By Women, About Women

It's apparent by now that what happens in the food world can have big, sweeping reverberations outside of it. The choices we make individually and collectively about food—like what we eat, and how and where we grow, make, and consume it—affect everything from agriculture and the environment to political policy, world hunger, climate change, and so much more. Food also plays a societal role, influencing how we act toward and around each other, and the way we experience people, cultures, and traditions that are different from us and our own. Ultimately this all factors in to how well we understand and relate to one another in our communities and across borders.

We are happy that 2018 is a year, long overdue, in which women are being prioritized, listened to, and celebrated in the food world and beyond. (Hopefully, this is just the tip of the iceberg.) This fall issue of SAVEUR is fully written, photographed, and illustrated by women, and all of its stories feature women. We did this not only to add our voice to this powerful movement, but because it just felt like a great thing to do.

I learned a lot in helping to create and curate our first all-women issue. For one, there will always be more we can do to expand our pool of contributors further and wider, something I've been committed to doing since day one in my position as SAVEUR's executive editor. (What fun is it, and how much can we really learn, anyway, when the same few people or the same kinds of people tell all the stories?) For this issue, that meant collaborating with a greater number of talented women than ever before. SAVEUR has always had an inspiring base of female contributors, starting with the magazine's founding editor, Dorothy Kalins. But giving this pool of experts some extra thought led us to even more new, wonderful relationships. We are enamored with London-based photographer Susan Bell's work in capturing the strong, spirited home cooks of the Latvian countryside and their dishes in "Queens of the Country." We love the contribution of artist Lucy Engelman, whose illustrated rendition of our Origins map gave a lush, colorful depiction of all the places our contributors wrote about and visited for this issue. And we are moved by writer Naomi Tomky and chef Kate Koo's glimpse into the challenges of being a female sushi chef in a time when being a woman behind the counter is somehow still not widely accepted.

This issue also led me to Giorgia Goggi, a cook I flew all the way to southern Italy to meet, and whose produce-forward recipes grace our cover. Giorgia is too humble to call herself a chef, but her food was among the most gorgeous I've seen and tasted all year.

Humility is something we women, as a whole, have too much of. In our all-too-common quest for perfection—saying or writing the right thing, pleasing everyone, being a flawless host or partner or colleague—we can second-guess ourselves and our worth and achievements. And yet, every one of the bold, talented women in this issue has made an invaluable contribution to it that changed the way I look at cooking, food, and community. We're hoping many of you will feel the same.

The path to movement won't ever follow a straight line. But we think, we hope, we are all headed in the right direction. —Stacy Adimando, executive editor