Politico: President Donald Trump has ousted the remaining commissioners from a bipartisan federal agency charged with helping state and local officials conduct elections in an apparent move to assert control over voting ahead of the midterms.

The president removed the two Democratic members of the Election Assistance Commission on Thursday while a Republican was allowed to resign, according to a White House official and three other people familiar with the dismissals.

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Here’s my absolute favorite version, developed after years of tweaking to solve a few problems, especially the occasional soggy crust from overly juicy apples. It’s best to start with Step 4 of the filling instruction, the most time-consuming task of draining the sliced apples for an hour or two, then boiling down the remaining rich juice until thickened and concentrated before tackling the crust.

This prized pie crust recipe includes the magical addition of citrus zest. If you’d rather have someone else do the work, I’m sold on store-bought Pillsbury Refrigerated Pie Crusts.

I lightened up on the filling spices to highlight the taste of the fruit: large apples from the farmers’ market in your own preferred combo of Honeycrisp, Fuji, Rome, Stayman, and Granny Smiths. And it never hurts to add a few chunks of butter atop the fruit.

Finish with ice cream or, as my father did, a slice of cheddar. “Apple pie without some cheese is like a kiss without a squeeze,” he always said.

Go, Dad! And happy July 4 to fellow readers of theamericantable.org.

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Pie dough (makes two crusts)

3½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour, sifted

1 teaspoon kosher salt

2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon sugar

1½ teaspoons finely grated orange zest

1½ teaspoons finely grated lemon zest

12 tablespoons (1½ sticks) chilled unsalted butter, cut into cubes

¼ cup chilled vegetable shortening

1 large egg yolk

½ cup cold water, or more as needed

Apple filling

8 cups (964g) peeled and sliced apples (about 5 to 7 large apples)

2 tablespoons (28g) fresh-squeezed lemon juice

¾ cup (149g) granulated sugar

¼ teaspoon kosher salt

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/8 teaspoon ground allspice

1/8 teaspoon ground ginger

¼ cup (85g) boiled and concentrated apple cider,
or ¼ cup (70g) undiluted apple juice concentrate

1 ½ teaspoons pure vanilla extract

1 tablespoon pure maple syrup

1 tablespoon (14g) plus 2 tablespoons (28g) unsalted butter, diced into medium-sized pieces

2 tablespoons (14g) unbleached all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons (14g) cornstarch or Instant ClearJel

1 large egg yolk

1 tablespoon water

1. Make the crust: In a large bowl, whisk together the flour and salt. Stir the citrus zests into the sugar, and add to the flour mixture. Using your fingers, two knives, or a pastry blender, cut in the chilled butter and shortening until they are reduced to pea-size pieces. (Alternatively, combine the flour, salt, and sugar in a food processor and pulse 12 times. Add the butter and shortening, and pulse 25 times, until reduced to pea-size pieces, then transfer to a large bowl.)

2. Add the egg yolk, stirring with a spatula until well blended. Gradually add the cold water, stirring just until the dough comes together. If it’s crumbly, add more water 1 teaspoon at a time. It should stay somewhat dry, not soggy. Test it by smearing a large pinch onto a cutting board to see a well-combined smudge. Add a bit more water if needed.

3. Divide the dough in half, forming each one into a disk. Wrap individually in plastic wrap to refrigerate for at least 30 minutes, and up to 1 day, before using. The dough can be sealed in freezer storage bags and frozen for up to 1 month; thaw for 2 hours in the refrigerator before using.

4. Make the filling: In a large bowl, toss the apple slices with just the lemon juice, sugar, salt, and spices (not the flour, no cornstarch or thickener, no boiled cider or juice concentrate). Let the ingredients sit for at least 1 hour or up to 2 hours to allow the apples to release much of their juices.

5. Scoop out the apple slices, leaving the liquid, and set apples aside in a large bowl. Pour the liquid that has accumulated at the bottom of the bowl into a small saucepan. Add the boiled cider or juice concentrate, and cook the liquid until it has been reduced by half and thickened into a syrup. It should remain easily pourable and not too thick. Take it off the heat and stir in the vanilla, maple syrup, and one tablespoon of the butter. Set aside.

6. Add the flour and cornstarch (or ClearJel) to the sliced apples, and mix gently with a wooden spoon.

7. Preheat the oven to 425° F. Place a wire rack inside a rimmed baking sheet.

8. Make the pie: Roll out one disk of pie dough into a 13-inch round, fit it into a 10-inch pie pan, and trim the edges at the point that they touch the countertop or cutting board. Fill the pie shell with the apple mixture, packing the slices so there are no large gaps. Pour or drizzle the reduced apple syrup evenly over the apples, letting it run between the slices. Scatter the remaining cubes of butter over the apples.

9. Roll out the second disk of dough into an 11-inch round and set it over the filling. Trim and crimp the edges to seal all the way around. Cut a few slits or star shapes in the center of the top crust.

10. Use a fork to whisk together the egg yolk and water in a small bowl. Use this egg wash to brush the top and crimped edges.

11. Place the pie on the rack in the baking sheet and bake for 60 to 75 minutes, turning the baking sheet from front to back halfway through, and bake until the pie filling is bubbling through the center slits (if the center isn’t bubbling, the filling hasn’t yet thickened and you’ll have a liquidy pie. It needs to bubble to set). Cover the pie loosely with foil if the edges seem to be browning too quickly.

