Natalia Buia
Natalia Buia is a journalist whose reporting follows how everyday people navigate city systems, cultural spaces, and consumer trends, with a recurring focus on food and safety. Her coverage for blogTO and other digital outlets moves between city news, lifestyle features, and national alerts, tied together by close attention to lived experience in Toronto and across Canada.
City life under strain
Buia’s city reporting often centres on the stress of navigating transportation and infrastructure, from a weekend of nightmare traffic caused by multiple road closures in Toronto to a resident forced to walk 8km when transit failed during a record-breaking snowstorm. She brings the same focus to accountability when systems cause harm, covering a Toronto woman seeking justice after her dog was fatally electrocuted on Queen Street and a cyclist injured by a police officer who then issued a ticket for something totally legal. In an examination of unpaid labour by immigrants propping up a key area of Ontario’s industry, she connects policy and economics directly to the workers whose unpaid hours are holding up the sector.
Human stories and cultural scenes
Buia frequently profiles people building more inclusive and surprising cultural spaces, such as Black burlesque performers pushing for more diversity in Toronto’s performance scene and a prominent architecture critic who moonlights as a sassy drag queen tour guide. She highlights venues that double as creative hubs, including a multi-purpose shop that brings everything under one roof as a record store, recording studio, café, and event space. Her features on one of Toronto’s oldest bookstores, complete with cats guarding the shelves, treat long-standing businesses as characters in the city’s ongoing story.
Food, recalls and consumer safety
On the food and consumer beat, Buia tracks recalls and safety issues in straightforward, service-oriented pieces, including coverage of ice cream products possibly containing gravel and plastic being recalled across Canada. She extends that lens beyond food to technology and other goods, writing about AI smart glasses recalled across Canada for serious burn risks and similar warnings that show how product design can impact everyday safety. Her work on national trend stories, such as the change in Canada’s top baby name for girls after almost a decade of consistency, uses simple data points to signal broader shifts in culture and consumption.
Cross-outlet trends and approach
Beyond her work at blogTO, Buia’s stories appear across other digital publications where she covers city issues, food, and consumer trends on a national scale. Across these outlets she maintains a consistent approach: concise, headline-driven pieces built around a single person, business, or product, with concrete detail and clear stakes for how institutions, markets, and cultural scenes shape ordinary routines.
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.