R.P. Aditya

Article URL: https://thehustle.co/the-man-feeding-a-remote-alaska-town-with-a-costco-card-and-a-ship

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23062570

Points: 481

# Comments: 220

Article URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52530828

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23067008

Points: 475

# Comments: 150

Summary:   Updated data shows that in King County, COVID-19 is disproportionally impacting communities of color. There is more to do collectively to support all communities with access to testing, information and social supports to address inequities in health outcomes. Story:   Public Health – Seattle & King County is releasing updated data on COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths [...]

The post Media release: New analysis shows pronounced racial inequities among COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths appeared first on PUBLIC HEALTH INSIDER.

Article URL: https://github.com/ksindi/managers-playbook

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23026750

Points: 358

# Comments: 59

Research on this virus (officially SARS CoV-2, commonly COVID-19) is pouring out and filling every medical journal I typically read.  Here are a few recent articles on food-related aspects (some of these are not yet in print).

Obesity and its Implications for COVID-19 Mortality: The authors argue that the increased prevalence of obesity in Italy older adults as compared to its prevalence in China may account for the higher mortality observed in Italy.

Obesity is associated with decreased expiratory reserve volume, functional capacity and respiratory system compliance. In patients with increased abdominal obesity, pulmonary function is further compromised in supine patients by decreased aphragmatic excursion, making ventilation more difficult. Furthermore, increased inflammatory cytokines associated with obesity may contribute to the increased morbidity associated with obesity in COVID-19 infections.

Sudden and Complete Olfactory Loss Function as a Possible Symptom of COVID-19: This is a case study of a patient infected by SARS-CoV-2 whose presenting symptom was the sudden and complete loss of the ability to smell.

Loss of smell and taste in combination with other symptoms is a strong predictor of COVID-19 infection:  “Our study suggests that loss of taste and smell is a strong predictor of having been infected by the COVID-19 virus. Also, the combination of symptoms that could be used to identify and isolate individuals includes anosmia, fever, persistent cough, diarrhoea, fatigue, abdominal pain and loss of appetite.”

COVID‐19 Related School Closings and Risk of Weight Gain Among Children:  “In short, we anticipate that the COVID‐19 pandemic will likely double out‐of‐school time this year for many children in the U.S. and will exacerbate the risk factors for weight gain associated with summer recess.”

Should COVID-19 Concern Nephrologists?  Why and to What Extent? The Emerging Impasse of Angiotensin Blockade:  This is the easiest-to-understand review of the science of this extensively studied virus I have been able to find.  It covers the basics along with detailed explanations of what this virus does, how it works, and where vaccines might operate.    To penetrate human cells, this virus seems to hijack a particular enzyme in the complicated renin-angiotensin system that regulates body fluid balance and blood pressure.

Despite these differences, several studies have reported that SARS-CoV-2 exploits the same membrane-bound angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) as SARS-CoV to gain access to its target cells, although it has greater binding affinity. ACE2 is a carboxypeptidase that preferentially removes carboxy-terminal hydrophobic or basic amino acids. ACE2 cleaves a single residue from angiotensin I (Ang I), generating Ang 1–9, and a single residue from angiotensin II (Ang II) to generate Ang 1–7, whose vasodilator, anti-proliferative, and anti-fibrotic functional effects oppose those of the Ang II generated by angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE).

Article URL: https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-donald-knuth-cant-stop-telling-stories-20200416/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22889195

Points: 642

# Comments: 221

As the author or co-author of two books about pet food (Pet Food Politics and Feed Your Pet Right), I have an ongoing interest in animals in general and dogs and cats in particular.  They too are infected by Coronavirus.  Here are some recent reports.

PANGOLINS: If, like me, you have never seen one, here’s what they look like.

They are the most illegally trafficked mammal in the world, prized as food and for their scales used in traditional Chinese medicine.  They are also suspected as being the reservoir for SARS CoV-2.

The discovery of multiple lineages of pangolin coronavirus and their similarity to SARS CoV-2 suggests that pangolins should be considered as possible hosts in the emergence of novel coronaviruses and should be removed from wet markets to prevent zoonotic transmission.

LIVESTOCK: This article offers the intriguing but unconfirmed suggestion that industrial pig production—not pangolins in wet markets—could be the origin of covid-19.    But other data suggest that pigs do not get Covid-19 (neither do chickens or ducks, but ferrets do).

TIGERS AND LIONS: A tiger at the Bronx Zoo—Nadia—developed a dry cough; her test for covid-19 came out positive.  Three other tigers and three lions also had the same cough.  How did they get this?  The zoo says:

Our cats were infected by a person caring for them who was asymptomatically infected with the virus or before that person developed symptoms…Appropriate preventive measures are now in place for all staff who are caring for them, and the other cats in our four WCS zoos, to prevent further exposure of any other of our zoo cats.

DOGS: I’ve written about this previously.  The few cases of Covid-19 in dogs were apparently transmitted by their humans.  We don’t have evidence that dogs can transmit the virus to humans—yet?

CATS:  Cats, like lions and tigers, can be infected with Covid-19 and can spread it to other cats.  This is known from a study in which Chinese virologists injected the virus into the noses of domestic cats.  Can they spread it to humans?  More research, please.

The team, led by virologist Bu Zhigao at Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, introduced the SARS-CoV-2 virus into the noses of five domestic cats. When two of the animals were euthanized six days later, the researchers found viral RNA and infectious virus particles in their upper respiratory tracts.

