The CEO is 32. The CFO is 28. Their startup is the second-largest burger chain in the country.

From Norwegian waters to European plates.

On wine’s sacred and profane history.

How P. Rajagopal, the founder of one of the world’s largest vegetarian restaurant chains, got away with murder.

The story of Soylent, a Silicon Valley concoction designed to replace your meals.

The creators of some of the most distinctive craft beers in the world are identical twins from Denmark. They also can’t stand each other.

Previously: Jonah Weiner on the Longform Podcast.

An essay on the service economy.

An overweight teenager's psychological test with an unhappy neighbor.

"Mrs. Butler never commented on my weight. I wanted to believe she didn’t see my layers of fat or hear how my breathing quickened if I exerted much physical effort. My neighbor wasn’t gorgeous like a supermodel, but she moved her long graceful limbs with an elegance I could only envy."

“More than a café, the shop is a carpentered-together, ingenious mechanism—a specialized tool—designed to keep Carrelli tethered to herself.”

The gay influence on American cooking.

Comic miscues ensue at a private family dinner.

"Also, I’m a pretty big guy, so I often find myself appointed the unofficial bouncer on these sorts of occasions. It was Dumpling Night. I know that because when I walked past the steam table, a teenage girl was there with tongs and she said, 'Dumpling?'"

How living off food stamps is making South Texans obese but leaving them hungry.

The search for the hottest chili.

The Giant Pacific Octopus is, in the words of a Seattle conservationist, a “glamour animal.” It is also tasty. Therein lies the conflict.

On the biggest food fraud in U.S. history.

Undercover in an industrial slaughterhouse.

Previously: Conover discusses this story on the Longform Podcast.

Three days on road with former chef and current rap eccentric Action Bronson.

How MSG became “perhaps the most infamously misunderstood and maligned three letters in the history of food.”

The story of a machine.

The fight to save a “delicious gold mine.”

The “naked technological realities” of America’s heartland and how they power a “cosy coastal world of pretend farmers’ markets and happy cows.”

A woman enters a casual relationship with a butcher.

"He was lazy about it. He told me he couldn’t that night but could he give me a call? It was two weeks and one — almost two — skipped Five Dollar Fridays later that he called and demanded why I had not come in yet. I arrived at a quarter to nine. He grinned and dug his knife into pork liver. Then a plucked duck. I ate the spinach rolls he set out for me and watched him slice away. Finally I told him I was starving and he looked up from his bloodied counter and grinned some more. He put his meat in the giant freezer behind him, hung his apron and walked out to me. It was the first time, I realized, that I’d seen his legs. I could tell they were brawny behind his jeans. In fact he looked like a hockey player and I wished he did that instead of dismembering dead animals all day."

The odyssey of Kim Jong-il’s personal chef.

A trip to a pepper-eating contest in remote India.

The trade in fake olive oil.