Kate Cox

Dear Reader, I’m writing with news I hoped I’d never have to report. After nearly seven years publishing some of the most provocative and memorable food stories in journalism, The Counter will cease publication on May 20. We are journalists in a community of journalists; we know there will be follow-up questions. The reasons are many, but the shorthand is this: We do not have sufficient future funding to keep publishing.

by Jim Berman + Kate Cox 06.25.2021, 12:37pm “I don’t need to be rich. I’m a cook, that’s never going to happen anyhow”: This furloughed chef borrowed a food truck, served Thanksgiving, and unearthed an idea he could scale Forty-eight-year-old Jim Berman wouldn’t call his first food job “cooking,” per se. At age 15, he left his hometown of Pittsburgh and went to Canada for the summer to wait tables at a fishing club that needed help in the kitchen.

The Counter asks every journalist’s go-to nutrition expert how to infuse our consumption with some critical thinking. When I spoke to Marion Nestle two days into September, it felt like I was calling from another life, far removed from the one I’d been living when I last saw her. But in fact, it was only mid-February when we had crossed paths, at New York University, where Nestle is the Paulette Goddard professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health, emerita.