"I had a mother who approached me to tell me she had learned a lot from prior cooking demonstrations about healthy eating," he says, "and, because of what she learned about nutrition and about reducing saturated fats and sodium, and increasing fiber intake in her diet, she lost over 20 pounds. And her daughter lost 10 pounds." This is a really important achievement, he notes, in an area struggling with obesity and all its related health problems, including diabetes. The jury's still out on whether

Now, to be fair, the time was short. The store was only open for six months before residents were surveyed. Matthews says most residents knew that the store was there and that it offered healthy food. But only 26 percent said it was their regular "go to" market. And, as might be expected, those who lived close to the store shopped there most regularly.

e chocolate my mom bought me as a treat to comfortmyself when she was away on business

ere are hundreds of objectively sadder foods. An unsold pie in a deli case, forexample, is a celebratory food that should be shared at a bustling table but is nowwasting away in isolation. ere is the sadness of an unattended lemonade stand or offree samples when no one takes any. An untouched tray full of mini quiches offeredby a cheerful employee beckoning “Would you like to try some quiche today?” touninterested shoppers is so much sadder than a personal pizza

In the traditional fashion, she was the house accountant, the maid, the launderer, the disciplinarian, the driver, the secretary, and, of course, the cook. She was also my first basketball coach. In South Korea, where girls’ high-school basketball is a popular spectator sport, she had been a star, the point guard for the national high-school team that once won the all-Asia championships. I learned this one Saturday during the summer, when I asked my father if he would go down to the school yard and shoot some baskets with me. I had just finished the fifth grade, and wanted desperately to make the middle-school team the coming fall.

“Go out and play with your friends,” she’d snap in Korean, “or better yet, do your reading and homework.” She knew that I had already done both, and that as the evening approached there was no place to go save her small and tidy kitchen, from which the clatter of her mixing bowls and pans would ring through the house.

What is evidence? It is a moment remembered from a novel, a story overheard, a movie, an experience. It’s anything you use to think through your concepts.

Many personal essays will not come out of a place of grief. They will come out of other experiences, other stories. They will come out of a moment of shame, or embarrassment, longing, or the complications of a particular joy. They will come out of a moment that feels like a small fire inside—you don’t even have to know why it burns, only recognize that it does and be willing to follow it and feel it out.

While the pot bubbled, I rifled through old notes. I was looking for an interview with Um Hani that I conducted for The Gaza Kitchen, the cookbook I co-authored. Reading the transcript, I was immediately transported back to her kitchen table in Gaza.

I couldn’t rescue my aunt in Gaza, but I can keep her recipes alive.

In World War II, American G.I.s ate tins of lobster in the trenches. Yet this past summer, lobster rolls, heavy with sweet claw and knuckle meat and dripping butter, sold for as much as $34 each in Maine.

So much seafood was once dismissed as the debris of the sea: eels, snared from the Thames River in 16th-century England and tucked into pies in lieu of meat; clams, eaten by New England colonists only in times of desperation; oysters, offered all-you-can-eat for 6 cents at bars in 19th-century New York City