MAD Recommends | May 2026

In this month’s recommends: the hidden histories of what we eat and drink—from oranges, koji, and wine to the systems shaping modern food media and culture.

Welcome to MAD Digest Recommends, our special supplement for paid subscribers that takes the month’s firehose of food-related media, and siphons it to a gently burbling stream of can’t-miss pieces.

The orange is the most consumed fruit in the world, and, as anyone who has tried to eat one in public will know, one of the more socially awkward. In this hybrid memoir and social history, Chinese-Malaysian-Irish author Katie Goh traces it from its origins in the pomelo and mandarin of the Han Dynasty through the Silk Roads, the groves of California, and her father's ancestral village in Fujian, finding at each stop that the fruit has been doing a lot of quiet work. It travelled the same routes as emperors, artists, and slaves and has been a coveted ingredient in cuisines across the world. Goh connects the fruit's history with her own, tracing the orange through questions of anti-Asian violence, identity, family, and belonging, and making the case that the stories of the things we eat and the stories of the people who eat them have always been the same story.