The Healthy Food Myth, Erotic Bar Games, and More Long Reads

Read this week's top food writing.

From Candy To Juleps, Persians Left Imprint On Many Edible Delights

NPR

Apart from trade, Persian words traveled in other ways as well. Conquerors proved to be excellent couriers. Alexander the Great, the Crusaders, the Mongols, and especially the British — who colonized India, where Persian was the court language of the Mughal emperors — all had a role to play.

Highly Recommended: Erotic Photo Hunt

Eater

In the last few years, Erotic Photo Hunt has become my most beloved, most eagerly shared bar game. There have been many: Frat parties and unfinished basements and our culture's insatiable collective thirst for binge drinking-as-sport have brought me beer pong and flip cup, our country's most celebrated drinking games, which I played poorly and to excess as a socially anxious sorority girl. But now, as an adult who spends time in bars for social reasons as much as inebriatory ones, I've learned that the games I can play while sipping quietly on a beer or five are the true heroes — pastimes that enhance the drinking experience, rather than turning it into an extreme sport of consumption.

The Art of Toilet Cleanliness

Lucky Peach

I guarantee you after his second free shift, Fred will give him a check. It's that commitment: somebody who's thinking, Whether you like it or not I am coming to work here. If you come to work for free and you're a loudmouthed asshole and all you do is talk, I'll enjoy kicking your ass to the curb, but if you walk in here and hustle and you show your intention you'll be employed quicker than you know.

No food is healthy. Not even kale.

Washington Post

Last March, the Food and Drug Administration sent the nut-bar maker Kind a letter saying their use of the word "healthy" on their packaging was a violation (too much fat in the almonds). Kind responded with a citizens' petition asking the FDA to reevaluate its definition of the word.

A Falafel House Divided

Roads and Kingdoms

They work meters from one another every day, preparing falafel the way their father taught them. But instead of sharing a kitchen, Zouhair alone inhabits the original Damascus street shop. One store over, Fouad has a new shop, emblazoned with red signs that read "Falafel M. Sahyoun." A single white tile wall separates them, a boundary that is never breached. The brothers no longer speak. Lebanon has long been a country defined by divisions, and though the brothers' rift is not sectarian, the uneasy relationship between two falafel makers competing in close proximity is a reflection of the problems that still haunt the country.

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