CAN PETS (OR ZOO ANIMALS) TRANSMIT THE VIRUS TO HUMANS?  There is no evidence for this so far, according to the Centers for Disease Control, World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) and World Health Organization.  The WHO says:

Can I catch COVID-19 from my pet?

• We are aware of instances of animals and pets of COVID-19 patients being infected with the disease;
• There is a possibility for some animals to become infected through close contact with infected humans. Further evidence is needed to understand if animals and pets can spread the disease;
• Based on current evidence, human to human transmission remains the main driver;
• It is still too early to say whether cats could be the intermediate host in the transmission of the COVID-19.

WHEN IN DOUBT: Wash your hands.

OTHER ITEMS ABOUT ANIMALS

• It’s hard to recruit and retain food animal veterinarians in the United States
• A dog team in Maine is delivering supplies to elderly residents shut in by the virus

RESOURCE: The World Organization for Animal Health has a useful Q and A on Coronavirus and pet and food animals.

Engineers at Dyson want to know: Are your kids ready for a challenge? Well, maybe they weren’t before, but they’ve been home for a month now and they’re bored out of their minds. Now is a good time to try something new.

Read more...

Although anyone can catch the novel coronavirus, we’ve known for months that not everyone is equally at risk of dying or becoming seriously ill from COVID-19. But it’s not just older people who are vulnerable. Preliminary reports on COVID-19 fatalities suggest black Americans are dying at elevated rates, and poorer Americans are many of the workers whose jobs put them at daily risk of exposure.

And the medical conditions that make the coronavirus more dangerous aren’t evenly distributed throughout the population. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that anyone who has underlying conditions that compromise their immune system or other ailments like heart disease or diabetes is also at increased risk. A recent report from the CDC found that as of March 28, only about half of all patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were over 65, while three-quarters of hospitalized patients of all ages had at least one underlying condition.

We analyzed the CDC’s 2018 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data, a collection of health-related surveys of U.S. residents, to see just how many Americans are more vulnerable to getting seriously ill from COVID-19 and what demographic groups they fall into.⁸ Some of the most striking findings:

According to the data, more than 135 million American adults, or 52 percent, are somehow at elevated risk.

• About three-fifths of those who are vulnerable are under 65.
• Younger black Americans are more likely to be vulnerable. The percentage of white Americans who are over 65 is higher than the share of black Americans in that age group, but among those under 65, a larger percentage of black Americans have underlying conditions.
• The poorest and least educated Americans are more likely to be at risk than those with higher incomes or more education. More than 60 percent of those who make less than $25,000 a year and those who did not complete high school have an underlying condition that makes them vulnerable.

So to better understand the threat Americans are confronting, let’s dive deeper into the data.

2 in 5 younger people are at elevated risk

Although everyone over 65 is considered to be at higher risk whether or not they have underlying conditions, as you can see in the chart below, more than 30 percent of every age group is at risk. Overall, nearly 40 percent of all Americans under 65 have a condition that makes COVID-19 more dangerous for them.

Similar percentages of white and black Americans are at high risk (56 percent and 54 percent, respectively), but white Americans are more likely than other racial groups to be at risk because of their age, as you can see below. Some of the most at-risk groups are multiracial and black Americans under 65.

The pandemic preys on existing inequalities

David Williams, a professor at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health who studies how social factors like race and socioeconomic status affect health, said that people of color are more likely to develop conditions like heart disease and diabetes than white Americans, and to develop those conditions at a younger age than white people do.

These disparities extend to whether people are getting regular health care, too. For example, the CDC’s risk factor survey estimates that almost 16 percent of black Americans — 4.8 million people in total — did not see a doctor when they needed one at some point in the 12 months prior to taking the survey because they couldn’t afford to go. Among Latinos, that number jumped to almost 20 percent, while around 17 percent of Native Americans and multiracial Americans reported forgoing needed care. In contrast, 10 percent of whites and 9 percent of Asian Americans didn’t see a doctor because of cost concerns. And that makes sense, because black Americans were also almost twice as likely to lack health insurance as white Americans, and Hispanic Americans were nearly four times as likely.

The reasons for these disparities are well documented. Pervasive residential segregation puts people of color at a disadvantage, differences in employment and education opportunities exacerbate poverty, communities of color have fewer health resources and less access to fresh food, and for decades, alcohol, tobacco and junk food companies have targeted advertising to black and Hispanic communities.

Williams also pointed to a comprehensive study of how people of color experience the health care system. The study suggested that at least partly due to providers’ implicit bias, black, Hispanic and Native American patients can receive lower quality health care.

“The science is 100 percent clear on this point and that is, across virtually every therapeutic intervention in the United States, from the most simple procedure to the most complicated, blacks and other minorities receive poorer quality care and less intensive care than whites,” he said.

The working class faces higher risk

Because of how race and class are intertwined in American life, you can also see health inequalities along socioeconomic lines. In general, Williams said, “Socioeconomic status is one of the biggest predictors of variations in health in the world.” Almost two-thirds of those who make less than $25,000 have underlying conditions that make them more vulnerable to the novel coronavirus, and, as you can see in the chart below, the likelihood of having those conditions declines as incomes go up. And these numbers just look at respondents’ health — they don’t take into account what jobs these people do or whether those jobs are requiring workers to interact with the public and increase their risk of exposure.

