Two Sinsheimer Literary Authors Nominated for James Beard Awards

I’m thrilled to share that two Sinsheimer Literary authors have been nominated for 2026 James Beard Media Awards.

Marion Nestle’s What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters has been nominated in the Food Issues and Advocacy category. Published by North Point Press, the recently relaunched Farrar, Straus and Giroux imprint devoted to literary nonfiction, What to Eat Now is a fully revised and dramatically expanded update of Marion’s classic What to Eat, which was itself nominated for—and won—the James Beard Award for Best Food Reference in 2007.

Nearly twenty years later, Marion has returned to the supermarket aisles with the same clarity, rigor, and moral seriousness that have made her one of America's essential voices in food politics. The new book takes on the questions that shape how we eat now: ultra-processed foods, plant-based meats and milks, bottled and flavored waters, food insecurity, obesity, online shopping, organics, cannabis edibles, farmworkers, farmed fish, toxins, and the ever-evolving confusion of trying to make good choices for personal and planetary health in a food system designed to sell us more. Civil Eats described it as a comprehensive guide to thinking about food today.

Meanwhile, the first season of Chris St. Cavish’s ambitious documentary series saintcavish has been nominated in the Docuseries Visual Media category. The YouTube series, made with filmmaker and photographer Graeme Kennedy on a shoestring budget, consists of immersive, deeply reported short documentaries on Chinese food culture, with episodes exploring hand-pulled noodles, Cantonese pig roasting, Sichuan’s salt history, Shengjian Bao, fermentation, and the craft knowledge passed down in kitchens and workshops across China. Chris and Graeme are up against docuseries on Netflix (a little-known show called Chef's Table) and Amazon Prime.

In February I wrote about Chris’s forthcoming book with Clarkson Potter, MIAN: Travels Through China’s Noodle Culture, which will feature documentary-style photography by Graeme. What excites me about both the book and the video series is the same thing: Chris brings a cook’s technical eye, a journalist’s curiosity, and a deep commitment to showing Chinese foodways with the seriousness, specificity, and wonder they deserve.

When he learned about the nomination, Graeme wrote:

We’re over here in China, making videos and having fun, sticking cameras in wok forges and wood ovens. Traveling all over the place. Filming in noodle schools and elite kitchens and crab factories and tofu towns. Grinding out edits on train trips and long flights. Shooting videos off into the internet and wondering where they might land.

Now, as we’re prepping and shooting Season 3, we’re starting to find out. These stories go far. We’ve made almost 30 short documentaries in the last 18 months. If you’ve watched even one of them, thank you. We’re just getting started.

I couldn’t be happier for Marion, Chris, and Graeme. The James Beard Media Awards will be announced on June 13 in Chicago. Wishing them all the very best of luck!