When Food Is Only a Portion of the Story

Every story has a food angle, Kim Severson likes to say.

This thinking allows Ms. Severson, who covers the country’s food culture for The New York Times, to write about themes and topics that are larger than the portions on our plates. With that lens in mind, she reported that our pandemic-era isolation was driving America’s renewed love for the drive-through. After attending an organic farming conference in Georgia, she wrote about a farm’s history of slavery.

Last week, The Times published an article by Ms. Severson about a dispute between a vegetarian restaurant in New York City and a small farm in the Texas Hill Country that shared the same name: Dirt Candy. Inside a trademark fight between the Cutler family, who own the farm, and Amanda Cohen, who runs the restaurant, Ms. Severson found threads of what she calls “America’s crisis of mistrust,” the country’s reordered political spectrum and the developing ideology around organic food.

In an interview with Times Insider, Ms. Severson discussed the article, her role at The Times and the rapidly evolving culture surrounding food in the United States. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.

Your job is to examine food. How does your profession influence your eating habits?

I see eating as part of my work. Any time I have a chance to eat something that I haven’t tried before, I do that. If I come across something at a farmers’ market, or maybe I’m out in the country and somebody is making a dish I haven’t seen before, I’ll ask how they make it. Sometimes in the grocery store, if I see a person with something interesting in their cart, I stop them and ask how they’re going to use it. I understand and appreciate the artistry that goes into a four-star restaurant, but day to day, I’m with my teenager. We enjoy McDonald’s French fries. I cook dinner regularly. I review cookbooks and I test recipes. It’s all one big information stream.

When in your career did you come up with the philosophy that food could be a window into larger social issues?

I started writing about food when I was a reporter at The Anchorage Daily News in Alaska. I was the restaurant critic there. Food allowed me to get out on the Iditarod Trail, and to find out how people get groceries to the bush. Then I went to The San Francisco Chronicle, and the idea was to cover news around food. San Francisco is a great food town, and I had good editors who believed that you could tell any story through food. That really cemented it for me.