12. Transfer the pie to a separate wire rack to cool for 30 minutes. Serve each portion with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or a slice of cheddar cheese, if desired.

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A single blurb graces the back cover of “The Red Truck Bakery Cookbook,” the first of two Brian Noyes recipe collections.

“I like pie. That’s not a state secret…I can confirm that the Red Truck Bakery makes some darn good pie.” President Barack Obama

The 44th chief executive became a fan in 2016, after Noyes wrote to thank him for White House efforts to end the Great Recession that nearly sank his original bakery in Warrenton, Va., eight years earlier.

“Just as the economy crumbled, my investors fled, and I was stuck trying to make it happen on my own. With hard work and 18-hour days we kept the bakery afloat, although I spent many nights worrying about paying suppliers and making payroll,” he told Obama.

A month later, presidential speechwriter Cody Keenan walked into the second bakery, in Marshall, Va., to personally deliver the boss’s appreciative reply. Alerted by a staffer that Keenan was also buying lunch and desserts, Noyes, who was traveling, strongly suggested the bourbon-laced sweet potato pecan pie by phone.

In mid-March, Noyes personally delivered three of those pies to Keenan, a slice of which became Obama’s official salute to Pi Day, the March 14 global celebration of the mathematical ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter: 3.14159. At exactly 3:14 pm on 3/14/16, a beaming president held up a wedge as White House photographer Pete Souza snapped away.

Noyes was thrilled. And the Red Truck juggernaut kept on rolling. To promote his 2018 debut cookbook, Noyes had the quote embroidered on a custom jacket and an elaborate cowboy shirt, both by the “rodeo tailors” at Fort Lonesome in Austin, Texas.

Well before the groundbreaking, Dr. Louise Bernard, director of the just-opened Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, asked Noyes to donate several pie-centric artifacts.

He was floored.

“Oh my gosh! Being permanently paired with the President through pie is phenomenal. Her out-of-the-blue request meant the world to me! That jacket and shirt are original works of art. I would have been happy to hang on to them, and still yearn for them during my cookbook events, but they really did need to be in the Obama Center’s permanent collection.”

Noyes, 69, gained national acclaim in a 2008 New York Times roundup of “thrifty indulgences” for mail-order food after Marian Burros hailed his “deft hand with pastries and an unerring sense of flavor balance.” A whopping 57,000 website hits that day changed his life.

He quit his job art directing the Washington Post magazine and tapped his savings. He was soon baking fulltime in the farmhouse he shared with his future husband, architect Dwight McNeill, in rural Orlean, Va., and selling his wares at a nearby market.

A fifth-generation Northern Californian, Noyes honed his baking chops during childhood visits to his paternal grandmother in North Carolina and an uncle in Florida, later augmented by rigorous classes at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY; L’Academie de Cuisine in Bethesda, Md., and an internship with chef Rick Bayless in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Noyes also credits a note taped to the kitchen door of “a grubby little Southern diner decades ago: ‘They’ll like dinner but will remember dessert.’ That pushed me away from my desk to jump into professional culinary training. I like making pies, some fun sweets, nothing fussy but more rustic. I think that’s where the charm is.”

By 2023, after publishing “The Red Truck Bakery Farmhouse Cookbook,” he sold the business to Marshall restaurateurs Neal and Star Wavra, including his beloved 1954 scarlet Ford-100 pickup, bought at auction from fashion mogul Tommy Hilfiger.

Today Noyes is writing “Pie in the Sky,” a memoir starting in California, with its deep agrarian and culinary traditions, followed by countless food-inspired road trips and a string of art directing jobs from Houston and Tampa to New York and DC.

This fall, he’ll open Hayfields General Store & Café in the tiny, toney hamlet of Washington, Va., dubbed “Little Washington” to distinguish it from the nation’s capital 70 miles to the northeast. He already bought a shiny yellow 1930 Ford farm truck, adding license plates proclaiming, “GOT PIE.”

Yet Noyes still calls himself an art director who became a baker. “That first artsy creative career of 30 years influenced this newer career—creating a personality and identity for a charming destination food joint: a design project for me, not for a publisher or client. Launching a bakery has been, well, icing on the cake.”

Last year he and McNeill sold the Orlean farmhouse to buy and restore a 1920s home, complete with a graveyard, in Little Washington. “I realized there’s nowhere within walking distance to have a casual, comforting meal with friends, or on the fly, that didn’t break the bank,” he said, referring to the very pricey, world-famous Inn at Little Washington that currently boasts two Michelin stars (down from three).

There was also nowhere to buy kitchen staples—local organic produce, proteins and coffee beans—enjoy breakfast or lunch, and pick up creative carryout for family meals or a dinner party. Noyes will feature his favorite soups, sandwiches, and baked goods, including “classic church lady cakes.” His 1,700 square-foot space in the spanking new Rush River Commons will be anchored by a communal table seating nearly two dozen, perfect for the monthly Sunday night family suppers he has planned.

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Annie Groer has been a Washington Post and Orlando Sentinel reporter and columnist, and a presidential debate panelist whose work has appeared in numerous print, broadcast, and digital outlets . She twice represented DC in the National Chicken Cooking Contest.

There’s a photograph worth sitting with this week. Twelve people in morning coats and floor-length gowns, seated at a long white table at the edge of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It isn’t quite seven in the morning. A string quartet is playing somewhere off the frame. The candelabra are lit even though the sun is already up. And in the water beneath them the whole improbable scene is doubled — china, champagne, the brims of those enormous hats — because that is exactly what a reflecting pool is for.