Similarly, about 63 percent of Americans who did not graduate from high school are more vulnerable, while about 40 percent of college graduates have health issues that put them at increased risk.

The differences among income, education and racial groups reflect that those with more resources have better access to health care and more of the flexibility that makes healthy lifestyle changes possible (such as exercising or buying fresh fruits and vegetables).

In this pandemic, Williams said that those who were already disadvantaged will likely be hit hardest, as businesses close down and leave many low-income black and Hispanic workers out of a job, causing financial hardship even in the best of circumstances and making it even harder to see a doctor if they do get sick.

“I think we are looking at a perfect storm that can have pervasive adverse consequences. The people being most hurt by this epidemic are the very people who at the beginning of this epidemic were the most vulnerable,” he said.

Parents, let’s embrace — especially during this stressful pandemic — teaching our children to be perfectly average.

My kids probably aren’t going to cure cancer. They probably aren’t going to be professional athletes or billionaire CEOs or world-famous singer-songwriters. They probably aren’t going to be the first to land on Mars or the first to climb Mount Everest while doing a handstand or even the first to read the terms and conditions all the way through. Sure, they could do any (or all) of those extraordinary things, but chances are they won’t. Instead, they’ll most likely grow up to be ordinary adults with ordinary lives. Like me. And like you.

It sounds like a horrible thing to say. How dare I shrug as my children drift toward mediocrity? I should push them harder and further and faster at the earliest possible age to reach their “full potential.” Luckily for my kids, that’s not my style. Of all the things my kids probably aren’t going to do, there’s only one I’m certain of: They aren’t going to give up their childhoods to chase “success.”

At some point, the early years of many American children shifted from a time to grow and learn to a time to get on the career fast track. The road to becoming a partner at an elite East Coast law firm doesn’t start when a high school junior first thinks about colleges. It begins when their parents enroll them in violin lessons at age 5 so they’ll seem well-rounded on their Ivy League applications. The pressure is real and well-documented, and it begins earlier and earlier. Tiny designer briefcases as baby shower gifts can’t be too far away.

It’s never been more apparent than now — in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, when many parents are doing all of their normal duties while also working from home and guiding their kids through online classes that work about a third of the time — that we need to take another look at our standards for success. It’s hard to parent, teach, and work simultaneously, even though the myth of the super-mom and -dad has taught us to expect ourselves to be all things to all people at all times. If you thought kids would take it easy on parents due to something as minor as a worldwide quarantine, you’ve never met a real-life child.

Parents probably assume everybody else is still pushing their kids toward pre-pandemic standards for success, and they feel like they should be, too. The popular advice for how to do it all has no connection to reality: Set a schedule. Maintain normality. Limit screen time and get your kids hooked on books. They might as well recommend that you permanently give up sleep and grow fairy wings. I’ve never been a fan of limiting screen time, but now, I don’t even pretend to feel guilty when my kids finish their schoolwork and move straight to YouTube for the rest of the day. Whatever keeps them from killing each other is fine in my book. I don’t want my kids to be perfect, just alive. I was parenting apocalypse-style before it was cool.

I understand the culture of overachievement that got us here, even if I don’t agree with it. Growing up, my parents never put any pressure on me, but I fell in with a group of academic overachievers, and I hated to lose. As far as peer pressure goes, I could have done worse, but not by much. I was constantly stressed out as I pushed myself to succeed at everything, at least academically. I was valedictorian of my high school class, and I was miserable. I was valedictorian in college, too. (Don’t be impressed. I majored in English.)

But coming out ahead in high school and college didn’t make any difference in my life, and if I didn’t bring it up as an example of what not to do, I wouldn’t even remember that it happened. And that was just me putting pressure on myself to meet the ways in which society defines success. I can’t imagine what would have happened if that pressure came from my parents. I never would have had the free time to discover and pursue my real passions, like comedy writing or taking long naps. I would have been too busy going to therapy.

Today I have four young kids of my own. I don’t want them to feel the pressure I did, from me or from themselves. I want to give them the space to become their own people without pushing them toward a career path while they still have their baby teeth. That’s a weird thought in today’s world. Nobody thinks of children as having agency over their own lives. To many people, children are just a reflection of their parents’ decisions. Yet anyone who has actually spent time around kids knows that they have distinct personalities, with their own goals and preferences, pretty much from day one.

My oldest, age 9, still doesn’t play any sports (by her own choice), which is enough to get me locked up for neglect in some parts of the country. But she recently joined a robotics club she thought sounded fun, and she likes it so far. Maybe she’ll stick with it and turn it into a lifelong pursuit. Maybe she’ll drop it next year to focus on choir, or join a running club, or stand around our yard and poke things with a stick. I’m letting her explore her own interests because that’s what’s best for her. The fact that it lets me be lazy and not fly around the country for sports competitions is just a bonus.

Parents today feel as though they’re letting their kids down if they don’t give them every possible advantage, no matter the cost. You might worry that if your kid doesn’t get into the best preschool, they won’t qualify for advanced classes in elementary school and junior high and high school. Then they won’t get into their (or, more likely, your) dream college, so they’ll never land that high-paying job you always wanted. You know, for them. That’s why young couples jump on waiting lists for “top” preschools as soon as they find out they’re pregnant. It’s never too early to start raising those math and science scores.

