re hanging with friends in a local bistrot. They host tastings with winemakers and have regular promotions. I think it is charming and has a good vibe.

Vigneto Piazza dei Condottieri 26/27

Owners Vincenzo Caruso, Cecilia Rinaldi, and Fabrizio Franzé have managed to create a Gen X vibe in their little corner of Pigneto, and now, with chef Luca Bizarro, the food has gone from usual wine bar charcuterie with some olives and taralli to incredible seasonal and inventive choices that never miss the mark. They regularly host producer nights. Great place for those of us who need a little bit of color and a break from millennial white. Good people, good new wave vibe.

Les Vignerons Via Goffredo Mameli 61

The original. The OG. I used to drive an hour and a half each way to stock up on bottles when Les Vignerons was still in Centecello. Antonio helped me organize a tasting with Georgian vigneron Nika Bakhia at that shop back in 2015. When I first met Alice Feiring in Rome, I took her there. Antonio Marini is a purist, and I appreciate it. He also has a knack for remembering his customers’ tastes, even if you haven’t been in there for a year. He and Marisa have punk and goth souls which is dear to my heart. They had a cat named Blixa (IYKYK) may his memory be a blessing, and the spirit of natural wine live in them, now in Trastevere. Not a wine bar, it is a bottle shop with an extensive portfolio of natural wine and craft beer.

Mescita Garbatella Via Luigi Fincati, 44

I have been trying to make Mescita my local for a few months now. I want to enjoy Garbatella before it is fully gentrified and full of expensive bistros for boomers and brunch places for anglophones, in a boring beige-and-white pseudo-Scandinavian vibe. I love getting off the metro and seeing Palestinian flags, labor movements, and street art calling for human rights and progress. Mescita has a great wine-by-the-glass list and interesting bottles, but it’s definitely for those who like glou-glou and funky wines. The last time I was there, I straight up asked them, “Do you support a free Palestine?” and their answer was a resounding, “Absolutely, yes.” They pass the vibe check on so many levels.

Piccola Bottega Merenda Viale Anicio Gallo 59/61

Situated in the Appio Claudio neighborhood but serving as a reference point for locally sourced groceries in the Tuscolano area, this small, 40-square-meter shop was founded by Giorgio Pace and Giulia Martucci. It stands out for its dedication to fruit, vegetables, cheeses, bread, and cured meats from the Roman countryside, offering a vision of agriculture as a cultural hub and the shop as a vibrant community meeting place. The store regularly hosts producers from Lazio for tastings and events.

Enoteca Mosto’ viale Pinturicchio, 32

Located in the Flaminio neighborhood near the MAXXI Museum, Mostò is a popular wine bar and deli managed by Ciro Borriello. Drawing on his deep experience, Borriello offers a curated selection of prestigious, organic, and natural wines. Guests can purchase bottles to take home or enjoy their choices on-site, accompanied by gourmet platters of cured meats and cheeses or small plates ideal for an aperitif or a relaxed dinner, making Mostò a favorite spot for wine lovers in Rome. If you are going to see AS Roma or Depeche Mode at Stadio Olimpico, it’s a good place to pre-game.

Fischio Piazzale Degli Eroi

Fischio is an outdoor kiosk in Prati near the Vatican that sells fun bottles, has excellent coffee, and often hosts DJ sets in the warmer months. It definitely attracts a younger crowd, which is great because they are converting young people before they get sold poison. The prices are reasonable, and the pours are generous, and it is a good place to go for a pre-dinner aperitivo if you are out with friends and want to share a bottle.

Vignaietto Via del Monte della Farina 38

My nearest and dearest are right in the heart of the city center. My friends and I call this the communist because it is located around the corner from the old communist party headquarters. There is no real food except some taralli and boiled eggs, and it is not an exclusively natural wine venue, but it does have good choices, excellent champagne, and a highlight: their old-school refrigerator. I tend to come during the day after a tour or after a class, so it is usually empty, and I get to chat while they restock. But after 6 pm, it can get quite busy, with every chair and table full and people spilling onto the street. The pours are good and cheap; this place truly embodies the idea of wine for the people.

Special mention:

DLR Frascati Via Nino Bixio, 1 Frascati

The Corriere calls it a trattoria with a punk spirit, which aligns with my values perfectly. They serve incredible wines and traditional, local meat-heavy dishes in Frascati. Nazis and Zionists are not welcome.