The Washington Post ran it on the front of the Style section on July 20, 1974, under a headline I would have killed to write: “On the Mall: Breakfast for 12, At Dawn.” The photographer was Harry Naltchayan, a Post lifer who shot presidents and moon landings and Dr. King at the microphone. For half a century people bought prints and hung them in offices without knowing the first thing about the diners. They didn’t need to. The picture tells you that someone, once, thought the most beautiful room in Washington was outdoors, at dawn, with no walls.

The woman it was all for, Janet Harley, was twenty-eight and had just been told she had terminal breast cancer. Her friends decided the answer to that news was not a casserole. It was a permit. They walked into a government office and asked, with a straight face, to set a formal breakfast for twelve at the edge of the Reflecting Pool — and they got it, signed and stamped. They woke Janet before dawn, walked her to a horse-drawn carriage, and served her oysters and champagne at first light while strings played behind her

Janet died in 1982, at thirty-five. Before she did, she helped write the government’s guiding interpretation of Title IX — the law that pried the gym doors open for every girl who ever laced up a cleat. In 2024, Naltchayan’s own daughter found the survivors and re-set the table on the fiftieth anniversary, in the same spots. The chair at the head sat empty on purpose. It was Janet’s.

One of them put it best, decades on: it was their way of celebrating being alive, and together.

That’s the part I can’t get out of my head. The worst news a young person can get had just landed in that group, and their answer was to pull the table closer to the thing that scared them — candlelight, oysters, friends, the open Mall at dawn. They met something dying with a feast.

The Reflecting Pool was built in the 1920s to do one job, and the job is in the name. It holds still water between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument so the two great verticals of the Republic can see themselves, and so we can see them twice. It’s where the 1963 March pooled its quarter-million. It’s where Janet’s friends poured champagne. It is, functionally, the largest mirror in America, and like any good mirror it has never much cared who was standing in front of it. That’s the thing about a reflection — it’s democratic. It gives back whatever you bring.

This spring it was drained and resurfaced and, on a presidential whim, painted “American flag blue.” The bill ran north of sixteen million taxpayer dollars. The blue didn’t last a month. The water went green with algae. The paint began peeling and floating up in sheets. A duckling was found dead in it, and the District opened an investigation into whether the bloom had turned toxic. The mirror stopped reflecting and started rotting, and now it’s to be drained again, around the Fourth, for what they’re calling a “permanent repair.”

Read that back. A young woman, fifty years ago, told her body was failing — and the response at that pool was a banquet. This year the pool itself is failing — sick water, dying paint, a dead duck floating in the blue — and the response is a fence.

Because that’s the other thing that happened this week. Ahead of the Fourth of July — the 250th, the big one — crews ran chain-link around the entire perimeter and mounted cameras over the water’s edge. The official line is that the pool always gets fenced for the holiday, fireworks, public safety, and there’s truth in that. But it went up early, and the reason given wasn’t fireworks. It was people. The President says the new lining was slit three hundred feet, then three hundred and fifty, “in the dark of night.” Arrests were made. So up went the wall.

We looked at something we love coming apart, and we decided the move was to fence it off and point cameras at it. Janet’s friends would not recognize us.

Are you invited?

That’s the whole story, in two questions fifty-two years apart.

In 1974, the question at the edge of that water was are you invited? — and the answer could be yes. Yes for twelve people who simply asked. Yes for a dying woman and her friends who decided grief deserved candlelight on the country’s front lawn. The Mall said come.

In 2026 there’s no question, because the answer’s been settled in advance and bolted into the ground. No permit to request, no table to set, no walking up to see your own face in the water — because the water is the color of a bad hotel pool, and it gives back one man’s idea of red-white-and-blue and nothing past it. Not the Monument, not the Memorial, not you. The same Mall is getting a triumphal arch now, and when a reporter asked the President who the arch was for, the answer was one word: “Me.” —CBS News. There’s your before-and-after. The breakfast was for Janet, a gift the givers stayed out of the frame to give. The arch is for me.-

So here we are. Sixteen million dollars and a fence around our own front lawn, two weeks before the country turns two hundred and fifty. That’s the message now, and it’s a short one. Stay back.

The twelve people in that photograph wanted the opposite thing. They wanted to add a chair, not take the table away. They looked at the most public lawn in America and figured someone they loved should get to eat breakfast on it, even — especially — with the clock running out. That was the whole idea. It isn’t complicated, and it never was.

We knew how to do it once, at dawn, with no walls. We could again. The fence is the easy part to take down.

The American Table runs at the intersection of food, politics, and culture.

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The losses trace to the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (H.R. 1), signed into law July 4, 2025, which cuts federal SNAP funding by $186 billion through 2034 — the largest cut in the program’s history. The law shifts large benefit costs onto states for the first time and expands work requirements, and analysts say the resulting red tape and recertification barriers are pushing eligible families out even though children were never the stated target

Arizona has been hit hardest, shedding more than 200,000 children — a 55 percent drop — even as unemployment rose. Texas lost 253,000 children, Louisiana 79,000, and Massachusetts nearly 50,000.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins disputes the figures. Pressed by Rep. Jim McGovern, she called the 700,000 number “not correct,” contending most people removed were “fraudulent” and that the source was not a nonpartisan group — though ProPublica says it independently verified CBPP’s numbers.

