In telling the story of Patrick Brown, who recently purchased the plantation where his ancestors had been enslaved, Cooke deeply explores hundreds of years of Brown family history against the backdrop of American racism and discrimination, showing the family’s struggles and triumphs in an epic feat of reporting. She dives deep into Brown’s own many-chaptered life, too, recounting his farm childhood and his work in real estate, as an agricultural advisor in Afghanistan, with the Department of Defense, and now as a regenerative hemp farmer and grower of vegetables for his community. All of this richly told history resonates in the story’s final scenes, with Brown on his farm, “carrying out acts of reclamation, finding ways to push back against the systems designed to oppress people of color.”

To arrive at the final selections for the anthology, series editor and food writer Jaya Saxena combed through submissions from print and online publications, as well as doing her own research. Then she and guest editor Bryant Terry, the cookbook author and food activist, reviewed them. Both Nelson’s and Cooke’s pieces, she said, “hit that great intersection of speaking to the food and travel conversation happening in America right now, as well as being just genuinely beautiful writing.”

“Kate Nelson’s ‘The Land Back Movement Is Also About Foodways’ stood out for the way it powerfully connects Indigenous sovereignty with food systems, layering history, activism, and ecology into a deeply reported narrative,” Terry added. “Christina Cooke’s ‘Black Earth’ is equally compelling, weaving together questions of Black identity, land ownership, and healing with an intimacy that lingers long after the final paragraph. Both writers bring nuance, vision, and a fierce sense of purpose to their work—exactly the kind of storytelling we need in this moment.”

Civil Eats writers have been featured in previous Best American Food Writing editions. Kim O’Donnel’s piece “Cooking as the Cornerstone of a Sustainable Food System” and Barry Estabrook’s “Five Things I Will Not Eat” were both chosen in 2014. In 2023, former Senior Reporter Wesley Brown’s story “Black Farmers in Arkansas Still Seek Justice a Century After the Elaine Massacre,” was selected for the collection.

The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2025 also includes terrific, insightful pieces by many others whose writing we admire, among them John Paul Brammer’s “How to Eat a Rattlesnake” for The New Yorker; Reem Kassis’s “They Ate at My Table, Then Ignored My People” for The Atlantic; and Kayla S. Stewart’s “An African Legacy Endures in Palenque, Columbia,” for Saveur.