Cruda—Brooklyn

I met Joana Dickinson shortly after we launched the Field Office website in early June 2026. As Cruda’s Operations Director, she was the sunniest, most positive connector of people and ideas I’d met in a long time. So when Cruda announced its first printed magazine, I wanted to be in the room.

On October 5th, Joana and Editor-in-Chief Jess Eng hosted a Talk & Taste series at the Reform showroom in Dumbo to celebrate the launch. I came for “The Forgotten History of Sweeteners in the Northeast,” presented by Joe of The Northeast Larder (stay tuned for Joe’s launch of communal-style restaurant Garnet in Brooklyn Heights). What I took home was how earnest, smart, respectful, and curious the young people in the room were.

The Work

Cruda is an independent magazine on gastronomy, design, and food science. The name means raw, which the founders treat as both material and metaphor: an ingredient before it’s transformed, a question before it’s solved. The first issue, Raw Beginnings, runs 87 pages and is an ode to gastronomic works in progress. It features a bakery bildungsroman, urban foraging, mycological mischief, table metaphysics, memories of anafres, wheat as architecture, tea in precolonial Assam, and a brief history of pie crust. It also has interviews with flavor scientist Dr. Arielle Johnson and Argentine chef Manuela Donnet, plus a foreword by Dr. Johnny Drain.

The evening’s talk made the same argument in miniature. Joe traced how cuisines sweetened before refined sugar: malted rice syrup in Korea, date syrup and pomegranate molasses in the Middle East, honey in Apicius’s Rome, palm sugar in Southeast Asia. In the Northeast, it was maple and other tree saps, then honeybees, which English colonists first brought to Jamestown in 1622. By the 1850s, cane sugar and molasses had pushed nearly everything else aside. Beet sugar was tried in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1838 and left for the Midwest. Sorghum did the same. Domino’s Yonkers refinery closed at the end of 2025, ending a long run of sugar refining in the region.

Why It Matters

Joe made a point I keep returning to: each sweetener carries a flavor that shapes the cuisine around it. Try making Pad Thai with refined sugar instead of palm sugar and see how much of the dish disappears, in familiarity as much as taste. A limitation, in other words, becomes a character.

That is the same spirit as Cruda’s “raw.” A food system is the sum of its ingredients, and honest work starts there, before the polish. It is also encouraging to see a new generation reading, tasting, and asking where things come from.

Support This Work

Cruda is an independent magazine, and Raw Beginnings is its first printed issue.


→ Read Cruda’s digital magazine

→ The Northeast Larder