The fallout reaches beyond groceries: children who lose SNAP also lose streamlined eligibility for WIC and automatic enrollment in free school meals, with food banks reporting surging demand.

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When the plates were cleared, Greenspan explained, with the patience of a man who had explained far more complicated things to far less attentive rooms, that one did not leave the table after lunch at the Metropolitan Club without having a chocolate chip cookie. It was not optional. It was tradition, and tradition, in his telling, was a form of respect — for the room, for the people who came before you in it, for the ordinary civilities that hold a place together when no one is watching.

That was the lesson. The man who could move global markets with a single syllable spent the back half of a lunch making sure a kid he would almost certainly never see again didn’t miss the cookies. The brilliance was real — you felt it the way you feel weather — but the thing that stayed with me was the graciousness, scaled all the way down to the person directly in front of him. I have met a great many powerful people since. Most of them never learned that part.

A few years later, the federal budget did something I had been taught was theoretically possible and practically mythological. It balanced, then ran a surplus, then did it again. I was still young enough to find it astonishing, almost magical. I watched a column of numbers walk down to zero and keep going, and a fair share of the credit sat with the man who had shown me, with great seriousness, which cookie to take at the club.

History will argue about the rest — the exuberance he called irrational, the deregulation, the crisis that arrived the year after he left, and rearranged how everyone remembers him. Let the economists have it. They will be at it for decades, in the deliberately fogged dialect he invented to keep them busy.

I’ll keep the smaller thing.

I never had lunch with him again.

I have never once skipped the cookie.

-James Bell

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The film has taken the National Capital Chesapeake Bay Chapter Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for Outstanding Societal Concerns — Long Form Content.

Somerville follows the Grove family, four generations rooted on the same Virginia land since 1914, and the fight to keep the farm in their hands. Produced by The American Table and Inertia Films, the film set out to document a family and ended up helping save their farm and their homes.

More to come.

To watch the film, become a subscriber to The American Table now!

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But London’s food scene success isn’t quite that cut-and-dried. Landlord greed has added steeply rising rents to restaurants’ costs of maintaining Michelin-star expectations. Successive governments have kept Value Added Tax at 20%. Brexit and the resulting immigration laws have squeezed out the global labour pool previously depended upon to staff front-of-house and kitchens, adding to the problems caused by rising food import costs and ever-increasing energy bills.

High-volume chains and mid-tier establishments struggle, and a number of good independents have had to close for lunch to stay afloat. Yet try and get a reservation in any restaurant - high end, ethnic, or neighbourhood – which has featured on Instagram, and unless you’re a free-loading, promo-promising influencer or a celeb with a ‘name’, you’ll have to book weeks if not months ahead. More often than not, you’ll be eating in a minimally but expensively designed room where you’ll have to shout to be heard above the shrieks of laughter from the tables on either side of you only inches from your elbow, and a carefully curated playlist loud enough for a nightclub dance floor.

The average age of most diners in any such on-trend restos is well under forty. It’s a sector of society that can’t ever expect to have a house or an apartment of their own unless funded by the bank of Mummy and Daddy, so instead spends its earnings in desirable public spaces because to save hard-earned money makes little sense. London property prices may trail Hong Kong and Zurich but they are more expensive by far than New York, Paris, and Amsterdam. London’s salaried young are eating out not less often but more, seeking to be part of the community, to make some kind of post-pandemic connection. Before Covid, a three-course dinner at an average mid-range London restaurant (not ethnic which are always cheaper) cost around £40 without drinks and service. Now it clocks in at between £50 and £90 before drinks and service (a standard 12%). But young diners willingly pay a premium for dishes they haven’t even chosen themselves but which have been curated for them on tasting menus that once were the province of high end restaurants only.

Despite closures continuing in the middle and lower-price market, dozens of new restaurants open in London each month, with between 220 and 250 each year since Covid. The bulk of successful fixtures have been at the upscale end, many of them in Mayfair. Luxury fine dining drives their success, despite the economic and staffing challenges. London holds 88.

Michelin stars. Renowned chef Jason Atherton of Soho’s Bocca di Lupo has opened Row on 5 on Savile Row. On St George Street, wood-fired Igni, helmed by Theo Clench previously of Shoreditch’s Michelin-starred Cycene (olde English for ‘kitchen’) serves up a seafood tasting menu. The former Gavroche site on Upper Brook Street has been taken over by Bonheur, where chef Matt Abé has already garnered two Michelin stars. Elite restaurants such as these can charge £150 or more a head at dinner.

At the affordable end of a night out, in the first quarter of 2026, two pubs a day across the UK closed, with the loss of 2,400 jobs. Since 2000, 16,000 have shut their doors. Yet across London (and in major UK cities) in neighbourhoods where rents are lower, success has come to those which have transformed themselves into gastropubs, with kitchens celebrated for high quality food at reasonably affordable prices whose lower checks to the diner are partly helped by ordering good draft beer instead of wine. In Soho, The Devonshire and Upstairs at the French House are notoriously hard to get into. The Harwood Arms in Fulham, southwest London, is Michelin-starred. Not all serve contemporary versions of traditional British comfort food. The Tamil Prince in Barnsbury, North London, is celebrated for its South Asian cooking; Richmond’s The Red Cow is revered for its authentic Cambodian menu. Eat at Hammersmith’s modest The Salutation and most of the unpretentious pub’s other dinners relishing its Thai dishes are South East Asian.