It’s not just that parents are expected to push their kids toward success. It’s that they’re expected to push their kids toward one very specific kind of it. They feel pressured to move to expensive neighborhoods so their kids can attend “good” schools to get into “good” colleges so they can get “good” jobs. But in almost every case, “good” is just a euphemism for “well-funded” or “high-paying.” Parents who are seduced by the system expect a very measurable payout when their kids become high-powered doctors or lawyers or corporate executives, and they’re willing to pay top dollar to get them there.

It’s not a fair standard. The poor can’t afford to move a few miles down the road to a house that costs three times as much because of the school district. But those who can afford it aren’t doing themselves (or their kids) any favors, either. Kids internalize that pressure. If a family uproots itself solely so a child can have better opportunities at school, that kid better perform at the highest level — or else. Nobody triples their mortgage payments so their child can get Bs and Cs.

But isn’t a focus on excellence a good thing? Not for kids. The world may be physically safer than it’s ever been before (current pandemic notwithstanding), but kids today are more depressed and anxious than ever, and the extreme pressure to succeed can be a contributing factor. A 2014 review of 16 scientific studies found that burnout, which had previously been documented among professionals and university students, is now clearly present in high school populations, increasing the risk for anxiety and depression. Kids feel pressured by their parents, society, and themselves to never slip up. Perfectionism among students has been rising since the 1980s, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. The result is a generation of kids on target to be equal parts wealthy and unhappy. There’s nothing less perfect than that.

I get why parents feel pressured. Income inequality is the highest it’s been in 50 years, and as a new recession looms, it can seem like winning in today’s competitive job market is the only way to feel secure. A college degree can mean a better life, so it makes sense that parents, especially those who are working or middle class, push their children so hard to get one. (For families that are already winning in the current economy, it seems like less of a necessity and more like running up the score.) But regardless of a household’s income level, the negative effects of academic pressure are the same. Pushing kids too hard too early can hold them back in ways that never show up on a standardized test score. More and more, “excellent” and “damaged” go hand-in-hand.

Am I really saying you shouldn’t do everything in your power to make sure your child makes as much money as possible one day? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Take a deep breath. I have only three goals for my own kids, none of which have anything to do with becoming the richest people in the world. I’ll consider my kids to be successful adults someday if: 1) they can support themselves, 2) they’re not serial killers, and 3) they don’t blame me for all of their problems. There are so many other perfectly good scapegoats in the world. I just want them to leave me out of it.

Ultimately, you can’t control your kid’s future, whether you take a laid-back approach to parenting or read SAT prep questions to them in utero. What you can do is give your child the mental and emotional tools to not define themselves by their test scores or salary. The greatest thing you can teach your kid is how to find meaning and fulfillment on their own. Kids who grow up understanding that are the ones who really come out ahead in life, regardless of their class rank or tax bracket.

Recently, I took my 9-year-old to the park and taught her to play wiffle ball. We made it through all nine innings and had a great time together, even if it was a little cold and windy to be out. Nothing we did that day will lead down a road that will impress a college recruiter. Not everything has to be an organized sport or competition with the possibility of a scholarship dangling at the end. My dream for my oldest daughter isn’t for her to attend a top school that lands her a prestigious 80-hour-a-week job and puts her in the top 1 percent. It’s for her to one day have the free time to play wiffle ball with her own kids, if she decides to have them. There’s nothing mediocre about a life like that.

I don’t actually think I’m raising mediocre children. In fact, my kids might even be above average, which is what every parent thinks about their own offspring. But I’ll never burden them with unrealistic expectations to become the smartest, richest, most famous, or whatever else is considered #goals on Instagram this week. I want my kids to be happy and healthy, with the freedom to pursue their passions.

That might seem ordinary to some, but to me, it’s the most extraordinary kind of life.

James Breakwell is a professional comedy writer and amateur father of four daughters, ages 9 and under. His book, Bare Minimum Parenting: The Ultimate Guide to Not Quite Ruining Your Child, can be purchased wherever books are sold.

In the 1970s, amid changing tastes and a growing population from Ethiopia and Eritrea, chef Desta Bairu’s DC restaurant won national attention. The woman in the kitchen, not so much.

Desta Bairu, a native of the Eritrean city of Asmara, had spent her 17 years in America trying to make injera. At first, nothing seemed to work.

The sandy grain called teff grew in abundance in the highlands of Ethiopia, but it was hard to come by in America in the 1970s, and reproducing injera’s spongy, sour sensation seemed impossible without it. Yet after countless experiments involving club soda, beer, and even Coke, Bairu settled on a foolproof formula. She’d brew buckwheat flour and baking powder in water for six days in plastic buckets. Cooks back in Asmara spread the batter flat on an earthenware griddle, gently heating it over a flame of eucalyptus sticks until its surface started to bubble. Bairu opted for a frying pan.

The result, forged of compromise, wasn’t quite like the injera she knew from home. Its color was creamier, its tang less exclamatory. Yet it was the closest approximation she could offer. Americans unfamiliar with the fundamentals of Ethiopian or Eritrean cooking back in 1978 — which was most Americans, really — may not have known the difference. That year, Bairu became the chef of Mamma Desta’s, the first Ethiopian restaurant in Washington, DC. Bairu’s interpretation of the cuisine, cobbled together from the limited ingredients at her disposal, triggered a national obsession with dishes that are now part of America’s shared palate: kitfo, seasoned raw beef thick with butter and the soft burn of spice; doro wat, that thick stew of chicken crowned with a hard-boiled egg; injera, rolled in sheets that look like plump cigars.

