Cartoon by Barbara Smaller. For more: http://nyr.kr/V58KDO

On this week’s podcast, Calvin Trillin and Amelia Lester discuss what our food says about our culture.

This week in the magazine, Calvin Trillin writes about the eating pleasures to be had in Oaxaca, Mexico. Here, Trillin joins Lester and Sasha Weiss to talk about current food trends, what they look for in a restaurant, and how the Immigration Act of 1965 revolutionized eating in America. Also, Joan Acocella on why so many good novels end badly.

That is what it means to learn to eat. Few of us are encouraged to do as Julia did, and eat in a way that lets us be formed, neatened, honed; that lets us take on eating as a thing to learn, a path that may leave us, god forbid and god grant, tasting and thinking of things differently than we do now.

Video: The Next Big Apple?

This week in the magazine, John Seabrook writes about the process of building a better apple, focussing on the creation of a new variety “trying to take its place as the next hot apple” called SweeTango. He goes to Minnesota, where the apple was bred, and finds that the SweeTango is “a piece of intellectual property…. SweeTango has more in common with the apple on my laptop than the apple I used to carry to school in my lunchbox.” Here he shares footage from his trip, discusses the process of breeding and developing an apple, and delights in the renaissance of apple varieties in supermarkets and greenmarkets.

The Best is the Enemy of the Food

“When it comes to food, the best is the enemy of the good, and the good is the enemy of the merely O.K.—which I’m O.K. with… And even instant coffee quickly turns me human in the morning.”

- With the Food Issue out, Cartoon Editor Bob Mankoff looks at some cartoons for non-foodies: http://nyr.kr/rtAV3G

The Food At Our Feet: Why is Foraging All the Rage?

I spent the summer foraging, like an early hominid with clothes. It didn’t matter that the first thing I learned about that daunting pastime of hunter-gatherers and visionary chefs was that nature’s bounty is a thorny gift. Thorny, or, if you prefer, spiny, prickly, buggy, sticky, slimy, muddy, and, occasionally, so toxic that one of the books I consulted for my summer forays carried a disclaimer absolving the publisher of responsibility should I happen to end up in the hospital or, worse, in the ground, moldering next to the Amanita phalloides that I’d mistaken for a porcini. I was not deterred.