Despite the challenges, with diners still enthusiastic about eating out at the higher end of the cost spectrum, restaurateurs who focus on responsible sourcing of seasonal food and who provide chef-led innovative or immersive experiences are likely to survive the volatility of the London restaurant scene.

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An appeals court is keeping intact a federal judge’s ruling requiring the Kennedy Center to remove President Donald Trump’s name from its building by the end of Friday.

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a last-minute effort by the center to freeze the judge’s ruling so that it wouldn’t need to comply while more court proceedings play out.CNN

Both claims are now in the Congressional Record. That contradiction is the whole story, and it is worth three minutes of your evening.

The thing they cut

The bill is H.R. 8646, the agriculture and FDA spending measure for the coming year. It funds farm research, food-safety inspectors, rural broadband, and the whole pantry. Inside it sits WIC, the program for Women, Infants, and Children, and inside WIC sits a small, flexible voucher that does exactly one job: it buys produce. Apples. Carrots. The bag of grapes a toddler will eat in one sitting.

In 2021, on the recommendation of the National Academies of Sciences, that voucher was raised, because researchers looked at what a small child actually needs and found the old amount wanting. Thursday’s bill walks most of that back — a cut of roughly 10 percent. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities puts the damage at $141 million in produce benefits, stripped from nearly 5.4 million participants. Of every line in a $26 billion bill, the one the majority reached for was the fruit.

The slogan stamped on this administration’s health agenda is Make America Healthy Again. The vote on Thursday was to make it healthy again with less spinach.

What the floor sounded like

Here is where it gets strange. Andy Harris, the Maryland Republican who chairs the agriculture subcommittee, rose to defend the bill and told the chamber, in plain words, “No woman or their children will lose or be denied coverage.” His reasoning: WIC enrollment has dipped from its pandemic high, the program is sitting on carryover funds, and $8 billion will therefore stretch to cover everyone who walks in the door. Tom Cole, the full-committee chairman, framed the whole package in the key of national strength — “when American agriculture is strong, America is strong.” Fiscal discipline in a season of two trillion-dollar deficits. A bill, in Harris’s telling, that takes nothing from anyone.

Rosa DeLauro, the Connecticut Democrat who runs point for the minority on Appropriations, did the arithmetic differently. The bill funds WIC at $200 million below the current year. It does not fully fund the produce voucher. And the participation argument, she has said repeatedly, is a magic trick: enrollment ran only about 1.2 percent below last year through February — during a 43-day government shutdown that scrambled everything — while the administration’s own budget projects 7.2 million participants in 2027, well above today. Cut the money against a rising line of need, and someone, eventually, gets turned away. Her sharpest cut was aimed straight at the slogan: denying women and children fruits and vegetables, she said, is “hardly a way to make America healthy again.”

So which is it? Does the bill take nothing, or does it take produce from five million kids? They cannot both be true, and the gap between them is the entire fight.

The fine print nobody chants about

There is a quieter casualty. A pandemic-era waiver lets families enroll and recertify for WIC remotely, by phone and video, without taking a morning off work and dragging a four-year-old across a rural county to a clinic. That waiver expires September 30. The bill did not extend it. Even if you accept every word of the majority’s funding math, a working mother in a county with no nearby clinic now has one more reason to give up before she starts. Nutrition policy, it turns out, is also transportation policy.

The part that should hold your attention

We are, as a country, exhausting on the subject of vegetables. We put them on cereal boxes, on the sides of buses, in the mouth of every official who has ever stood near the word wellness. We built a slogan around it. And then, on a Thursday night, with grocery prices climbing in every aisle, the House voted to make produce a little harder to reach for the families with the least margin to begin with.

It was close. Four Democrats crossed over to vote yes; five Republicans broke ranks to vote no. Three votes the other way, and the produce stays. The Senate, whose own version of this bill leaves the voucher intact, takes it up next, which means none of this is settled and all of it is still arguable.

But the shape of the argument is already clear, and it is not really about money. It is about whether a child whose mother is doing every single thing the program asks of her gets to eat the one food every doctor in America agrees she should.

The Senate gets it next. Somewhere tonight, a toddler is waiting for an apple.

The American Table covers food, politics, and the table where the two meet. Vote, floor remarks, and funding figures from House floor action on H.R. 8646, June 4, 2026; participant and benefit estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the offices of the House Appropriations Committee.

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Two years before the first Covid outbreak in 2019, I began volunteering at The Felix Project. Based in London, it collects high-quality surplus food from suppliers and farms, and also from supermarkets where, as it approaches its Best Before date, it is rejected by privileged shoppers. The still-nutritious food is then redistributed to charities, community organizations, primary schools, and vulnerable individuals.

Back then, for fund-raising purposes, we would quote the statistic that we were moving enough food to create 6 million meals a year, from ingredients that would otherwise go to landfills where it rots and releases methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas.

Just 9 years later, The Felix Project creates and redistributes the equivalent of 44 million meals a year, to more than 1200 organizations. Yet it only serves Greater London, an area with a population of just over 9 million. You do the math.

We should be ashamed of ourselves. Successive British governments have abandoned social services and those people, many of whom hold down more than one job in order to feed their families, to the care of the charity sector.