Like the culinary tradition it came from, injera represented a real object of intrigue for American eaters in Bairu’s time. Even its appearance posed a conundrum for the most worldly of journalists. Washington Post writer Robert L. Asher, who doggedly covered the area’s goings-on, joked that it might double as “doorstops or football padding” after his visit to the restaurant, while the newspaper’s restaurant critic, Phyllis Richman, described it as having “the texture of high-quality rubber gloves and the flavor of yogurt in starch form.” This bread could play many different roles at once, Richman noted: tablecloth, plate, utensil.

Injera sat at the center of a cuisine that deemed forks and knives unnecessary. Human hands were far better tools.

Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images

It’s now easier to recognize this sort of writing as belonging to a bygone era of food criticism, one that presupposed a white reader and gazed at a cuisine of the global South from an uncomfortably awestruck remove, like astronauts encountering an unknown planet. In those days, though, language that emphasized a cuisine’s perceived exoticism captivated diners who fancied themselves to be cosmopolitan, coaxing them to restaurants with foods they’d never tried.

Through a combination of passionate reception from both the press and diners, Mamma Desta’s was the first nominally Ethiopian restaurant to make a deep impression on America, as much an entry point into the region’s cuisine for the uninitiated as it was a source of inspiration for a generation of Ethiopian- and Eritrean-born restaurateurs. Decades after the restaurant’s closure, Washington, DC, is the de facto capital of Ethiopian cuisine in America, a cradle of restaurants that continue to draw national attention; Zenebech Dessu’s Zenebech was even recently named a semifinalist for a James Beard Award.

The galaxy of Ethiopian restaurants in that city, and the entire nation, owes it all to Mamma Desta’s, which sparked a culinary revolution by inspiring copycat restaurants across America. The restaurant accomplished this feat against a backdrop of a ruinous Ethiopian famine that loomed large in American memory, a military junta, and a civil war that began in 1974.

Bairu’s cooking, unapologetic about its origins, could have deterred more incurious American palates, yet it seemed to awaken sensations eaters didn’t know they had. Richman would later write that tej, the faintly fizzy honey wine Bairu served at her restaurant, “is like drinking flowers.” And Bairu became as much of an attraction as her food. She was a short, forceful woman who wore Hush Puppies shoes as she roamed the restaurant talking with patrons, her strong arms tattooed with Coptic crosses and Ethiopic script. Some of her most devoted diners, natives of Eritrea and Ethiopia, went on to open restaurants themselves, encouraged by her success.

The restaurant, which Bairu didn’t even own, would close by 1983 because of competition from fellow Ethiopian eateries. Bairu would die in relative obscurity in 2002 near Minneapolis.

“Others brought her into the spotlight,” says Harry Kloman, author of Mesob Across America: Ethiopian Food in the U.S.A.

Circumstance pushed her into the public eye: It was Ghebrai Asmerom — described either as the restaurant’s manager or owner, depending upon the source — who hired her as its cook, and Bairu may never have had the ambitions or means to open a restaurant. Inhabiting that restaurant milieu came naturally to her, though; she courted the press and diners with ease. Had she been left to her own devices, she likely would have kept cooking in the privacy of her own home, Kloman hypothesizes. But the fact that Bairu didn’t own the restaurant that bore her name feels like a cruel metaphor: Her spirit guides the country’s now-robust network of Ethiopian restaurants. With time, she’s become more like a ghost.

Illustration by Ojima Abalaka for Vox

Mamma Desta’s wasn’t America’s first Ethiopian restaurant. That distinction belonged to the bluntly named Ethiopian Restaurant, owned by one Beyene Guililat in Long Beach, California. Then an aspiring pilot, Guililat opened the restaurant in a two-story brick building in 1966, during a time when Ethiopia felt so distant in the American imagination that a short blurb about the restaurant in the local newspaper referred to it as “the land of the Queen of Sheba,” as if the country were an imagined place. The restaurant didn’t last more than a few months, according to Kloman, nor did Guililat’s San Diego follow-up. A Miami restaurant called the Ethiopian Lair opened in 1972 to little fanfare; all that exists as evidence of the restaurant is a scant mention in the Miami News, joking that then-Emperor Haile Selassie might like it.

Little is known about why those early restaurants died so abruptly. But their short lifespans may have to do with the fact that Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants were in such small numbers when Guililat’s restaurant opened, so minuscule that the census didn’t even clarify how many Ethiopians lived in America at the time, accounting only for “Africans.” Prior to that period, most immigrants from the region had come to the US to get an education and eventually returned home. But Ethiopian political instability in the 1970s after the ousting of Selassie, followed by Mengistu Haile Mariam’s ascension to power and the outbreak of a civil war in 1974, created a much larger, and ultimately more permanent, exodus to America. Meanwhile, those who were already studying abroad found little reason to return to a home experiencing such turbulence. The Ethiopian refugee population swelled in the ensuing years, when Mariam’s military junta, ushering in a period known as the Red Terror, resulted in the immigration of an entirely new class of educated and upper-class Ethiopians.

