What I’ve Been Reading (Instead of Writing)

My favorite food systems read of late, plus garden pics and fiction recs

I have spent this past month off of social media, aside from the occasional peek into Instagram on desktop and a frankly shameful reliance on Facebook’s mobile site (not the app). The latter I have tried to curate as solely Buy Nothing, plant ID, century-old rowhome repair, and fat fashion groups, but the Chrome extension I use to filter out the ads, suggested posts, and other garbage doesn’t work on the mobile site. With my food and fiber arts and farming interests, I am served a sea of tradwife-adjacent content like this as I try to give away an old dresser or find a roofer to fix my skylight:

OK, I do most of these, but I’m pretty sure we have different reasons for not trusting the government

I began taking a social media break each June as a birthday gift to myself, and this year, it’s hard to see myself going back. So far in June, I have read 7 books—approximately 7 times more than usual—and have enjoyed feeling enriched rather than hollowed out by the words I’m putting into my brain for hours each day.

When I don’t look at social media, I’m not goaded into feeling bad about myself by seeing other people having a nice time on Instagram. I’m not in a perpetual clench due to the deluge of bad news and takes on BlueSky, a platform I never really used but subbed as scroll fodder when Twitter became unusable. Over the weekend, I spent my time gardening, making ceramics, and hanging out with my friends at book club. I remaining blissfully ignorant that the US had, while I was living my life, bombed Iran until I pulled up the homepage of my city’s newspaper on Monday morning.

I don’t feel great about how easy it can be to insulate yourself from bad news or other truths you don’t want to hear, though keeping some distance feels healthier than monitoring social media 24/7, which ratchets my hypervigilance into overdrive. I do feel a bit like I’m missing out on what my IRL friends and internet friends are doing when I don’t use Instagram, and I sort of feel like I don’t exist when I don’t share I’m doing with the .1% of my followers who actually see my posts. I reached something like a life goal the other day when I harvested blueberries I grew on my front stoop into a ceramic bowl I made myself—but did it even matter if no one was around to like it? (Yes.)

Then again, aside from the dozens of cat pictures I take each day, I haven’t been “documenting” life with my phone as much. Part of the trick to quitting, or seriously curbing your use of, social media is grayscaling your display to make whatever’s on the screen look boring. A side effect of this is that you’re generally less interested in taking pictures as well as looking at them, and when you do snap a pic, it’s hard to tell how well it came out.

Delicious yet out-of-focus blueberries

The berries might not be in focus, but it does capture what was a lovely vibe.

As my brain has been able to breathe a little during this time, I have felt moved to write, but very little capacity to actually do so—despite no dearth of relevant topics both positive (attending the Meeting of the Milkmaids last month, filing copy for a couple of upcoming Culture articles) and infuriating (climate.gov being basically shut down, literally everything else). 2025 has been rough for me in many different domains, as my therapist would call them, and it honestly feels like an achievement to work and feed myself and maintain some semblance of hygiene and stay on top of basic adult tasks. It doesn’t help that I write for a living, and often, the last thing I want to do at the end of a long day is more tap-tap in front of a screen.

But I have been doing lots of reading. Today, I’m going to share what’s been on my summer reading list this month with you. Next time, I’ll put together a list of my favorite newsletters—mostly food-centric ones, but a few others I always open, too. And hopefully by then, I’ll have the link to my latest Culture article to share.

I have shelves full of nonfiction—food systems, food histories, food memoirs—that I buy but then take forever to get to because reading them can feel like work. Barons: Money, Power, and America’s Food Industry sounds fascinating, but as bedtime reading, it’s literal nightmare fodder. So for my social media cleanse, I leaned into fiction, mostly.

I don’t follow contemporary literature as closely as I should, so choosing what to read can feel like trying to pick a perfectly sweet, juicy watermelon from a giant bin of identical duds. I pulled these together thanks to a combination of Libby’s “Available Now” search filter, some weeks-old ebook holds that fortuitously came through, and recs from friends and acquaintances.

I read Gone Girl (starts somewhat promising and then goes wildly off the misogynistic rails), Sally Rooney’s latest, Intermezzo (stream-of-consciousness sad Irish people in relationships), Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (fun, funny novel about intergenerational trauma), a three-book collection of Raylan Givens stories and novels by Elmore Leonard (Justified hive, rise up), I’ll Look So Hot in a Coffin: And Other Thoughts I Used to Have About my Body by Carla Sosenko (deformity/disability memoir in essays), and Trust & Safety: A Novel by Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichmann (bougie, tech-obsessed Brooklyn hetero couple buy a fixer-upper in the Hudson Valley and rent an outbuilding to a local queer couple, chaos ensues). The latter would make an excellent beach/lake read.

But my little book club’s most recent (nonfiction) selection was actually right up my alley: Gastropod co-host Nicola Twilley’s excellent, brain-breaking Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, which came out last year.

My understanding of food storage, the cold chain, and produce itself has been deepened and transformed after listening to this book, much of it on the trip back from the Berkshires to Philly after Milkmaids. Twilley takes you from underground cold storage caves in Missouri to one of the few reefer trucks in Rwanda to precisely calibrated dry-aging rooms in NYC to Svalbard’s seed vault. Anyone who eats should read it—but it’s especially salient for food professionals of just about any stripe.