And the situation is about to get worse.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates 20 to 45 percent of agricultural and food production depends on free access through the Strait of Hormuz sea passage. If the conflict in the Middle East lasts beyond June 2026, it calculates around 45 million people will be added to the 318 million individuals already suffering acute food insecurity. Include diminishing supplies and the effects of climate change on farmers’ yields, and soaring food prices globally are on their way. “The good old days are gone,” says Christopher Tang, a professor of global supply chain management at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. “When the prices go up, they rarely come back down.”

Few would disagree that the world produces more than enough food to feed its entire population. The crisis of global hunger is not driven by agricultural output but by inequalities in its distribution, along with local conflicts and the extreme poverty caused by them, and by climate change.

Meanwhile, shoppers in my high-end supermarket complain when supplies of out-of-season strawberries, asparagus and other exotic produce have run out. They turn a blind eye to stories of fish farms contaminating the sea bed with faeces and the fish with the antibiotics necessary to keep healthy the hundreds of fish kept crammed into pens unable to swim. They quickly swipe left past photographs of cattle chained over metal troughs standing packed tightly together on concrete flooring in miles of feedlot.

Arguments that we should stop eating red meat not only don’t go down well, they are not necessary. Intensively farmed beef is inevitably significantly cheaper than pasture-fed beef, as is farmed fish cheaper than line-caught. But hormone- and antibiotic-free meat and fish would be so much less challenging to our own health. Treating a steak as a treat and expecting one less often would demonstrate we are a responsible and concerned part of a society that is global, not just a self-serving one existing in the space between our refrigerators and our front doors.

If we were to become more curious about how what we eat is produced for our benefit, we might decide to take effective steps to protect the welfare of those creatures we eat. We might fight against the use of fertilizers applied to produce to encourage abundant crops and which deplete the health of the soil and are so dangerous to our bodies. We might vote for policies that would spread the share and excess of what we grow broadly enough to reach those who desperately need it.

There will always be those who point out that relying on surplus food to feed the hungry is no more than a band-aid solution that distracts local governments from solving the structural causes of poverty and inequality. Meanwhile, in our own developed world, huge swathes of society struggling to put food on the table have no choice but to turn to the processed products that the industrial food complex sells cheaply to fill empty stomachs with empty calories and low nutrition. What an accumulation over years of such food will do to our health will be reflected in the soaring costs of medical services. But perhaps western governments are also unmoved by inequality and the plight of the poor in our own societies.

Legumes and pulses are excellent protein alternatives to meat and fish, providing fiber and less fat. In Southeast Asian cuisine, meat is used sparingly, only as a flavoring. In the Caribbean, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and the wider Middle East, cultures that were successfully in existence long before modern processing techniques were invented, meals depend more on legumes and pulses than they do on meat and fish. If we adopted more of their cuisines, we might become healthier, our animals more content, and we could even succeed in feeding the whole world.

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Everywhere you turned in London this week, there were Americans. Not tourists. Americans who came and stayed — working in its restaurants, pouring its wine, redistributing its food, writing about its tables. A quiet migration that doesn’t make the wealth pages but says something true about where we are right now.

Marylebone. 8 am.

The high street before the city gets loud. Jammy eggs, espresso, a café that doesn’t try too hard. The morning happening through the window — deliveries, school runs, a woman walking a dog the size of a coffee table.

Back-to-back meetings from nine. Americans living in London. London money looking at Washington. People who move between both cities the way other people move between zip codes.

Somewhere in the night, Somerville — the film about the Grove family’s Virginia farm, four generations on the same land since 1914 — had been nominated for two Capitol Emmy Awards. Societal Concerns, Long Form Content. Audio Recording.

The news came at three in the morning—some things you carry quietly through the day.

St. Alban’s, Kensington. Before Lunch.

A candle lit in a quiet church before the afternoon began.

Not everything worth noting makes it into a newsletter. Some things are just between you and whatever you believe in. The Emmy news. The Groves. Bobby’s handshake after the private screening last fall. A film about people who stayed when leaving would have been easier.

Gratitude has to go somewhere. A candlelit church in Kensington is as good a place as any.

On The Felix Project

Before the trip, Julia Watson had been talking about this at length.

The Felix Project — London’s largest food redistribution charity, founded in 2016 by Justin Byam Shaw in memory of his teenage son Felix, who died suddenly from meningitis. The project rescues surplus food from supermarkets, restaurants, and farms and delivers it free to over 1,200 charities and schools across the city. Felix’s Kitchen in Poplar turns donated produce into roughly 4,000 ready meals a day. Last year: 38 million meals.

A father’s grief turned into something that feeds people. That’s the whole story.

Julia is doing work that matters in London. She won’t be the last one mentioned here.

The UK’s sugar tax — in place since 2018 — has cut sugar in beverages by 44 percent. Not by asking nicely. By making the industry reformulate or pay. The menus across this city have followed. What a society decides to pay attention to shows up eventually on the plate. London figured that out.

Lunch at The Ivy

Lunch with Alex, who runs Sotheby’s UK. Old friends, no agenda required.

The Ivy at noon is a civic event. Amber lights, arched windows, the bar occupied before most people have finished their coffee. Old money and new money and money you can’t quite place, all eating together with the ease of people who’ve decided this is where they belong.

The conversation covered the market, London, Washington. A lot of ground without arriving at any particular conclusion. That’s the best kind.

West Hampstead. Late Afternoon.

A friend named Cathy — her flat in West Hampstead, and one stop first.