Bairu came to America in 1959, long before that influx, to serve as the chief cook for the Ethiopian ambassador to the United Nations. Prior to her arrival, she’d cooked in Italy and Saudi Arabia, as Asmerom told the Post in 1979. The ambassador would leave for Ethiopia in the 1970s, according to Kloman, but Bairu stayed behind, working as a domestic helper in New York City. After a brief detour back home, she moved to Washington, DC. There she met Asmerom, a former liaison with the Peace Corps in Addis Ababa who’d come to the city for college, working as a cab driver and the weekend manager for a doughnut shop. The two had a tight bond: Aware of Bairu’s prowess as a cook, Asmerom would give her a lamb each Easter, asking her to cook it in the manner he knew back home.

“When she moved to Washington, she cooked in her apartment until the complaints started,” Asmerom, who could not be reached for comment, told the Post. “Then we decided it was the right time for a restaurant.”

Mamma Desta’s didn’t look like anything special from the outside when it first opened, just miles from Howard University, in February 1978. The only indication that the storefront was a restaurant at all was a canary-yellow sign hanging over an opaque window; the building had once housed a Chinese restaurant called the Eastern Star. The decor was sparse, with walls the color of turtle flesh, a gargantuan stainless-steel refrigerator plopped in the dining room like an abandoned asteroid and a suggestion box hanging high above a coat rack.

In spite of the restaurant’s lack of aesthetic polish, the press took to Mamma Desta’s quite easily. Unlike its predecessors, Mamma Desta’s gained admiration from the city’s critical establishment. After all, it emerged in a time when Ethiopians were settling in the country in greater numbers, with Washington becoming a particular locus of Ethiopian immigrants who patronized the restaurant and kept business flourishing. More crucially, as Kloman writes in his book, the ingredients central to Ethiopian cuisine, whether lentils or lamb, weren’t markedly foreign in the way that, say, groundnuts or cassava of Nigerian cuisine may have seemed to white Americans. For those ignorant to its charms, cooking like Bairu’s may have represented a dazzling way to reorder those recognizable ingredients and enliven them with a radically altered flavor profile.

In April 1978, Baltimore Sun writers Tom Horton and Helen Winternitz, who’d spent five years in Ethiopia, declared that Mamma Desta’s offered “the best Ethiopian meal this side of Addis Ababa.” One month later, the Post’s Asher took his family to the restaurant, coming to the cuisine from a position of utter illiteracy. He was alarmed by the paucity of options — the early menu listed a mere three items — and the fact that utensils were all but absent. There didn’t seem to be many people working the restaurant, either, considering that Asher’s waiter was also the restaurant’s owner.

Asher would have to make do with those “flying-saucer-sized, floppy pancakes with a kind of foam-rubber texture,” or injera. But he eventually discovered that the bread was an able vehicle for the fried, lean beef of tibs; the yebeg wat, lamb with a spice of “two alarms with a controllable low-burning-fire sensation”; and an unspecified dish with chicken and a hard-boiled egg (likely doro wat), which caused one of his dining companions to ask if there was smoke emerging from his mouth. Asher loved it all, especially because the entire party’s bill amounted to just over $13. Yet Bairu herself remained mostly unseen in Asher’s writing; he didn’t get a chance to meet her. He referred to her simply as Mamma Desta. As for her menu, “She does what she wants,” the restaurant’s owner (unnamed by Asher, but presumably Asmerom) told the reporter.

The restaurant received a similarly positive notice from the newspaper’s critic, Richman, the following month. “Roll up your sleeves,” she wrote. “You eat with your hands.” She noted the presence of Chinese lanterns and a jukebox in that sea of booths and chairs, the few accoutrements of “a room that tempts you not at all to describe it.” Richman was a fan, though. She praised Bairu’s ingenuity, noting the chef’s crafty workaround for making injera and her use of sour cream in place of the soft, homemade cheese called lab.

When reflecting on her career in 2000, Richman would call this first visit the best restaurant meal she’d ever had. But Bairu was a cipher in that review too: “Mamma Desta herself may change her white uniform and head draping for a Western red dress and make the rounds of the tables,” wrote Richman, concluding her piece with a grand proclamation: “Mamma Desta could be the mother of the year.”

The fact that none of these initial stories used Bairu’s full name may seem minor until you consider who did receive that basic courtesy in restaurant coverage at the time. The gifted French-born chef Jean-Louis Palladin reversed Washington’s culinary image in 1979 with his restaurant, Jean-Louis at the Watergate. Outlets today routinely refer to him as the city’s first celebrity chef, who drew elite audiences through applying French technique to American ingredients. Upon the restaurant’s opening, he received a lavish profile in the Post that hailed him as “a hero of the nouvelle cuisine, one of the most honored young chefs in a nation.”

Palladin fits a template that many of us may now recognize as catnip for chef deification—white, male, pedigreed (he went to culinary school and worked in restaurants in his native France), cooking continental cuisine. Yet another major talent in the era who received considerable press and an equally affluent clientele was the Austrian-born Nora Pouillon, whose organic eatery Restaurant Nora opened in 1979 and Richman cautiously termed “a culinary statement of radical chic.”

It’s no wonder that Palladin and Pouillon’s names have come to define that era in the city’s dining while Bairu’s hasn’t: Such declarative statements of genius eluded Bairu in her lifetime. Though Desta Bairu’s cooking drew plaudits, a number of traits beyond her control — her age, her race, her motherly mien — may have put her at a disadvantage. The omission of her name from most coverage has the effect of rendering the woman an afterthought, as if she was more of a hostess than a chef whose work justified sustained critical consideration.

