Louisiana boiled crawfish, Costa Rican gallo pinto on banana leaves and a French fry-stuffed sandwich from South Africa called a “Gatsby” — these are some of the dishes praised in Time Out’s recent list of the world’s best food cities.

Related Articles

At Cooks of Crocus Hill, that old name is new again as Bellecour partnership ends

Recipe: Herbed Green Rice is a flavorful sidekick for your next barbecue

Give salt-and-pepper pork chops a crunchy coating without the deep frying

Burnsville Cub to celebrate revamped grocery store with fanfare

The innovative ice-cream makers at Salt & Straw serve up secrets and recipes in a new cookbook

There’s only one U.S. place on the list, but that’s by design. Time Out surveyed its readers for “The world’s 20 best cities for food right now” on criteria like quality, affordability and attributes such as “family-friendly” and “experimental.” The editors then narrowed down the ranking in the interest of geographic diversity, so that there’s only one “culinary capital” per country.

Though this is kind of a self-selecting poll, it’s hard to quibble with New Orleans’ placement as America’s food mecca. Other spots might surprise folks who’ve never been — perhaps Abu Dhabi (praised for its burrata pizza), or Riyadh (for its Japanese cuisine) and Medellín (chicharrón salad).

“From street eats to fine dining, family-run taverns to cutting-edge kitchens, eating and drinking is the backbone of local culture in our cities and the reason many of us choose to travel,” writes Time Out. Without ado, here are the first 10 on the list of 20 culinary capitals:

Time Out readers vote the world’s best cities for food right now

1 New Orleans

2 Bangkok

3 Medellín

4 Cape Town

5 Madrid

6 Mexico City

7 Lagos

8 Shanghai

9 Paris

10 Jakarta

Source: timeout.com/travel/worlds-best-cities-for-food

By PETER SMITH, Associated Press

WILLIAMSTOWN, Ky. (AP) — As the colossal replica of the biblical Noah’s Ark rises incongruously from the countryside of northern Kentucky, Ken Ham gives the presentation he’s often repeated.

The ark stretches one and a half football fields long — “the biggest freestanding timber-frame structure in the world,” Ham says. It holds three massive decks with wooden cages, food-storage urns, life-size animal models and other exhibits.

The Ark Encounter is seen in Williamstown, Ky., Friday, March 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Madeleine Hordinski)

It’s all designed to argue that the biblical story was literally true — that an ancient Noah really could have built such a sophisticated ship. That Noah and a handful of family members really could have sustained thousands of animals for months, floating above a global flood that drowned everyone else in the wicked world.

“That’s what we wanted to do through many of the exhibits, to show the feasibility of the ark,” says Ham, the organizer behind the Ark Encounter theme park and related attractions.

And with that, he furthers his goal to assert the entire biblical Book of Genesis should be interpreted as written — that humans were created by God’s fiat on the sixth day of creation on an Earth that is only 6,000 years old.

All this defies the overwhelming consensus of modern scientists — that the Earth developed over billions of years in “deep time” and that humans and other living things evolved over millions of years from earlier species.

But Ham wants to succeed where he believes William Jennings Bryan failed.

Bryan, a populist politician and fundamentalist champion, helped the prosecution in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, which took place 100 years ago this July in Dayton, Tennessee.

Bryan’s side won in court — gaining the conviction of public schoolteacher John Scopes for violating state law against teaching human evolution. But Bryan was widely seen as suffering a humiliating defeat in public opinion, with his sputtering attempts to explain the Bible’s spectacular miracles and enigmas.

The expert witness’ infamous missteps

For Ham, Bryan’s problem was not that he defended the Bible. It’s that he didn’t defend it well enough, interpreting parts of it metaphorically rather than literally.

“It showed people around the world that Christians don’t really believe the Bible — they can’t answer questions to defend the Christian faith,” Ham says.

“We want you to know that we’ve got answers,” Ham adds, speaking in the accent of his native Australia.