Her favorite butcher in the neighborhood. The kind of shop that still knows its customers by name, still cuts to order, still treats the work as something worth doing carefully. Twenty minutes at the counter just talking about what was good this week. London runs on these places. The restaurants get the attention. The high streets do the actual work.

Then wine at Tannin and Oak. A wine bar on the high street, unhurried, the kind of room that rewards staying longer than you planned. The wine steward was from New York. She’d been in London long enough to know the list cold and recommend without hesitation. Another American who found something here worth staying for.

Evening. The Ned.

Back to the bar. Midland Bank once — Sir Edwin Lutyens, 1924. Arched windows two stories up, brass fittings, a hundred years of transactions in the walls.

Campari. Ice. Orange. Soda water on the side.

Through the window the Underground roundel glowing red. London telling you it’s still here. Still running.

A full day. Good meetings. A church in Kensington. Lunch with a friend. A butcher in West Hampstead. Wine poured by a New Yorker who stayed. Two Emmy nominations carried quietly since three in the morning.

The bartender didn’t ask questions. London lets you have your moment.

Dinner at St. John

Twenty years of coming back to this room.

Fergus Henderson opened it in 1994 with a philosophy that was radical then and obvious now — nose to tail, nothing wasted, the whole animal respected. The menu printed fresh every day. Wednesday 13th May 2026. The pig on the masthead never changes.

The server was Michael. From DC.

He brought the Roe and Radishes without ceremony and checked back once. That’s the St. John way — the room doesn’t perform, the food doesn’t explain itself, the service doesn’t intrude. Michael understood this perfectly. He’d learned it here, in this room, in this city, three thousand miles from home.

The Lancashire Cheese was on the menu. Ordered without hesitation.

It was late when the night ended. The city quiet in the way London gets quiet — not empty, just settled. The Groves on the mind. A film nominated for two Emmys while dinner was being eaten three thousand miles from Virginia. Michael clearing the next table. A long way from DC. Right where he needed to be.

Some things take twenty years. Some things happen overnight. Both are true at the same time.

Breakfast at The Wolseley. Friday Morning.

Josh Spero of the Financial Times is across the table.

The Wolseley is the right room for this conversation — grand, unhurried, the kind of place that takes breakfast seriously. Wealth migration was on the table. Journalism. Americans in London. Opera and the arts. The particular question of what brings people across the Atlantic and what keeps them here.

The answer, it turns out, isn’t simple. It never is.

Some come for the property. Some come for the work. Some come for a posting and discover they’ve stopped counting the years. Julia writing about food in a city she now knows better than the one she left. A New Yorker pouring wine in West Hampstead on a Wednesday afternoon. Michael from DC bringing the Roe and Radishes at St. John like he was born to it.

London in 2026 is absorbing a quiet but significant American presence. Not all of it shows up in the wealth migration numbers. Some of it shows up in who’s working the room, pouring the glass, redistributing the food.

The American Table has been watching this from both sides of the conversation for nearly a decade.

That’s why this trip matters. That’s why this letter exists.

The scrambled eggs and toast were the best on the planet. That’s not a throwaway line. That’s a fact about that room. The coffee was excellent. The company was better.

The American Table covers food, politics, and culture from Washington and beyond. This dispatch was filed from London.

• One Hyde Park

• The Felix Project

• Julia Watson — Tabled

• The Ivy

• Tannin and Oak

• The Ned

• St. John

• The Wolseley

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— Societal Concerns, Long Form Content

— Audio Recording

This is the Groves’ story before it’s anything else. The nominations are theirs.

The film follows the Grove family — four generations on the same Virginia land since 1914 — and what it takes to keep a farm like that going now.

It premiered at WorldFest-Houston in April. Produced by Inertia Films.

In August, chef Hamilton Johnson will mark the two-year anniversary of Mallard, his homey Southern restaurant with an unlikely Nordic twist. And he is just a teeny bit anxious.

After all, Honeysuckle, Johnson’s first Washington venture, lasted little more than two years before he reluctantly pulled the plug. “It was in a basement and there was not enough traffic. It was like a death, devastating, and you think, ‘this was my restaurant, and it wasn’t good enough for people.’”

Honeysuckle had replaced the long-running Vidalia, DC’s high-end temple of modern Southern cuisine, founded by Jeffrey Buben, who won the 1999 James Beard award for Best Chef, Mid-Atlantic, and Sallie Buben, his wife and business partner. Johnson’s first job in Washington was at Vidalia, starting as a line cook and rising to chef de cuisine over eight years

“Hamilton wanted to become a leader and be able to practice his craft,” says Buben. “I was a little bit of a mentor, a father figure to him.”

When the Bubens declined to renew their lease, Johnson, now 44, grabbed the chance to be his own boss. He had Honeysuckle’s walls painted a screaming sexy red, hung photos of rock stars, then waited in vain for enough patrons to keep the lights on.

“It was an odd time in Washington in terms of where the puck was moving the energy of the city,” says Buben, 67. “You had the expansion of some of the largest restaurants in DC history. Downtown business lunch was winding down, shifting to The Wharf and City Center. At that time, it was very difficult for an owner-operator downtown,” but easier for a neighborhood small-concept, like the Michelin-starred Dabney in Shaw’s Blagden Alley, and Ris, in West End.