More Natural Wine

An online wine shop in Europe whose owners openly support a Free Palestine. They have gotten some hate for it. They offer good deals, an excellent monthly wine club, and ship to all of Europe.

If you own a wine bar or restaurant in Rome and openly support Palestine, I will be happy to add your venue to the list.

If you need to learn more about the Isreali US, UK, and EU funded genocide of Palestine, here is a guide to learn more.

Help me buy an abandoned vineyard

Please consider donating to these two families, links in text:

A Family in Danger, Children in Need of Safety

My name is Mahmoud Badawi. I am 35 years old, a husband, and the father of four beautiful children: Anas (8), Zeina (6), Adam (4), and our baby girl Celine, who was born just weeks before this genocide began.

Please help my friend Tareq El-bawab and his family.

Tareq used to be a software developer and Areej was newly pregnant and caring for their then 8 month old son when they were displaced almost 21 months ago. Their home was completely destroyed by a bombing in December 2024 so they have never been able to go home and have been displaced and trying to survive during this time. All money collected will be for their daily survival needs as life in Gaza has become unbearably expensive.

Subscribe now

Ettore and I were recently on his annual birthday trip to Venice. He had won a travel gift certificate from a travel company he works for, and they included a free tour of San Marco’s Basilica and the Doge’s Palace with a local Venetian guide, which was very informative and interesting. He discussed the purpose of art in the Venetian Republic, art as propaganda, art in context, and why he personally loves the Doge’s Palace over the city’s art museums. In his opinion, the art was alive because it was made for the palace, for the republic, the artworks and place gave each other context. It is art made for the palace in its original context, while paintings hanging in museums and galleries are often not in their original homes. They are acquired and collected, and we lose context while viewing them.

Of course, being me, it made me think about how we approach wine in such an unnatural way. We have dissected it and based teaching on an empirical method. These methods of learning divide and separate us from its ethereal nature. It is just another singular, unapproachable object to consume rather than a living thing that enhances human connection. This beverage can feel like medicine, lending emotion, expressive creativity, and connection to culture and land. Living wine that inspires us to feel more. Not something to consume just because of trends, influencers, or bottle art. Wine needs context. I find so much wine education feels so detached from the source and roots of wine, and there is a lot of gatekeeping in the wine world, which seems antithetical to the nature and purpose of wine.

I have spent so much money and time on wine education that I thought I needed at the time. I am here to tell you, you don’t need to spend your hard-earned cash on expensive degrees, sommelier certifications, or WSET diplomas to learn about wine, especially if your intention isn’t professional. If you want to know about wine organically, the first step is context. Think about your best wine moments, those moments when a wine seemed to dance in the depths of your soul. I have had many, and it never happened in a class. It was in a candlelit enoteca with excellent company, it was overlooking a vineyard during sunset, it was during a supra in Tbilisi that I was randomly invited to, which changed the trajectory of my life when I tasted a Tsolikuori so beautiful I had no words but was overwhelmed by emotions, as someone lovingly embraced me. That’s wine in context. Wine evokes. The rest is just building knowledge and vocabulary to understand how it is and why you taste and feel what you do when you drink it. Wine is a living product with a story that goes back thousands of years; it connects us to our Neolithic brothers and sisters.

There was a point about ten years ago when I thought I wanted to be on the MW track. I even completed ½ of the WEST Diploma before realizing it wasn’t for me. It felt like wine porn, and it reduced wine to regurgitation of facts and very rigid tasting standards. I didn’t learn about real wine, the true heart of it. I suppose I was looking for meaning in places that couldn’t give it to me. Fortunately, in Rome, Sandro Sangiorgi runs Porthos, which has a natural approach to tastings, seminars, and lectures. I studied with him for about five years, and it was like a re-education for those who had been through the system. But they were still just classes, and while the poetry and the Socratic style of discussions were extremely beneficial, I don’t think it was necessary. I think a lot of people are feeling a certain way about contemporary wine education, I loved this article by

ROTT Wine Club

"Wine Education” Is Turning Off the Next Generation

The wine industry has convinced itself that the only way to bring younger consumers in is through endless education. Masterclasses. Webinars. Infographics. Tasting grids. Twelve-slide carousels on “What Is Cabernet, Actually?” My God…

Read more

8 months ago · 19 likes · 10 comments · Colette

Subscribe now

What you need is time and social skills

Wine has always been about connection for me. That sometimes means people, and at other times it means nature or culture, and that is NOT often in formal wine education. I know this because I taught a class called Wines of Italy for five years, and I started with this approach, and realized early on that my students wanted to connect with Italian culture through wine, not just a PowerPoint and rigorous tasting. So I made the class a place of connection. Wine has been a part of Italian culture for some 6000 years on the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, and 3000 to 3500 years in Lazio. The Greeks called southern Italy Enotria. Wine existed here long before the Romans came up. That history shapes what we drink today. Wine came alive on our field trips to producers or during visits to an enoteca. These kids (they were university students) made that connection drinking in the wild, not in a fluorescently lit room with an ink board.