In spite of appraisals from such influential writers like Craig Claiborne of the New York Times (who called Ethiopian food “among the world’s most interesting” in 1970), Bairu’s cuisine was still gunning for the respect of the food establishment. Reviewers of the era instead seemed preoccupied with the perceived newness of the food to the American reader. Only the Sun noted that Bairu was Eritrean.

Bairu’s charisma, however, pulled patrons back to the restaurant repeatedly. She wasn’t immune to patronizing cultural comparisons, like the one she was saddled with in the Chicago Tribune, which described her as “a grandmotherly Queen of Sheba as she greets visitors to her domain.” Her gifts as a cultural envoy for Ethiopian cooking may have come from years of work for the Ethiopian ambassador to the United States, Kloman speculates in his book. Restaurant work was thus an ideal marriage of her two greatest skills: cooking and diplomacy. She’d boast about the success of the restaurant, bragging to Post reporter Jacqueline Trescott in 1979 about visitors from far outside the city, like “the Los Angeles bank president and the Oregon university president who came straight from the airport, with their baggage, and ate, then checked into their hotel.” She knew how to market herself.

Bairu left the kitchen every time Elizabeth Hand visited to welcome members of her party with three kisses, a moment Hand and her friends anticipated. “She would always come out, and she would greet us very, very warmly,” Hand, now a fiction writer based in Maine, remembers. “She would chat, just about ... how was the food? You know, how is everyone? Did you like this, did you like that?”

Bairu was a small woman, Hand recalls, who usually wore her white apron chalked with the food she’d been chopping. After a few minutes, she’d slip back into the kitchen. Hand’s memories of her meals at Mamma Desta’s compelled her to describe the restaurant in her 1994 fantasy novel Waking the Moon as “a dinky little restaurant in a dicey part of town that had the best Ethiopian food in the city,” while Bairu herself was “a tiny cheerful woman with frizzy greying hair and a bloodstained chef’s apron.”

Four decades on, Hand remains steadfast in her love for Mamma Desta’s. “It was a book where I was kind of throwing in everything I loved about DC,” Hand says of Waking the Moon. “And Mamma Desta’s was one of those things.”

Hand first visited the restaurant when she moved to DC in 1979. During that time, Washington had a growing spate of restaurants serving food that stretched far beyond the United States and continental Europe. That year saw a wave of new, “particularly exotic” restaurants, in Richman’s words, like Siam Inn, Samurai Sushi-ko, and Tung Bor alongside Mamma Desta’s. Such restaurants as Vietnamese-born restaurateur Germaine Swanson’s pan-Asian eatery, Germaine’s, also opened in 1978. “Nobody had much money, but we really liked to go out and find cool restaurants to eat at,” Hand remembers of her friend group.

“I’m sure a lot of this is nostalgia for lost youth, and also, it was the first time I’d had that food,” she adds. “But also, I think it was the first time a lot of people had ever had Ethiopian food.”

Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Mamma Desta’s wasn’t just a gateway to Ethiopian cooking for the unacquainted. Sileshi Alifom, who opened the Ethiopian restaurant Das in 2011 in Georgetown, recalls that it also became a democratic refuge for Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants. Alifom went to Bairu’s restaurant frequently after moving to America in 1970. “I was just like any other immigrant going to see another immigrant at that place,” he remembers.

Soon enough, Bairu’s influence began radiating far beyond the orbit of Washington, DC. By March 1979, the restaurant rated a mention in a New York Times story about the city’s late-night eateries, alongside its most prominent direct competitor, the Blue Nile, which had sprouted that year.

Araya Yibrehu, who had come to New York from Addis Ababa in 1976 to study at Pace University, began eating at Mamma Desta’s with friends in 1978. Each time he visited the restaurant, Bairu would emerge from the kitchen. Everyone’s attention would flow toward her.

“I’ve been in the restaurant industry for a long time, and her personality is the most outstanding personality for a restaurant business,” Yibrehu remembers. “She was there smiling, talking to you, like a mother.”

Those visits would inspire Yibrehu to open New York’s first Ethiopian restaurant, Sheba, in 1979 at the tongue of the Holland Tunnel in Manhattan. Yibrehu made ends meet by driving cabs, but he’d long dreamed of opening his own restaurant. He had trouble securing a space, though; landlords would stare at him quizzically when he told them he wanted to open an Ethiopian restaurant, so foreign was the very concept.

Yibrehu stresses that Bairu’s cooking reflected an unmistakably Eritrean sensibility, a distinction that may have been lost on food journalists of the era. “Her cooking has more somewhat Italian influence,” he says, noting the use of tomato paste that hints at colonial origins, resulting in milder flavors than his own cooking, which is laden with fenugreek, black pepper, garlic, and ginger.

The more muted nature of Bairu’s cooking may have made it more palatable, then, to American audiences unaccustomed to flavors from the region. Within a year of its opening, Mamma Desta’s was averaging 2,000 customers per week, while white patrons asked her to cater their weddings. It was Bairu’s hope, she joked that year to the Post, that her restaurant would be soon known as one of the finest in the world, so much that Jimmy Carter would come pay a visit.

“Washington is pleasant,” she would say. “I wouldn’t be living better if I were at home.”

Though the restaurant’s ramshackle interiors were a crucial part of its early charm, Mamma Desta’s went through a few cosmetic improvements as it matured. By 1979, it had been decorated with “African” paintings and ephemera, according to the Post. Mesob, wooden basket tables with low stools, replaced a few of the booths that were there earlier in a bid for what the Post called “total immersion in Ethiopian dining.” The restaurant even hired waitresses.

