海角大神

In this season of cooking and baking, I got talking with staffer Kendra Nordin Beato about food 鈥� and sharing a laugh over her recent story about cranberry sauce wars. But something else emerged from our chat 鈥� how many food-related stories the Monitor published this year,聽and why that is so natural to our publication.

Reliable access to food sits at the crux of people鈥檚 sense of stability and of opportunity. Ensuring that 鈥� or dealing with its absence 鈥撀爄s a challenge the entire world shares. That鈥檚 why we continually explore, at so many levels, how we rise to meet it.

There鈥檚 locally: the East St. Louis grocer who nurtures a neighborhood short of markets, as Tara Adhikari reported. The cooks profiled by Patrik Jonsson who prep for a year to fill the stomachs and hearts of 15,000 people with a fine Thanksgiving meal at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. The new attention to the struggles some military families face in putting food on the table, as Anna Mulrine Grobe spotlighted.

There鈥檚 globally: Howard LaFranchi reported this fall on the United Nations鈥� first-ever global food systems summit, which showcased a progress-oriented shift toward reducing massive food waste and loss. Our intern team, in its series on Hunger in America, surfaced efforts to shape better policies. Earlier, our 2017 famine series identified the building of聽resilience in tackling severe drought in Africa.

And culturally, of course, food is bound tightly to our foundational tales and sense of identity. Take a look at Richard Mertens鈥� story about a Native American food sovereignty movement, Sara Miller Llana鈥檚 look at old root cellars driving Newfoundland鈥檚 鈥済row local鈥� movement, or a mother-daughter bond strengthened by Korean food.听

We care about tracking progress in bridge-building, in driving innovation. And that鈥檚 why we care about food.