Vittles Issue 2 (Winter 2025): Bad Food

Vittles is a London-based magazine of food and culture that began as an online newsletter during the pandemic and has since grown into a substantial print project. From the start, it has been more interested in scrutiny than reverence. It uses food as a way to examine power, class, taste, commerce, and the stories people tell about what and how they eat.

Issue 2, Winter 2025, serves as a clear reintroduction to that project. Organized around the deliberately elastic idea of “bad food,” it looks at foods that are nutritionally suspect, socially embarrassing, aesthetically dubious, or simply unloved.

The magazine’s perspective is distinctly British and often very London-specific, taking local references and shared knowledge for granted, and inviting readers elsewhere into that world rather than translating it.

That point of view is part of the pleasure. As widely as the magazine ranges geographically and culturally, its grounding produces a steady sense of discovery of unfamiliar assumptions, different food economies, and definitions of “badness” that do not align neatly with American food writing. Throughout, the writing is sharp, confident, and intellectually curious, with contributions that slip between reporting, criticism, personal essay, and fiction.

Selected pieces include:

• Joe Zadeh on “fried rice syndrome” and the persistent fear of reheated rice

• Tania Sanchez on soft drinks and the sweeteners that define them

• Sharanya Deepak on Italian food in India and Pakistan, from alfredo fettuccine to pink sauce pasta

• Lily Kelting on the unlikely dominance of Szechwan sauce

• Conversations on MSG, with Joyeta Ng and Andy Ho discussing Hong Kong and the Western diaspora, and Ozoz Sokoh and Joké Bakare on Maggi in Nigerian cooking

• Chris Jones on the history of London’s squat cafés and the food cultures they sustained

• Alim Kheraj on the bleak offerings of gay bar food across the UK

• Fiction by Munir Hachemi (translated by Julia Sanches), Sheena Patel, and Lauren J. Joseph

Issue 1 of Vittles is now sold out, aside from a very small number of copies we have on hand. Issue 2 makes clear why the magazine has quickly earned attention: it treats food not as comfort or virtue, but as a site of argument, pleasure, and contradiction.

Paperback. Color photographs and illustrations throughout.