Over the next decade, though, a crop of competitors including the Blue Nile and Red Sea began to outpace Mamma Desta’s growth. By 1979, there were four Ethiopian restaurants on the same busy Washington thoroughfare alone. The 1980s would turn out to be boom times for Ethiopian restaurants in the country at large. In addition to Yibrehu’s Sheba in New York, Los Angeles saw the critically favored Walia appear in 1979, succeeded by restaurants like Almaz, Addis Ababa, Red Sea, and Ghion; the Bay Area got Blue Nile in Oakland in 1980. Major cities like Boston, Dallas, Detroit, and Seattle followed with Ethiopian restaurants of their own.

Mamma Desta’s suffered as a result of the rival restaurants in Washington, though. Some had more high-end pretensions, like posh interiors and robust waitstaff. “The food was fine,” Hand recalls of one such restaurant. “But it was not as good as Mamma Desta’s.” If Mamma Desta’s looked like this, she thought, it would’ve been packed every night.

Illustration by Ojima Abalaka for Vox

The restaurant flamed out just before its fifth anniversary. Bairu and Asmerom parted ways. By the time Bairu left Washington, the restaurant had helped to shift perceptions that the nation’s capital was staid culinary backwater, and Mamma Desta’s had earned a national reputation as “the pioneer of the Ethiopian boom.”

The specifics of Bairu’s story are difficult to pin down after her departure from Washington and arrival in the Midwest in 1983, when she was 70. She lived in Madison, Wisconsin, for a brief period, drawn there because of friends, and sold food from her home to the city’s Ethiopian and Eritrean community, which was still in its infancy then. It was through that business that a young entrepreneur named Tekle Gabriel found Bairu. A chemistry graduate from the University of Chicago at Illinois, Tekle was searching for a partner with whom to open Chicago’s first Ethiopian restaurant, a project his friends persuaded him to take on. Tekle, who could not be reached for this story, convinced Bairu to become the restaurant’s chef. She would write culinary history all over again in a different city.

Chicago’s Ethiopian community was much tinier than DC’s in that period; around 1985, there were roughly 10,000 Ethiopians living in Washington, compared with fewer than 1,000 in Chicago, according to the Los Angeles Times. Mama Desta’s Red Sea — the spelling was subtly different from its Washington ancestor — opened in Chicago in January 1984, during a time when Ethiopian cuisine faced a fundamental struggle to gain the esteem of some diners in the city.

For one, Chicago wasn’t yet enlightened to Ethiopian cooking in the same way Washington, New York, and Los Angeles were. Some patrons tied it to the ongoing famine that began in 1983 and wouldn’t end until 1985. Images of famished Ethiopians crowded the media of the era (so pervasive, in fact, that coverage resulted in the controversial 1984 hit “Do They Know It’s Christmas” by supergroup Band Aid to raise money for relief efforts). “Some of my customers have told me they feel uneasy to come to Ethiopian restaurants and eat because they think of the people starving in our country,” Gabriel told the Los Angeles Times.

In spite of that, the city’s food media welcomed the restaurant with a mix of warmth and fascination, just as Washington had years before. Giving the restaurant a three-star review in March 1984 in the Tribune, Mark Knoblauch did not mention Bairu’s position as a chef, instead focusing on “the novelty of a new cuisine.”

Considered today, such deletions of Bairu from the restaurant’s narrative seem peculiar, as if foretelling her gradual vanishing from historical record. She would split from the restaurant two years later, when Tekle bought it in full. Bairu left for Atlanta and then Minneapolis, according to Kloman, drifting out of the public eye. A legend Kloman heard suggested that she even tried to go back home to Eritrea, embraced upon arrival like a celebrity with a red-carpet rollout and a greeting from then-President Isaias Afwerki. Yet, as the story goes, she wasn’t able to adjust easily to the rhythms of Eritrean life after so many years abroad. She came back to America and died in the Minneapolis area in 2002, just after her 88th birthday, according to death records.

“In reality, Desta was probably as much a metaphor as a pioneer,” Kloman tells me. She found herself at the nexus of a history bigger than herself. Her legacy is so large that it has swallowed her story.

Cyrus McCrimmon/The Denver Post via Getty Images

There is frustratingly little record of Bairu in her own words, which may reveal whose stories the food media of her time deemed worth telling and which others it ignored. Few took the care to write down her story in her lifetime. The reluctance of the media to refer to Bairu by her name, but instead in matriarchal terms, feels like a tell. A title like “Mama” or “Mamma” carries affection, but it has a whiff of condescension to it, too, as if reviewers saw her food as a mother’s down-home cooking, not that of a serious chef. (She had no known children, either, making the designation even more curious.) This was cooking meant to fill bellies rather than to exist on the plane of art.

The Chicago restaurant that bore Bairu’s name continued without her until 2009, when competition forced it to close. Its march toward death felt so protracted that the food website Grub Street lamented that it was “the restaurant equivalent of the little old lady who dies in her apartment but isn’t discovered for seventeen years.”

The assessment bears eerie parallels to the story of Desta Bairu. By then, the woman who’d given the restaurant her name was gone for good.

Mayukh Sen is a James Beard Award-winning writer in New York. He teaches food journalism at New York University. His first book, about the immigrant women who’ve shaped food in America, will be published by W.W. Norton & Company in fall 2021.