These are my suggestions to learn about wine while making connections.

Join a wine club or start one!

I started Women Who Wine Rome when I realized there was a lack of women-led and women-participating wine groups. I won’t get into the story here because I’ve already written about it, but it’s been a joy for me to share wine, meet new people, and organize visits for wine-curious ladies. But this is just my thing.

Most wine bars have wine clubs or host regular tastings. Sometimes a sommelier leads a tasting, or they invite a winemaker to talk about their wines. It’s an excellent opportunity to get more in-depth information about a region or a grape, and to discuss the wine with others. These are great occasions to taste multiple wines without buying numerous bottles.

It is very common here in Italy for an enoteca to host producers for tastings, and it is always great to meet the men and women who make the wine. The last producer-led tasting I went to was a vertical tasting of Pentima by Cantina Ribelà. I wanted to join because I had helped harvest for four of the harvests, so I feel a personal connection with these wines. A vertical tasting features wines from different vintages. This particular tasting was 10 years of Pentima. Vertical tastings are a great way to learn about vintage variation, how wine ages, how climate change is impacting wine, and how producers evolve. You can really get a sense of the person and the terroir through these tastings.

Starting your own small wine tasting group is another option. When I was studying for my sommelier certification and WSET, I joined small groups of 6-8, and we would open bottles relevant to our studies. Again, a great way to share the cost of bottles and learn. Most of the tastings were on theme with WEST studies, so we’d taste Burgundy or Bordeaux, Australian wine or whatever we needed. Usually, one person would lead a particular tasting, share the information, and we would all take turns. It was an excellent opportunity to taste multiple wines at once and to share the cost in a casual setting, usually in someone’s home. I like organizing thematic tastings for Women Who Wine: Amber wines, terracotta wines, Georgian wine, wines of Lazio, and Nebbiolo. There is so much variation and so many options.

I have been a member of the #winelover community since 2012, and with them I have travelled to wine regions all over Europe. We have been to Catalunya, multiple trips to Portugal, Serbia, Umbria, Friuli, Sicily, Romania, Cyprus, Türkiye, and Greece. A member typically organizes the trip, and then we join. My company, Taste Georgia, organized a visit to Georgia. These were very in-depth crash courses into regional wines that I wouldn’t trade for anything.

Which brings me to this:

Subscribe now

Visit Producers!

I love organizing visits to producers in Lazio that I already know, and I love joining visits that other people manage. A three- to four-hour visit to a winery, walking through the vineyards, digging up soil to smell, seeing other flora and fauna, and witnessing how a winemaker manages what nature gives her and transforms it into this ethereal, magical liquid in her cellar, is worth its weight in gold. I learn more in those moments than in 60 hours of wine classes. It’s inspiring to see someone’s passion and to visit a place through their eyes. You can see the spark in their eyes and their love for the land, and how magical it is that this transformation can be bottled, and I can enjoy it years later.

Join a harvest!

As a neurodivergent tactile learner, the best teaching method for me is kinesthetic. I need to feel things. I learn by doing. I realized, within a year of pursuing the sommelier certification, that I needed real-world field experience. Because we tend to buy wines in shops off the shelves, the fact that it is an agricultural product can get lost. I don’t think harvest work is for everyone, though. It is back-breaking work, and these days it’s usually in the heat, thanks to climate change. Harvests are earlier and earlier every season.

