Thank you for being here.
Extra Juicy is a newsletter featuring essays, interviews and stories about culture and food. It launched in September of 2023. My goal is to publish new works every two weeks; however, my publishing cadence is frequently erratic, depending on what deadlines and family commitments I am juggling at any given moment. I aim to send you new works about twice a month; sometimes more, sometimes less. Thank you for your grace and understanding.
Why subscribe?
My aim here is to publish essays and stories that reflect not so much the kind of aspirational dining and cooking reflected in mainstream food media, but rather the ways that food and eating more realistically comes to bear on our day to day lives. I’m interested also in inclusive storytelling that takes a clear-eyed view on the ways eating intersects with race, gender, politics, art, history, class, and our personal histories and lived experiences.
This may include:
Essays.
Reported stories.
Interviews with people working in the food and hospitality industry.
Deep-dives, profiles, round-ups, quirky listicles around the subject of food and restaurants.
A note on subscriptions
Like most writers, I would like my writing to be accessible. However, writing is not easy work, and researching and reporting can be costly. Generally, there is a paywall on archived posts to help offset the costs of producing this work. All that said, if you wish to read a post and cannot access it, please email extrajuicy@substack.com for a complimentary lifetime subscription. No questions asked; just let me know.
About me
I’m a writer and journalist based in suburban Los Angeles, where I live with my husband, our five-year-old daughter, and an anxious three-legged dog named Jackson. Previously, I was a reporter at the Arizona Republic, and a restaurant critic at the Phoenix New Times and the Los Angeles Times. At the Los Angeles Times, I was paid $55,000 less in annual salary than my male “co-critic,” and I was pushed out after speaking honestly about my struggles to achieve pay equity at the newspaper. Currently I am a freelance contributor to the New York Times Arts desk, Frieze Magazine, and others. I’m working on another forthcoming newsletter, The Pay Gap Report, dedicated to news and analysis about pay inequality. When not reading or writing, I am probably hanging out with my family and thinking about Mexican food.
