The Botanists Who Died for Our Food Future
Welcome to [Untitled Food Magazine], an independently owned digital food magazine. Our Tuesday editions are where we feature great writing about food. Thursday is for recipes.
IN THIS ISSUE: A new use for corn husks at cocktail hour; an old spot for commuters’ cocktail hour returns.
Appetizers
From Husk Til Dawn
Oakland Top Chef alum and restaurateur Nelson German blessed us with the release of his first book Caribbean Cocktails: Drinks and Bites from the Afro-Latino Diaspora this summer (a season for which its contents are particularly well-suited). It’s an ambitious, dizzying contribution to the literature on Caribbean, African, and American drinking and drinking food that demands real work from the reader-bartender, often in the form of subrecipes for garnishes or complexifying mixers. A guest contribution in the book—bartender Aleka Ross’s Gracias Ancestros—has two.
The drink is a rich exploration of all the ways that corn, “a versatile staple crop across Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America,” can fortify a cocktail, and the subrecipe for corn husk honey water immediately caught my attention. Ross infuses water with leftover corn husks on the stove, mixing in an ounce of honey once the husks are extracted to create a light syrup with a butterier sweetness than your average simple—a better complement for corn. That’s one less food byproduct to waste after the end-of-summer barbecues you’re going to invite me to!
N.B.: A fun variation might be to try mixing some drinks using Korean corn silk tea (옥수수수염차), made with the fibers just under the husk. I recently enjoyed some at L.A.’s famed Wi Spa and couldn’t help imagining a splash on some bassy, peaty Scotch over a big rock. —Alex
That Tracks
Received a text last night from [Untitled Friend] Maarvi with the sole sentence: “[Untitled Food Magazine] article about [T]racks bar reopening at Penn station,” and you know what she was right. The longstanding Midtown dive bar was my favorite, and a place of beautiful contrasts: a well-known secret in the bowels of Penn Station; inevitably busy but always an open seat at the bar; questionable oysters that everyone still ordered; a weirdo commuter beside me with an unrepeatable, often cancel-worthy life story but hey he’s now a friend. The martini was good too. I was crestfallen when Tracks closed in 2019 due to the station’s seat- and soul-less renovation; even though it reopened aboveground on a nearby street, it wasn’t the same. Now I can rejoice because Tracks has returned to its old home. The LIRR posted photos online of the new space and, well, they’re not promising. Both the new sign and the updated seating make it look like a renovated Chili’s circa 2015, but I’m holding out hope. Who knows—maybe it’ll add to the charm. —Cale
The Botanists Who Died for Our Food Future
By Ali Francis
The link between Leningrad’s seed savers and a new Indigenous agricultural resistance
Excerpted with permission from The Curious Lives of Vegetables: An Artful Exploration of the Wonderful World of Edible Plants, Their History, and Their Crucial Role in Our Future by Ali Francis, published by Hardie Grant North America, September 2026.
As Nazi bombs pounded the city around them, a group of Russian botanists chose to starve to death rather than surrender their precious seeds. Inside the walls of the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry was the world’s first seed bank: a genetically diverse collection meant to protect our food supply. Rows of shelves were lined with uniform metal containers that held hundreds of thousands of plant samples collected by botanist and founder Nikolai Vavilov during expeditions across five continents from the 1920s to ’40s.
By the fall of 1941, as German forces invaded Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and choked trade and travel routes, a crippling famine had swept across the city. Outside the wrought-iron gates of the Institute, the assault “wiped out any sentimentality towards animals,” Simon Parkin reports for The Guardian. Desperately hungry civilians resorted to eating pigeons and their own pets. Police officers “butchered their service animals.” And even the famous dogs living in Pavlov’s laboratory became food. Meanwhile, inside, a morbid question hung over the Institute’s researchers: should they “save a collection built to eradicate collective famine,” writes Parkin, or save themselves?