A heartbroken Johnson went home to tiny Inman, S.C., where he says he stayed drunk for quite some time while trying to get his life in order. He returned to Washington and worked at several restaurants but in late 2021, went back to Inman to help his widowed father, a retired textile worker and gifted duck decoy carver, who was battling pancreatic cancer. Two days after Mick Johnson’s final treatment, he died of Covid.

Hamilton Johnson came north once again, this time cooking at several spots around town, including chef Matt Baker’s Michelin-starred Gravitas. In 2024, he became a Neighborhood Restaurant Group partner and chef at the old Birch and Barley, which he renamed Mallard, in honor of his father. Nearly everything on the walls and shelves came out of his childhood home, including nature paintings by his late mother, Carolyn Fowler Johnson, who fulfilled her wish to live long enough to attend his 2003 Johnson and Wales University graduation in Charleston.

In her honor, his first tattoo were her monogram. Today, the six-foot-three Johnson estimates that 80 percent of his 280-pound corpus is tattooed head to foot. “I just really enjoy them. They make me happy.” The largest, most elaborate, and doubtless most painful, is the multi-hued face of Jesus, which occupies the whole of his massive back. (Full disclosure: Johnson is the first interview subject I have ever asked to semi-strip, so I could inspect the waist-up artwork.) There might have been more ink had Johnson not dropped 160 pounds through rigorous workouts, healthy eating and nearly three years of sobriety.

“It’s hard to be a dieting chef because you have to taste everything, right?” he asks with a smile. When preparing a large duck breast for a TV show--first seared in its own grease, then in added butter—he explains simply, “The more fat, the more flavor.”

Over the past 21 months, Johnson has made Mallard his personal sanctuary, and like the body art, its cozy decor evokes memory, loss and hope. “It’s like having my Dad and my Mom here,” he says softly.

But once in the kitchen, Chef--aka Ham or Hambone--is pure beast, as befits a man who honed his craft at Vidalia, Michelin-starred Gravitas and Charleston’s Maverick Southern Kitchens.

In the heart of the eatery-laden Logan Circle neighborhood, Mallard patrons tuck into Sea Island pea dip with duck fat saltines; shrimp and grits laced with pork, ham, scallions and sweet, heat-less Piquillo peppers. Think Chesapeake fried oysters atop creamy deviled-egg aioli, and a chicken-fried confit duck leg encased in a crust so hard it shatters audibly to reveal tender rich dark meat. Dessert, y’all? The Coffee and Cigarettes is a decadent mélange of espresso ice cream, cocoa crusted espresso beans, tobacco caramel, chocolate mousse, macadamia praline, and smoked olive oil, served in a vintage glass ashtray. It’s a tossup whether first to call the dentist, cardiologist or Ozempic prescriber.

Johnson’s love of Nordic food began 13 years ago, when he entered the first of seven Friends and Fun competitions in Finland and Iceland. Last month, Mallard hosted a Taste of Iceland pop-up with Chef Daníel Cochran Jónsson of Reykjavik’s Sushi Social. Three sold-out dinners included arctic char crudo, poached cod loin, grilled lamb fillet and berries with skyr, a tangy Icelandic yogurt-y cheese.

The Southern and Low Country traditions, however, are in Johnson’s DNA. “I grew up in a household where everything was centered around food. My mom was the kind of cook who got recipes from the New York Times and out of books, and always tried new things, whereas my dad was very rustic. For him it was the recipes his mom taught him. I was always around both of those worlds.” To this day, Johnson’s favorite meals draw on the countless variations of his father’s “breakfast for dinner” specialties.

In August, perhaps to celebrate Mallard’s second anniversary, he and Buben will host a Mid-Atlantic Coastal seafood dinner. “Hamilton’s roots are cooking from Charleston and the Low Country, me from Eastern North Carolina and the Outer Banks,” says Buben, who last year joined his protege at Mallard to prepare Vidalia’s greatest hits. In 2024, he and Sallie closed Bistro Bis on Capitol Hill and moved south, where he now helps his son, CIA-trained chef Mac Buben, run a large, casual seafood restaurant in Nags Head, N.C.

But even amidst the sold-out pop-up events, crowded brunches and dinners, something still niggles. “It’s always going to be in the back of my head here. What if this fails? What if Mallard doesn’t make it?”

Annie Groer was a Washington Post staff writer and columnist whose work has also appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, New Republic, and other print, digital, and broadcast outlets. She twice represented DC in the National Chicken Cooking Contest.

Upgrade to paid. Cartoons, columns, and satire in the tradition of the greats — only for PAID subscribers.

The American Table is proud to welcome Jeremy Nguyen as our first contributing cartoonist. His single-panel cartoon will be a regular feature of the publication — arriving at the intersection of food, politics, and the American table we all share.

Jeremy Nguyen is a cartoonist and illustrator whose work has appeared regularly in The New Yorker since 2017. His single-panel cartoons have earned him a devoted following for their sharp wit, precise observation, and the rare ability to make complex ideas land in a single image. Beyond The New Yorker, his work has appeared in Wired, Airmail Weekly, and The Atlantic, and he has created original cartoon campaigns for HBO’s The White Lotus and Netflix’s The Chair. His illustrations have been published by Penguin Random House and recognized by the Society of Illustrators. He is the author of Can I Pet Your Dog?

While the cameras are in the ballroom, we’ve been working on something new for The American Table. It launches tomorrow morning at 6am — and the timing, I promise you, is not a coincidence.

We’ve brought in a remarkable talent. More on that tomorrow.

See you at the table.

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