Ham is founder and CEO of Answers in Genesis, which opened the Ark Encounter in 2016. The Christian theme park includes a zoo, zip lines and other attractions surrounding the ark.

Nearly a decade earlier, Answers in Genesis opened a Creation Museum in nearby Petersburg, Kentucky, where exhibits similarly argue for a literal interpretation of the biblical creation narrative. Visitors are greeted with a diorama depicting children and dinosaurs interacting peacefully in the Garden of Eden.

The group also produces books, podcasts, videos and homeschooling curricula.

“The main message of both attractions is basically this: The history in the Bible is true,” Ham says. “That’s why the message of the Gospel based on that history is true.”

Creationist belief still common

If Ham is the most prominent torchbearer for creationism today, he’s hardly alone.

Polls generally show that somewhere between 1 in 6 and 1 in 3 Americans hold beliefs consistent with young-Earth creationism, depending on how the question is asked. A 2024 Gallup poll found that 37% of U.S. adults agreed “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”

Visitors looks at a display at the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Ky., Friday, March 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Madeleine Hordinski)

That percentage is down a little, but not dramatically, from its mid-40s level between the 1980s and 2012. Rates are higher among religious and politically conservative respondents.

“Scopes lost, but the public sense was that the fundamentalists lost” and were dwindling away, says William Vance Trollinger Jr., a professor of history and religious studies at the University of Dayton in Ohio.

But the reach of Answers in Genesis demonstrates that “a significant subset of Americans hold to young-Earth creationism,” says Trollinger, co-author with his wife, English professor Susan Trollinger, of the 2016 book “Righting America at the Creation Museum.”

Leading science organizations say it’s crucial to teach evolution and old-Earth geology. Evolution is “one of the most securely established of scientific facts,” says the National Academy of Sciences. The Geological Society of America similarly states: “Evolution and the directly related concept of deep time are essential parts of science curricula.”

The issue has been repeatedly legislated and litigated since the Scopes trial. Tennessee repealed its anti-evolution law in 1967. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1968 that a similar Arkansas law was an unconstitutional promotion of religion, and in 1987 it overturned a Louisiana law requiring that creationism be taught alongside evolution. A 2005 federal court similarly forbade a Pennsylvania school district from presenting “intelligent design,” a different approach to creationism that argues life is too complex to have evolved by chance.

Science educators alarmed

Some lawmakers have recently revived the issue. North Dakota’s Senate this year defeated a bill that would have allowed public school teaching on intelligent design. A new West Virginia law vaguely allows teachers to answer student questions about “scientific theories of how the universe and/or life came to exist.”

The Creation Museum Welcome Center entrance is seen in Petersburg, Ky., Friday, March 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Madeleine Hordinski)

The Scopes trial set a template for today’s culture-war battles, with efforts to expand vouchers for attendees of private schools, including Christian ones teaching creationism, and to introduce Bible-infused lessons and Ten Commandments displays in public schools.

Such efforts alarm science educators like Bill Nye, the television “Science Guy,” whose 2014 debate with Ham was billed as “Scopes II” and has generated millions of video views online.

“What you get out of religion, as I understand it, is this wonderful sense of community,” Nye says. “Community is very much part of the human experience. But the Earth is not 4,000 years old. To teach that idea to children with any backing — be it religious or these remarkable ideas that humans are not related to, for example, chimpanzees or bonobos — is breathtaking. It’s silly. And so we fight this fight.”

Nye says evidence is overwhelming, ranging from fossils layers to the distribution of species. “There are trees older than Mr. Ham thinks the world is,” he adds.

Religious views on origins vary

One weekday in March, visitors milled about the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, which draw an estimated 1.5 million visits per year (including duplicate visits).

“We are churchgoing, Bible-believing Christians,” says Louise van Niekerk of Ontario, Canada, who traveled with her family to the Creation Museum. She’s concerned that her four children are faced with a public-school curriculum permeated with evolution.

