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Kat Kinsman on Muck Rack

Kat Kinsman

Verified
(She/Her)
New York
As seen in: Food & Wine, Tinfoil Swans, CNN, CNN Travel, Medium, MSN, MSN Malaysia, MSN Singapore, Yahoo Entertainment, Yahoo Life, Yahoo Canada, Yahoo News Australia and
Covers:  food, mental health, chefs, restaurants, food news, bartenders, hospitality, anxiety
Doesn't Cover: tech, diets, wellness, parenting, kids, fashion, new products, wine, roundups, restaurant opening, menu specials, travel
Executive Features Editor @foodandwine. Founder of @chefswithissues. Author of Hi, Anxiety. Host of the Tinfoil Swans podcast.
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Kat Kinsman’s Journalist Portfolio

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My Epic Fail

My Epic Fail

Food & Wine Magazine — None of us love talking about how we failed. We may obsess about these flubs, missteps, errors in judgment, and mortifying mistakes on constant loop in our heads, but generally, most of us aren't going out of our way to shine a spotlight on our biggest mess-ups.
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The Best Damn Wine Club I Ever Joined

The Best Damn Wine Club I Ever Joined

Food & Wine Magazine — In the white-knuckle days of the 2009 recession, I wasn't so much cutting corners on my spending as taking a Microplane to the splintered places in my budget where I'd already lopped off whole branches.
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When Nanner Puddin' Means It's Going to Be OK

When Nanner Puddin' Means It's Going to Be OK

Food & Wine Magazine — I almost chickened out on going to Mama Diva's that November day in 1998, and my chest seizes up when I think about it now. Here's me then: 26, newly-ish single, broke as hell, attempting to breathe.
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Where'd You Go, Rocco DiSpirito?

Where'd You Go, Rocco DiSpirito?

Food & Wine Magazine — Rocco DiSpirito broke up my relationship. To be fair, it was on the rocks already, but that lunch at Union Pacific in the summer of 2004 opened the cracks even wider. I spent the subway ride home rhapsodizing about chicken salad with daikon and Champagne vinaigrette and sautéed skate with lime pickle, Swiss chard, and brown butter to the increasing annoyance of the man I was dating.
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Ode to Joy

Ode to Joy

Food & Wine Magazine — There's a Goethe quote at the beginning of Joy of Cooking , and it's understandable if you've skipped over it leafing toward your go-to recipe for Country Captain, blender hollandaise, or lemon bars.
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We Need to Talk About Anthony Bourdain

We Need to Talk About Anthony Bourdain

Food & Wine Magazine — As I see it, you either have to deal with the slightly uncomfortable situation of having your line cook cry in front of you, or you cry at their funeral. I'm sorry to make it sound that dire, but it is.
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Young adult books and sex: What we learned under the covers

Young adult books and sex: What we learned under the covers

CNN — When I was in seventh grade, my grandmother informed our extended family that I was a pervert. Mind you, I was as squeaky clean in thought and deed as you'd expect a badly permed, brace-faced, Catholic school spelling bee winner would be, but that didn't mean I wasn't curious about a few things. I'd often give my bedroom over to visiting relatives, and this time, my grandmother had decided on a little light reading -- in this case, my copy of Judy Blume's "Then Again, Maybe I Won't." It might seem downright quaint in this age of instantly accessible porn and e-book readers, but an awful lot of ladies who came of age in the '70s and '80s and into the '90s got a significant chunk of our sex education from young adult books.
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Living with anxiety, searching for joy

Living with anxiety, searching for joy

CNN — (CNN) -- "The blues are because you're getting fat or maybe it's been raining too long. You're sad, that's all. But the mean reds are horrible. You're afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don't know what you're afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don't know what it is. ...
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Dessert debate: cake vs pie

Dessert debate: cake vs pie

CNN — Each autumn, some of the world's most prominent food scholars, chefs, journalists and enthusiasts gather together on the campus of the University of Mississippi for a symposium on the state of Southern food. Overarching themes covered by the Southern Foodways Alliance in the previous 15 years have included the role of farmers, a study of global influences, the undercurrents of music and booze, just to name a few. The subject at the core of 2013's installment: Women at Work. Eatocracy's managing editor Kat Kinsman and New York Times Atlanta bureau chief Kim Severson faced off in a tongue-in-cheek Lincoln-Douglas debate. The topic at hand: which holds more essential social and emotional currency in the South, pie or cake?
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When it's not just skipping school

