Jasmine Mangalaseril
Jasmine Mangalaseril connects everyday eating with the stories, histories and people behind food. As a CBC News food columnist and culinary historian, she focuses on local food, restaurants and producers, and on how the food industry shapes what and how we eat. Her work blends reported features with clear, practical guidance, making culinary culture, health and sustainability feel concrete and close to home.
Culinary history and cultural food traditions
Mangalaseril’s columns often use a single dish or ingredient to open up wider culinary histories. In a piece on Jamaican patties, she revisits the “Patty Wars” and the compromise that led to the term “Jamaican patties,” using the story to show how regulation, language and migration converge in something as simple as a hand pie.
In another feature on Jamaican food, she goes beyond jerk chicken and rum by working with a local chef to explore stews, patties and other dishes that reflect the island’s diverse influences. Her rum coverage traces the spirit’s long history, including its ties to Canada, while profiling a craft distillery and the cocktails built around its bottles.
She regularly highlights food tied to specific heritage months and communities. A column on Portuguese Heritage Month walks through grilled sardines, porco à Alentejana and bife à casa, explaining how geography, trade routes and colonial histories show up on the plate. Other pieces spotlight Asian bakeries and their ingredients, techniques and textures, framing their pastries and breads as expressions of baking cultures and traditions rather than just new menu items.
Across these stories, she treats recipes and restaurant dishes as entry points into deeper cultural narratives.
Mangalaseril also brings a historian’s lens to processes like fermentation. In a feature on wine, yogurt and cheese, she speaks with fermentation experts and breaks down how microbes, time and technique transform milk, juice and other raw materials into everyday staples. The column ties technical explanation to flavour, health and tradition, showing how something many people take for granted underpins entire culinary worlds.
Local food businesses and producers
A consistent thread in her work is close attention to small, independent food businesses and producers.
She profiles women food producers, including a fromagerie and a broth company, focusing on how they built their products and what success looks like in a demanding industry. In another column, she follows a local hot sauce maker who continued developing recipes after losing his vision, emphasizing how adaptation, craft and community support intersect in a single kitchen.
Her columns on cafés, bakeries and patios combine scene-setting with specific dishes. A breakfast sandwich feature visits independent cafés and details the exact builds of their sandwiches, from double-decker bagels stacked with bacon, fried eggs and garlic sauce to waffle-based sandwiches layered with cheddar, spinach and aioli. A piece on patios and puppy-friendly spaces describes how restaurants and breweries respond to changing customer habits, from dog menus to new patio designs.
Coverage of tea sommeliers and fermentation specialists shows how niche expertise fits into the wider local food landscape.
Mangalaseril regularly connects farms and fields to finished products. She writes about pick-your-own farms for berries and other produce, outlining how visitors can enjoy the season while respecting farm rules and supply realities. A haskap berry column introduces an emerging fruit through a grower’s perspective and then follows it into pies, butter tarts, jams, vinaigrettes and savoury applications.
These stories present growers, makers and retailers as part of an ecosystem rather than isolated businesses.
Practical cooking advice and home kitchen skills
Service journalism is a core part of Mangalaseril’s beat. In her GLP-1 hormone feature, she works with nutrition experts to list specific proteins, fibre-rich foods, healthy fats and fermented foods that support gut hormones, explaining the roles they play in satiety, blood sugar and microbiome health.
The piece includes concrete examples and recipes, such as bowls built around salmon, whole grains and vegetables, turning clinical concepts into straightforward shopping and cooking decisions.
She offers direct, usable advice for home cooks across skill levels.
A backyard smoking column lays out tips for meat and vegetable smoking, balancing low-and-slow guidance with advice for hot and cold smoking setups. Another feature on cold soups suggests tomato gazpachos and icy noodle soups as alternatives to salads and drinks when temperatures rise, with enough detail on ingredients and textures to help readers imagine the bowls.
Her breakfast sandwich and brunch coverage similarly highlights adaptable options, including vegetarian and gluten-friendly versions, often naming key components rather than providing full recipes.
Mangalaseril’s work also treats the kitchen as a place where skills and relationships develop. In a column on teaching children to cook, she speaks with the owner of a cooking program for kids about how kitchen tasks build responsibility, time management and confidence, and how cooking together can strengthen family bonds. The emphasis is on making cooking a positive experience rather than a chore, with practical tips to structure lessons and keep children engaged.
Health, sustainability and food systems
Many of her stories link what is on the plate to broader health and sustainability questions. The GLP-1 hormone column and fermentation feature both ground health advice in whole foods and traditional techniques, showing how everyday choices around yogurt, kefir, legumes, grains and healthy fats affect gut flora and long-term well-being.
A piece on being an eco-friendly foodie tackles “eco-guilt” directly, offering tips on reducing food waste, making more sustainable purchasing decisions and thinking about the environmental impact of common habits.
She also reports on food access and nutrition support. A profile of a nutritionist working with a food bank describes how wellness and culinary programs are designed using ingredients available on-site, aiming to build clients’ confidence and teach budget-conscious, healthy cooking. Her exploration of food judging explains how competitions are structured, what judges look for, and why standards matter for producers and consumers, reinforcing the idea that food systems extend from farm and factory to festival tables and home kitchens.
Across these columns, Mangalaseril’s distinguishing trait is her ability to move between individual dishes, expert voices and systemic themes without losing clarity. She consistently anchors health, sustainability and industry dynamics in the concrete realities of local food businesses, home kitchens and the people who cook, eat and make decisions about food.
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.
Amanda Garrity
Amanda Garrity stands out for turning food, holidays, and family traditions into practical service stories that help readers plan specific celebrations. She is a lifestyle editor at TODAY.com and has more than seven years of experience as a lifestyle writer and editor, including five years on staff at Good Housekeeping, where she covered home, holidays, food, entertainment, and other lifestyle news. Her work also appears in consumer titles including Prevention, Men’s Health, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and Best Products. Her beat centers on event-based menus, holiday explainers, and classic TV and film guides, with clear, list-driven reporting that gives readers specific dates, recipes, viewing options, and simple background for family planning.