“The Sphenacodontid Kind,” Dimetrodon, is displayed at the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Ky., Friday, March 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Madeleine Hordinski)

The Creation Museum, van Niekerk says, “is encouraging a robust alternate worldview from what they’re being taught,” she says.

Many religious groups accommodate evolution, though.

Gallup’s survey found that of Americans who believe in evolution, more say it happened with God’s guidance (34%) than without it (24%). Catholic popes have shown openness to evolution while insisting the human soul is a divine creation. Many liberal Protestants and even some evangelicals have accepted at least parts of evolutionary theory.

But among many evangelicals, creationist belief is strong.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest evangelical body, has promoted creationist beliefs in its publications. The Assemblies of God asserts that Adam and Eve were historical people. Some evangelical schools, such as Bryan’s namesake college in Tennessee, affirm creationist beliefs in their doctrinal statements.

There’s a larger issue here, critics say

Just as Ham says the creation story is important to defend a larger truth about the Christian Gospel, critics say more is at stake than just the human origin story.

An exhibit of Adam and Eve is seen at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., Friday, March 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Madeleine Hordinski)

The Trollingers wrote that the Answers in Genesis enterprise is an “arsenal in the culture war.” They say it aligns with Christian nationalism, promoting conservative views in theology, family and gender roles, and casting doubt on other areas of scientific consensus, such as human-made climate change.

Nye, too, says the message fits into a more general and ominous anti-science movement. “Nobody is talking about climate change right now,” he laments.

Exhibits promote a “vengeful and violent” God, says Susan Trollinger, noting the cross on the ark’s large door, which analogizes that just as the wicked perished in the flood, those without Christ face eternal hellfire.

And there are more parallels to 1925.

Bryan had declaimed, “How can teachers tell students that they came from monkeys and not expect them to act like monkeys?” The Creation Museum, which depicts violence, drugs and other social ills as resulting from belief in evolution, is “Bryan’s social message on steroids,” wrote Edward Larson in a 2020 afterword to “Summer for the Gods,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Scopes trial.

More attractions are planned

The protests that initially greeted the museum and ark projects, from secularist groups who considered them embarrassments to Kentucky, have ebbed.

When the state initially denied a tourism tax rebate for the Ark Encounter because of its religious nature, a federal court overturned that ruling. Representing Ham’s group was a Louisiana lawyer named Mike Johnson — now speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Despite those blips, Ham’s massive ministry charges forward. Expansion is next, with AIG attractions planned for Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and Branson, Missouri — both tourist hubs offering more opportunities to promote creationism to the masses.

Todd Bigelow, visiting the Ark Encounter from Mesa, Arizona, says the exhibit vividly evoked the safety that Noah and his family must have felt. It helped him appreciate “the opportunities God gives us to live the life we have, and hopefully make good choices and repent when we need to,” he says.

“I think,” Bigelow adds, “God and science can go hand in hand.”

Associated Press writer Dylan Lovan contributed.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Sometimes it’s very simple combinations of ingredients that wow the palate; a bowl of perfectly seasoned olives teamed with sliced salami; wedges of crisp sweet-tart apple paired with aged white cheddar; blanched greens sautéed with pancetta, garlic and red chili flakes. Or, a stunning “carpaccio” made with raw paper-thin zucchini slices, buttery extra-virgin olive oil, fresh lemon juice, shaved Parmigiano Reggiano and toasted pine nuts. It’s a classic concoction with roots in the south of France.

The components, because there are so few, need to be perfect. The extra-virgin olive oil plays a crucial role; it needs to be aromatic and buttery, almost sweet. The zucchini needs to be thinly sliced, a mandoline is handy for this.

Zucchini Carpaccio

Yield: 6 to 8 servings

INGREDIENTS

1 pound medium zucchini (diameter about the size of a quarter)

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Juice of 1 lemon

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

4 tablespoons shaved Parmigiano Reggiano

4 tablespoons toasted pine nuts; see cook’s notes

Cook’s notes: To toast pine nuts, place in small dry skillet on medium heat. Shake handle frequently to redistribute pine nuts, cooking until lightly browned. Watch carefully because they burn easily. Cool completely before use.