For me, realizing I didn’t know shit about wine, even with all my formal education, drove me to seek out people who were willing to let me join them. My first harvest was with my local friends, contadini who make wine in demijohns for their own consumption. About 500-100 lts a year, depending on the year. With four of us, we were able to harvest the entire vineyard by noon and enjoy a fabulous vendemmia lunch. I then inserted myself into San Diego’s own Los Pilares. Michael and Coleman have become true mentors to me. Every time I visit, I call Coleman up and tag along with whatever he is doing. Planting a vineyard at 3000 feet? Sure. Bottling from an amphora? Great. Learn pruning. Absolutely. They are the most generous teachers, and I am blessed to have known them for over a decade. Here in Rome, I have worked harvests with Cantina Ribelà and Cantina Terracanta, both special places. Terracanta uses qvevri, so being able to not only harvest grapes but also help crush and get the must into the qvevri for their Nina was a very special experience for me, very emotional to combine two of my great wine loves: Lazio and Georgia. These experiences have planted a dream in me: I want to tend my own vineyard, and I know I want an old pergola vineyard with mixed grapes, including Bellone. I want to make wine for my friends and family. I have no desire to get into the industry as a winemaker. But I have learned that working in vineyards not only helped solidify my wine education but also planted a seed in my heart for my own ten-year plan. I know it will happen.

If you are interested in wine harvest, I suggest volunteering with smaller, family-owned wineries and working with organic wineries to avoid harmful chemical residues. Many wineries will advertise on their social media in July and August that they need help and what they offer. I never have time to stay for a week, so I stay local and work for a day or so, but many of them provide room and board in exchange for help.

Wine Fairs

I have a love/hate relationship with wine fairs. I love them for the palpable energy and the opportunity to talk to many producers in a short time. I hate them because I hate aggressive, drunk men, and it is inevitable that after a few hours, there will be drunk men. So I tend to go early, and on the first day, when everyone is fresh and hasn’t been out coke binging all weekend at the many, many afterparties that occur. I also love going on trade-only days, like a Monday. I won’t lie, I’ve been part of the party scene at some fair. Not coke-fueled on my part, but Jesus H. the crash. I once organized for a group of natural producers from Georgia to come to Rome for a fair and organized several tastings outside the fair, and I swear to god the crash after was so intense I had to hibernate for 3 weeks. I’m too old for this now. But if you are into the salon scene, the best wine weekend is in Tbilisi for Zero Compromise. And the best place to get up-to-date information on wine fairs and salons is over at Not Drinking Poison.

Wine fairs are great because they bring many producers together over the course of one to three days, so you can really taste many different wines and get to know your own palate and interests just by tasting and tasting and tasting. I am pretty loyal to Tiziana Gallo’s Vignaioli Naturali fair here in Rome. She was the first person in Rome to organize a fair dedicated to Natural Wine, and for that, I will always attend. I always try to arrange a small group. Globally, I love Raw Wine, Orange Glou, Vin Natur, FIVI, VAN, and my dream is to attend my hometown natural wine fair, Nat Diego.

I love this video by . I am telling y’all, its just a a question of time.

A Table For Gastronomes

Wine Basics: How to Develop Your Wine Palate (pt. 1)

Every week, I share wine lessons based on the questions people ask the most—whether to wine professionals in shops, restaurants, or tasting rooms. No question is ever too “silly” or strange…

Read more

7 months ago · 2 likes · Alice Achayo

Read

Read from a variety of wine writers, even those you disagree with. Read people with more experience, read work by novices. Get involved in the conversation. You never know. One book by changed the course of my wine career.

Here is a list of wine writers on Substack I highly recommend. Go and subscribe to them.

THE FEIRING LINE | | Substack

The Morning Claret | | Substack

NOT DRINKING POISON | | Substack

Maker’s Table | | Substack

Tanisha’s Substack | | Substack

EVERYDAY DRINKING | | Substack

LA MESCITA: Natural wine perspectives from Pipette Magazine | | Substack

Aanab News | | Substack

Wine Is Confusing | | Substack

Drinks Insider | | Substack

Thirst Behavior | | Substack

ROTT Wine Club | | Substack

And this list of five books by is comprehensive for all of us.

Subscribe now

You can read my very comprehensive article on natural wine:

I started 2026 in the hospital, where I have been since December 15th, with a blocked colon and a fistula. I spent the holidays in the surgical ward of Rome’s Tor Vergata without food or a drop of water. I haven’t had a bite to eat since December 19th while I await surgery. My case is complicated because I have Crohn’s disease. The first approach was to see if fasting would offer some relief and reduce inflammation, because they want to keep as much of my intestine intact as possible. Ten days into the fast, there was no change. It didn’t get worse, but it didn’t get better, so here I am, still, and I feel like I am in limbo. I am awaiting surgery. For ten days, I was on an IV with just the basics to keep me alive. Now I have a portal that gives me calories intravenously. There was no lasagna or panettone for me this holiday season, but I have had a lot of time for introspection and for thinking about what I want my life to look like in the future.

