Mehr Singh

About Me

I'm a multimedia journalist and Poynter fellow with a demonstrated history of producing impactful features and conducting high-profile interviews. I cover culture, food, and politics. My writing appears in Bon Appétit, Food52, Eater, MR Magazine, NewsX, and other publications. I am deadline-driven, work meticulously in fast-paced newsrooms, and aim to help create a more equitable information system.

For my master's thesis at Columbia Journalism School, I reported on inequities within the modern-day spice trade and its impact on major stakeholders, agrotrade, and the economy. 

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Recent Work

The Juggernaut •

How Tandoori Chicken Took Over South Asian Thanksgiving Tables

On a flight in June 1962 from Bombay to Rome, then-First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy ate an in-flight meal of “chicken tandoori.” The following year, the Los Angeles Times published a recipe for the spiced, brick-red poultry dish, patterned with stripes of char resembling a zebra’s. The piece included ruminations like “not all Indian food is curry,” followed by “it is surprisingly good.”

The recipe’s instructions were par for the course: washing and skinning fryer chickens, then creating small inci
Eater •

Mentaiko Is Ready for Its Moment

“I dumped my date to eat mentaiko,” reads a throw pillow on the Amazon search page. If upholstered encomiums to fish eggs aren’t your style, the site has 165 other (mostly) edible iterations of the stuff.

Think of karashi mentaiko, or sacs of salted cod roe that have been marinated in powdered chiles and spices, as caviar’s Japanese cousin. Spicy and mildly fishy, it has lurked flirtatiously on restaurant menus and in international snack aisles for the last decade. But now, thanks to a combinat
Food52 •

Rebuilding My Relationship With My Father, One Kebab at a Time

Good food is worth a thousand words—sometimes more. In My Family Recipe, a writer shares the story of a single dish that's meaningful to them and their loved ones.

Some of my most visceral childhood memories involve going to the butcher’s market with my father—dozens of nearly identical shops, each no larger than a service elevator, tightly stacked up against one another like a deck of cards. These excursions usually followed Sunday prayers at our local gurdwara, the beating heart of a bustling
Bon Appétit •

HAGS Brings the Queer Food Revolution to Fine Dining

Four hours before opening night on a hot July evening in the East Village, chef Telly Justice is slicing Big Rainbow tomatoes, a harbinger of summer. She enshrouds each slice with a snowy blanket of dehydrated fava bean milk dust, which she prepares beforehand in her and her partner Camille Lindsley’s one-bedroom apartment. Justice walked the 30-odd blocks to the Union Square Greenmarket to buy the fava beans. She finishes the dish with perilla leaves and a generous glug of sesame oil. This dish
MR Magazine •

PHOTOGRAPHERS MICAIAH CARTER AND QUIL LEMONS TALK INCLUSIVITY

In his recently-released book Th­e New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, curator and critic Antwaun Sargent feature the works of 15 renowned black photographers including Tyler Mitchell, the first African-American to shoot a Vogue cover, Campbell Eddy, Arielle Bobb-Willis, Micaiah Carter, Quil Lemons, and Renell Medrano. Sargent seeks to challenge the notion that blackness is homogenous; his book is deemed a form of visual activism. Historically, black visuals in fashion, film
MR Magazine •

HOW COMPANIES CAN APOLOGIZE WITHOUT GETTING SHUNNED...OR SUED

­The corporate apology, once deemed a rare occurrence, is now commonplace, an indispensable part of the daily corporate colloquy. From conglomerates to politicians, from YouTubers to teenaged Instagram influencers, everyone seems to be rushing at an alarming rate to deliver high-minded, low impact apologies. Sean O’Meara, the co-author of The Apology Impulse, helps break down why brands and celebrities continue to shell out lackluster apologies, only for them to fall on deaf ears.

In this age o