We’ve picked a few highlights from a memorable year, including the pouchification of food in America, NA beers’ frothy year, a gluten Rumspringa, nail art’s big food turn, the fluidity and fun of Chino-Latino food, and the darker side of one of America’s favorite grocery chains.

Selecting favorite stories of the year can be the most impossible task for an editor to complete. We love each and every story as if it were a child, a pet, or a preferred novelty Reese’s SKU. We love all our writers, illustrators, and photographers, and this year saw so much talent flow through our inboxes. We also had a lot of fun cooking up stories, fielding ambitious pitches, debating ledes and headlines sometimes late into the night, and working through the copy with an army of the brightest minds in journalism. So here we are at the end of another amazing year of TASTE. I hope you will read a number of these stories or bookmark a couple for later. You will most certainly enjoy the trip through the always interesting world of food culture.

Special thanks to our crack copyeditor, Amelia Ayrelan Iuvino; Ellie Skrzat, who illustrated a number of these stories; and my colleague Aliza Abarbanel for always being game to jump into another round of edits. And most importantly, thanks to all the writers who published on TASTE this year. You guys are everything.

— Matt Rodbard, TASTE Editor in Chief