One of my goals a few years ago was to feature Radical Women in food and wine, but work got in the way. I started this series with , but it fell by the wayside. Since I am likely to be unable to guide this year or travel much, I want to put more effort into this, starting with radical women in food and wine in my local area. Ideally, this will be a monthly feature, but again, I need to see how my recovery post-surgery goes. I have written so many producer profiles from Lazio that need editing and publishing, the real work in writing. I have been writing about the wines of Lazio for 15 years, and in the past few years, I am delighted to see that our region is no longer unknown and is gaining recognition. That’s always been the goal. I would love to weave these stories with articles that help people learn about wine easily. There is no point in writing in depth about wine producers if the foundations of wine aren’t there. You’ll also see more about my Women Who Wine Rome Project which I have decided to go forth with on my own, as the last collaboration didn’t work out.

Fasting has made me very highly aware and full of energy. Being ill has made me realize that maybe I do not have the healthiest relationship with food. By this, I don’t mean that I eat unhealthily. In fact, I feel like I have a form of orthorexia. I have put so much faith in food being the cure that I failed to take care of myself medically. The fact is, Crohn’s disease is a chronic disease that should be treated like type 1 diabetes, constantly monitored and under medical supervision. In my mind, my use of pharmaceuticals was a moral failure. I thought I was fine on a whole food plant-based diet, using Chinese medicine, and other alternative remedies, but the reality is, modern medicine is what will keep me alive, as is the case with the whole world.

Most of my fellow hospital guests are much older than I am. Some with severe cardiovascular diseases, many with intestinal cancers. It’s not the Mediterranean Diet that’s keeping these 80-plus-year-olds alive. It’s Italy’s healthcare system. When we really think about it, it’s modern medicine that has improved people’s lives and increased life expectancy worldwide. Children survive childhood, and mothers survive childbirth due to modern medicine. I am not dead of a perforated colon and sepsis due to modern medicine.

It takes an effort for me to feel like this flare-up isn’t a moral failing, and that is something I need to get over. I am not the cause of my disease, and my disease doesn’t define me. It does, however, feel like I have a fire under me, pushing me to do what I always say I am going to do but never get around to. I want to fulfill my goals as a writer, gardener, beekeeper, reader, and activist, but I also want to be realistic and more aware of my limits as a sick person. If I don’t accomplish these goals, it isn’t because I am a failure or lazy or whatever bullshit I tell myself. I don’t want to bully myself. I’d love to be a person who can have an editorial calendar and be consistent on here and build my audience, so that hey, I actually can work from home, which is healthier for me. But I also know that I will need to rest, that I will have bad days, that I am currently in a flare-up, and it may take months for me to reach a balance. Post-surgery recovery is hard, and I don’t even know what the outcome of my surgery will be. They don’t know how much intestine they will remove. They don’t know whether I will need a temporary ostomy bag. I won’t say those things until I wake up. Until then, having goals and ideas helps me look forward to something.

Subscribe now

If you’re in Rome and want to visit me, please do! If we know each other whatsapp me and I will let you know when and how. I have had so many friends and family visit it is really keeping my morale up. Ettore is on a constant bedside vigil and my other husband Sergio has visited almost nightly. My best friend Barbara has been at my house cleaning, caring for the dogs and making sure Ettore eats. It has been so beautiful to know I have support here and I am not alone.

Wow, I did it! One whole year of posting a monthly gardening essentials.

I plan to continue next year, adding more permaculture and beekeeping information as I learn, along with seasonal recipes from Carla to keep her memory alive. You can check out her recipes at Cook With Carla Project, a website created by her friends to keep her memory alive through food.

Readers, it is cold. When I go outside to do any kind of work in the garden, I have to be swift and efficient because my hands cannot handle the chill. It is a quiet time where I am. I mostly find myself laying down cardboard in some of the beds to prep for the spring. I am going to take a new beekeeper course. For those of you who don’t know, beekeeping was my sourdough during the pandemic. I learned online, so I didn’t really have much on-hand experience when I started. I just did it, but now I want to join the local beekeeper association and start from the beginning, since Italian Beekeeping is slightly different from the Australian way.

I am personally delighted by the cold, even if it hurts. The frosts are perfect for disease and pest control, as mildew spores and pest eggs are killed in the frost, so I am hoping next year will be an excellent olive harvest.

As a reminder, I am in Lazio, Italy, near Rome. My region typically falls between gardening zones 8a and 11a in the northern hemisphere.

What is in Season?