DIRECTIONS

1. Trim zucchini ends. Cut into paper-thin slices using a mandolin or vegetable peeler. Arrange the zucchini slices, slightly overlapping, on a large, flat platter. Cover with plastic wrap. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

2. In a small bowl whisk the olive oil and lemon juice. Just before serving, whisk the olive oil dressing briefly to blend it, drizzle it over the zucchini, season with salt and pepper, scatter the cheese and the pine nuts on top, and serve.

Source: Pascal Lorange, former executive chef at the now shuttered Fig & Olive restaurant in Newport Beach

Award-winning food writer Cathy Thomas has written three cookbooks, including “50 Best Plants on the Planet.” Follow her at CathyThomasCooks.com.

Related Articles

Recipe: This mushroom sauce is tasty on everything, but is best on chicken

Recipe: Herbed Green Rice is a flavorful sidekick for your next barbecue

Give salt-and-pepper pork chops a crunchy coating without the deep frying

5 weeknight dishes: Turkey meatballs so tender you can cut them with a fork

The innovative ice-cream makers at Salt & Straw serve up secrets and recipes in a new cookbook

By Tony Leys, KFF Health News

SPENCER, Iowa — This town’s hospital is a holdout on behalf of people going through mental health crises. The facility’s leaders have pledged not to shutter their inpatient psychiatric unit, as dozens of other U.S. hospitals have.

Related Articles

Glioblastoma brain cancer research: Study provides glimmer of hope

Dum Dums lollipops stands by bright dyes, despite RFK Jr.’s push

The US hasn’t seen a human bird flu case in 3 months. Experts are wondering why

Suicide rate in Minnesota for 2024 similar to ’23

In the Deep South, health care fights echo civil rights battles

Keeping that promise could soon get tougher if Congress slashes Medicaid funding. The joint federal-state health program covers an unusually large share of mental health patients, and hospital industry leaders say spending cuts could accelerate a decades-long wave of psychiatric unit closures.

At least eight other Iowa hospitals have stopped offering inpatient mental health care since 2007, forcing people in crisis to seek help in distant facilities. Spencer Hospital is one of the smallest in Iowa still offering the service.

CEO Brenda Tiefenthaler said 40% of her hospital’s psychiatric inpatients are covered by Medicaid, compared with about 12% of all inpatients. An additional 10% of the hospital’s psychiatric inpatients are uninsured. National experts say such disparities are common.

Tiefenthaler vows to keep her nonprofit hospital’s 14-bed psychiatric unit open, even though it loses $2 million per year. That’s a significant loss for an organization with an overall annual budget of about $120 million. But the people who use the psychiatric unit need medical care, “just like people who have chest pains,” Tiefenthaler said.

Medicaid covers health care for about 72 million Americans with low incomes or disabilities. Tiefenthaler predicts that if some of them are kicked off the program and left without insurance coverage, more people would delay treatment for mental health problems until their lives spin out of control.

“Then they’re going to enter through the emergency room when they’re in a crisis,” she said. “That’s not really a solution to what we have going on in our country.”

Republican congressional leaders have vowed to protect Medicaid for people who need it, but they also have called for billions of dollars in cuts to areas of the federal budget that include the program.

The U.S. already faces a deep shortage of inpatient mental health services, many of which were reduced or eliminated by private hospitals and public institutions, said Jennifer Snow, director of government relations and policy for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. At the same time, the number of people experiencing mental problems has climbed.

“I don’t even want to think about how much worse it could get,” she said.

The American Hospital Association estimates nearly 100 U.S. hospitals have shuttered their inpatient mental health services in the past decade.

Such closures are often attributed to mental health services being more likely to lose money than many other types of health care. “I’m not blaming the hospitals,” Snow said. “They need to keep their doors open.”