When it's not just skipping school

CNN — School hurt so much, I just stopped going. In these enlightened times, my condition would likely be swiftly identified as "school refusal behavior," treated with care and skill and billed to my parents' insurance under DSM-5 code 309.21: separation anxiety disorder. The root cause might be fear of academic failure, trauma associated with the location, worry over leaving a parent's protective sphere or upset caused by unkind classmates, but the outcome is the same: It's not that the child won't go to school, it's that they simply can't.
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When home is where the heart isn't

When home is where the heart isn't

CNN — Two decades ago, I strode out of my house and knew I'd never think of it as my home again. I hugged my mother goodbye and climbed into the car with my dad, my tape collection and every decent piece of clothing I owned. When he made the multistate drive back from dropping me off at college, the car would be empty, and the house would, to me, no longer be our family home -- just my parents' house. Recently, it ceased to be even that.
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5 tips that may save your wedding (and your sanity)

5 tips that may save your wedding (and your sanity)

CNN — When you get married, ideally it's for keeps. That's wonderful and devoutly to be wished for -- but you're also left with a wide and weird base of knowledge that you'll (hopefully) never use again. My husband and I planned our wedding in the course of 83 days, and by all accounts, things went pretty well for both us and the guests.
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Paula Deen and Southern food: Critics say credit is past due

Paula Deen and Southern food: Critics say credit is past due

CNN — "But some African-American food and culture scholars find it’s what Deen didn’t say that’s the bitterest pill to swallow. They claim that she has profited off the culinary legacy of African Americans, a group she’s repeatedly failed to credit in her cookbooks or on her television shows. Their contributions to American cuisine are often marginalized in the food world, despite having introduced rice cultivation techniques to the South, along with watermelon, okra, chile peppers and other foods that were already part of the African palate. In the wake of the controversy, pre-orders for Deen’s cookbook are red-hot, but some feel frozen out."
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Paula Deen - From the frying pan to the firestorm

Paula Deen - From the frying pan to the firestorm

CNN — The cockroaches came swarming from under the bed, and Paula Deen decided she'd had enough. At 44, the newly minted restaurateur had been through a lot: She'd grown up without a real bathroom, living in the back of her family's souvenir shop and gas station, lost her father when he was only 40 and her mother just four years after that, weathered a difficult marriage to her hard-drinking high school sweetheart and begun to wrest herself from the grip of a crippling panic disorder. But a roiling mass of bugs in her increasingly unkempt home - that, she recounted in her 2007 memoir "It Ain't All About the Cookin'," was her lowest moment yet.
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I am nobody's mother and never will be

I am nobody's mother and never will be

CNN — (CNN) -- On Mother's Day, no one is going to send me flowers or a card. I will not be awakened by sweet, giggling toddlers bearing a tray of breakfast in their chubby hands or receive an awkward but heartfelt hug from a gangly teenage son or end a phone call with a teary, dorm-bound daughter saying, "I love you, Mom." I am no one's mother, and I never will be. This is not by accident, a case of insurmountable physical challenges, an unwilling partner or prioritizing career over children.
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Going public with depression

Going public with depression

CNN — Editor's note: Politicians Jesse Jackson Jr. and Patrick Kennedy have each recently revealed struggles with depression and mental illness. After the death this week of "Top Gun" director in an apparent suicide (it's unclear whether Scott suffered from mental health issues), CNN's Kat Kinsman writes that talking freely about personal mental health issues and suicidal thoughts, whether you're a public figure or a private person, can help those who share the struggle. (CNN) -- I am 14 years old, it's the middle of the afternoon, and I'm curled into a ball at the bottom of the stairs.
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Of romantic meals, fibbers and fish knives

Of romantic meals, fibbers and fish knives

CNN — Once upon a time, I had a perfect romantic meal. It was ten years ago, but that doesn't much matter. The restaurant, by design, existed outside of time - mid-century French fanciness, untouched by fad or fashion. It seemed not outside the realm of possibility that the same tuxedoed waiters had been escorting the same fresh-faced and helium-bosomed young ladies (and their uncomfortably collared "uncles") to starched and sumptuous banquettes since the restaurant's opening in 1960, and that the maitre d' had air-kissed the same doyenne's surgically-taut cheek with the exact vim and deference he had since the year her Chanel suit was new.
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