It is time to bring a bit of that summer sunshine into your life in the form of citrus, pears, apples, pomegranates, and late-season persimmons. Unlike last year, the clementines are super juicy and sweet. A true marvel. Violet artichokes are in season (not the Roman globe artichokes in case you’re wondering). Fennel and every kind of brassica are available in all the markets, along with the pink and purple radishes. It is so easy to eat a rainbow at the moment.

What work to do?

December is the quietest month in the garden, but that doesn’t mean there is no activity. If you have planted a fall and winter garden, the most critical work is shoring up beds with leaves and other compost materials to protect them from frost. Make sure your tunnels are intact and undamaged.

What to Sow?

You can still sow green manure crops like broad beans, lentils, or peas.

I will once again plant Solstice Garlic and Onions. I sow them on December 21st and harvest them on June 21st. It has always been successful, so I will do it again. The only change will be switching which beds I use, and I will add marigold seeds as a companion plant. My ultimate goal is to be self-sufficient in garlic and onions year-round, but so far, I have managed only about 8 months. I plan to change that in 2026.

Full Moon: December 5th

New Moon: December 20th

I have to admit I am writing this for myself. I wanted to write a monthly gardening post for a year, and this month, I just haven’t had the motivation or health to get around to it until now. I have had a cough that won’t quit for a month, and I had a trip to San Diego for my niece’s wedding, which I officiated, so I am a little burnt out and tired.

Before I left, I sowed in broad beans and peas and covered my beds with cardboard to suppress weeds. I have just been digging around, pulling up the last of the summer garden and basic prepping for next year, and for my Solstice Garlic and Onions.

As a reminder, I am in Lazio, Italy, near Rome. My region typically falls between gardening zones 8a and 11a in the northern hemisphere.

What’s in Season?

It is officially citrus season! It is such a joy to have so many different types of citrus available in central Italy. Lemons, mandarins, all sorts of oranges, citrons. Not much in the way of limes, but that’s ok. My favorite fall tree is the persimmon tree; the leaves are incredible, and if the leaves have fallen, most of the fruits are still attached and look like Christmas balls. For us bitter lovers, radicchio is in season. SO many colors of pinks and purples. They are so delicious, especially the vanilla. Chestnuts, mushrooms, small purple artichokes, all the brassicas, lettuces, cardoons, potatoes, celery root, pomegranates, and new growth cicoria. It’s a bounty for sure and a great time for foraging. It is truly a delicious time of year, and relatively easy to eat a rainbow.

What Work To Do and what to plant?

Now is the time to prep beds and protect them for winter. In most English gardening books, they will say to lay compost in your beds, but I think it’s a waste of compost; the cold will damage all the microorganisms. Leave it in the boxes over the winter. The worms will thank you.

Now is a good time to sow borage for spring. I personally make seed bombs with perennials and throw them around the edges of my garden. These will sprout earlier, giving bees and other pollinators something to forage in late February and early March.

If you grow tulips, now is the time to get them in beds or boxes. They like a cold snap.

It’s a little late for transplanting cabbage and broccoli, but if you have set up tunnels, you can still get them in the ground before it gets super cold. In my area, you can still sow in spinach, peas, lentils, cime di rape, and carrots, and if you haven’t already, sow in some broad beans. They are one of the best cover crops around and delicious!

Lunar cycle

Full Moon: November 5^th

New Moon: November 20^th

Call for pitches: Once a month in 2026 I would like to have different writers featured in my newsletter. I am interested in articles on the intersection of food systems, food or wine/drink anthropology, agriculture, food security, feminism, equality, history, natural wine, system disruption, anti-colonization in food systems etc. I can pay $250. I want to post my first article in January 2026.

Nobody is free until everyone is free…

Please send pitch to wineclassldm@gmail.com

With some samples of your writing

Please consider making a donation to the Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library in the West Bank. The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library (PHSL), founded in 2014 in the West Bank village of Battir, began as an attempt to recover ancient Palestinian seeds — and their stories — in order to get them back into people’s hands and hearts. PHSL is an interactive art and agriculture project that also aims to start conversations, exchange knowledge, and share the stories of food and farming that have been buried away, waiting to sprout like seeds. It is also a living archive of stories of people and plants, and it aims to inspire a new world using the seed as a dissident traveling across borders and checkpoints to defy violence and oppression while reclaiming life and presence.

Please avoid genocide seeds bred in Israel.

In Italy I buy genocide free seeds from Cercatori di Semi and Sativa.