Amanda Garrity
Amanda Garrity ties food, holidays and family traditions together, using recipes and service features to help readers plan specific celebrations rather than generic meals.
She has more than seven years of experience as a lifestyle writer and editor, including a five-year tenure on staff at Good Housekeeping, where she covered home, holidays, food, entertainment and other lifestyle news. Her current role as a lifestyle editor at TODAY.com keeps her immersed in broad lifestyle coverage, but her Good Housekeeping work shows a consistent focus on food and festivities, from holiday menus to family movie nights. Across her portfolio at consumer titles including Prevention, Men’s Health, Cosmopolitan, Redbook and Best Products, she is positioned as a lifestyle specialist with deep experience in service journalism.
From 4th of July appetizers to healthy Super Bowl recipes
On the food beat at Good Housekeeping, Garrity concentrates on event-based menus built around specific occasions, rather than standalone cooking projects. Her 4th of July appetizer roundup showcases bite-size, shareable recipes tailored to outdoor gatherings and holiday cookouts, framing each dish around its role on a party table rather than its technical difficulty. In “40 Healthy Super Bowl Recipes to Make on Game Day,” she applies the same structure to football viewing parties, curating a large list of chili, pizza, burgers and snacks that balance indulgence with lighter preparations and ingredient swaps.
These stories are grounded in practical cooking advice: she emphasizes oven-baking or air-frying instead of deep-frying, and highlights simple changes that make familiar dishes feel healthier without sacrificing flavor. The tone is direct and instructional, with short recipe blurbs and clear serving suggestions designed for hosts who are planning a spread and need options that work together. Her food coverage is always tied to a concrete moment on the calendar—whether Independence Day, the Super Bowl or another holiday—so recipes function as components of a larger entertaining plan rather than isolated ideas.
Explaining Easter dates and Father’s Day history
Beyond menus, Garrity writes explanations of how major holidays work, translating calendars and traditions into plain language for readers who are planning around them. In “When Is Easter 2024? – How Is Easter Determined?” she spells out the concept of Easter as a moveable feast, walking through the role of the Paschal full moon and the spring equinox in determining the date. The piece breaks down rules such as Easter falling on the first Sunday after the appropriate full moon, and clarifies what happens when that full moon itself lands on a Sunday.
Her Father’s Day coverage takes a similar approach to history and timing. In “History of Father’s Day – When Did Father’s Day Start?” she traces the origins of the holiday from early 20th-century observances through presidential proclamations, while reminding readers that it is always celebrated on the third Sunday in June in many countries. These explainers serve a practical purpose: they give readers enough context to understand why a holiday falls when it does, and exactly when they need to have gifts, cards and activities ready. Across these pieces, she blends accessible historical detail with clear, actionable date information, reinforcing her focus on helping people organize family celebrations.
Guides to holiday classics from A Charlie Brown Christmas to A Christmas Story
Garrity extends her holiday lens into entertainment, producing service-heavy guides to classic films that families revisit year after year. Her article “Where You Can Watch ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ for Free” outlines how, where and when viewers can watch the Peanuts special, explaining Apple TV+’s exclusive streaming deal and clarifying that the movie is not available on major competing platforms. She details limited free-viewing windows and points to options such as buying the DVD so that families can reliably include the special in their seasonal traditions.
In “28 Things You Didn’t Know About ‘A Christmas Story,’” she shifts from access questions to deepening appreciation for a holiday favorite. The piece is structured as a list of lesser-known facts about the film’s production, source material and cast, offering quick-hit insights that enrich repeat viewings. Together, these entertainment stories mirror her food and holiday explainers: they focus on the practicalities of how to watch something, when to find it, and why it matters to long-running traditions. Garrity’s coverage of these films sits at the intersection of nostalgia and planning, treating television and movies as integral parts of holiday rituals alongside menus and decorations.
Across Good Housekeeping and her other lifestyle work, Garrity’s distinguishing trait is the way she threads food, calendars and culture into cohesive, planning-first service coverage. Her stories help readers decide what to cook, when to celebrate and what to watch, always anchored to specific dates and occasions and delivered in clear, list-driven formats that make execution straightforward.
4 more food journalists.
Al Culliton
Al Culliton is a writer and historian whose work focuses on the American cocktail as a living part of food and culture, using obscure, historic drinks to show how bars, spirits and cities change. They write reported features that trace how forgotten recipes move from old bar guides back onto modern menus, reconstructing how cocktails originally tasted and explaining how new builds reshape them. Their beat is revived classics, regional specialties and low-proof aperitifs, covered one drink at a time with close attention to specs, technique, glassware and service. They write about cocktails as cultural artifacts tied to specific communities and geographies, using single recipes to explore place, identity, regional traditions and diaspora histories. Across masthead work and recipe writing, they combine primary-source research with present-day reporting from working bars, in precise, accessible prose grounded in technical detail.
Alaina Chou
Alaina Chou stands out for rigorously testing food and kitchen products and turning those hands-on trials into clear shopping advice. She is a commerce writer at Bon Appétit and Epicurious, where she makes newsletters and shopping guides for home cooks. Her beat is food commerce, with coverage of air fryers, meal kits, protein powders, pepper grinders, electrolyte drinks, and cookbooks. She focuses on what is worth buying, how it performs, how it tastes, and how it fits daily routines and wellness. She also writes sale-driven lists and roundup pieces, and she has worked on Bon Appétit’s Feel Good Food Plan. Her reporting is practical, direct, and grounded in product testing.
Amadea Tanner
Amadea Tanner is a food journalist for Daily Meal whose distinct focus is food history, culinary nostalgia, and the way everyday dishes reveal broader cultural stories. She covers canned baked beans, boomer-era casseroles, cowboy trail food, and sailors’ rations to show how preservation, technology, labor, and survival shaped familiar staples. Her beat includes retro recipes, mid‑20th‑century home cooking, old-school ice cream flavors, and vintage cookbooks, treating them as records of household budgets and aspirations. She also reports on kitchen culture and domestic design, from breakfast alcoves and pie safes to milk doors and wall phones. Tanner investigates global dish origins and contested national claims in pieces on haggis and pavlova. Beyond Daily Meal, she has worked across food, travel, and sustainability, contributing to outlets including Atlas Obscura, Beau Monde Media, Yahoo, and Tasting Table.
Brad Reed
Brad Reed is a staff writer for Common Dreams who turns political and corporate decisions into clear reporting on everyday life. He focuses on how policy affects the cost of living, jobs, healthcare, food prices, campaign finance, and civil liberties, often through concrete examples like holiday cookouts and supermarket bills. He also covers Trump, conservative power, media criticism, and progressive politics. Reed uses economic data, investigative reporting, expert analysis, official figures, and direct quotes to connect structural choices by administrations, corporations, and elites to what workers and families experience. His work has also appeared at Truthout and The Real News Network.