editor’s letter
Ava
Annelise
Dean
Mattia
a
n old friend of mine wrote a book last year that explains the impossibly complicated world of college admissions. It’s called Who Gets In and Why, and I never imagined that I’d end up talking about it here. But I was reading the book while we were judging hundreds of entries for our recipe competition, America’s Best Kid Cooks, and now I think I have a rough idea of what it feels like to be an admissions officer at Yale. My friend, Jeff Selingo, says that in 2019, Yale accepted 2,178 students out of 36,843 who applied—a 5.9 percent acceptance rate. We, by comparison, went searching for the best young cooks in the country and chose five winners from an entry pool of 413, an acceptance rate of just 1.2 percent. The numbers don’t lie: It’s way harder to win this contest than it is to get into Yale. And selecting the five kids on page 44 was basically the toughest thing we’ve ever done at this magazine. Look at these faces and tell me if you could ever be coldhearted enough to move their recipes to a “no” pile. These kids—and hundreds of others who entered—are the definition of winners. They created totally original recipes using bread and rolls from our friends at King’s Hawaiian, and while we were impressed by their creativity, we were blown away by their heartfelt stories. Many of them told us that cooking got them through the pandemic. Some explained how food has connected them with their culture and relatives. Others told us how much they’ve learned by spending time in the kitchen. (And a bunch of kids told us how obsessed they are with King’s Hawaiian rolls!) We’ve all heard those terrifying rumors about college admissions committees tossing whole stacks of applications to get through the process. I promise you we didn’t resort to that. We painstakingly read every entry and analyzed every recipe, and after weeks of deliberation, we got the list down to a dozen finalists. Then we made the test kitchen team do the hard part. They tested the 12 best recipes and picked the winners. We made the rejection part easier for them though: We didn’t show them the kidsʼ photos.
Ella
Matthew
Ariah Ruthie
Sam
Avilene
Sydney
Everyone Wins
Rukaya
Kate
Delayna
Shaelyn and Brynah
Nakomis Ava Grace
Maile Carpenter Editor in Chief @maile__fnmag
Kareena
10
Rajit FOOD NETWORK MAGAZINE
l
SEPTEMBER 2021
Cannon
Zoe
Kyra
Izabelle
Chloe
Annie
Mekhi
Salem
Evie Ryan and
Ruby
Iymona
Jayden
Ross Haley
Clara
Raley
CARPENTER PORTRAIT: TRAVIS HUGGETT.
Sydney