Medicaid generally pays hospitals lower rates for services than they receive from private insurance or from Medicare, the federal program that mostly covers people 65 or older. And Medicaid recipients are particularly likely to need mental health care. More than a third of nonelderly Medicaid enrollees have some sort of mental illness, according to a report from KFF, a nonprofit health policy organization that includes KFF Health News. Iowa has the highest rate of mental illness among nonelderly Medicaid recipients, at 51%.

As of February, just 20 of Iowa’s 116 community hospitals had inpatient psychiatric units, according to a state registry. Iowa also has four freestanding mental hospitals, including two run by the state.

Iowa, with 3.2 million residents, has a total of about 760 inpatient mental health beds that are staffed to care for patients, the state reports. The Treatment Advocacy Center, a national group seeking improved mental health care, says the “absolute minimum” of such beds would translate to about 960 for Iowa’s population, and the optimal number would be about 1,920.

Spencer Hospital is one of the smallest hospitals in Iowa still offering inpatient mental health care. ((Tony Leys/KFF Health News)/KFF Health News/TNS)

Most of Iowa’s psychiatric beds are in metro areas, and it can take several days for a slot to come open. In the meantime, patients routinely wait in emergency departments.

Sheriff’s deputies often are assigned to transport patients to available facilities when treatment is court-ordered.

“It’s not uncommon for us to drive five or six hours,” said Clay County Sheriff Chris Raveling, whose northwestern Iowa county includes Spencer, a city of 11,000 people.

He said Spencer Hospital’s mental health unit often is too full to accept new patients and, like many such facilities, it declines to take patients who are violent or charged with crimes.

The result is that people are held in jail on minor charges stemming from their mental illnesses or addictions, the sheriff said. “They really shouldn’t be in jail,” he said. “Did they commit a crime? Yes. But I don’t think they did it on purpose.”

Raveling said authorities in many cases decide to hold people in jail so they don’t hurt themselves or others while awaiting treatment. He has seen the problems worsen in his 25 years in law enforcement.

Most people with mental health issues can be treated as outpatients, but many of those services also depend heavily on Medicaid and could be vulnerable to budget cuts.

Jon Ulven, a psychologist who practices in Moorhead, Minnesota, and neighboring Fargo, North Dakota, said he’s particularly worried about patients who develop psychosis, which often begins in the teenage years or early adulthood. If they’re started right away on medication and therapy, “we can have a dramatic influence on that person for the rest of their life,” he said. But if treatment is delayed, their symptoms often become harder to reverse.

Ulven, who helps oversee mental health services in his region for the multistate Sanford Health system, said he’s also concerned about people with other mental health challenges, including depression. He noted a study published in 2022 that showed suicide rates rose faster in states that declined to expand their Medicaid programs than in states that agreed to expand their programs to cover more low-income adults. If Medicaid rolls are reduced again, he said, more people would be uninsured and fewer services would be available. That could lead to more suicides.

Nationally, Medicaid covered nearly 41% of psychiatric inpatients cared for in 2024 by a sample of 680 hospitals, according to an analysis done for KFF Health News by the financial consulting company Strata. In contrast, just 13% of inpatients in those hospitals’ cancer programs and 9% of inpatients in their cardiac programs were covered by Medicaid.

If Medicaid participants have mental crises after losing their coverage, hospitals or clinics would have to treat many of them for little or no payment. “These are not wealthy people. They don’t have a lot of assets,” said Steve Wasson, Strata’s chief data and intelligence officer. Even though Medicaid pays hospitals relatively low rates, he said, “it’s better than nothing.”

Spencer Hospital CEO Brenda Tiefenthaler vows to maintain the facility’ s mental health services, with help from behavioral health services director Kerri Dandy, nursing director Jen Dau, and outreach navigator Jill Barr. ((Tony Leys/KFF Health News)/KFF Health News/TNS)

Birthing units, which also have been plagued by closures, face similar challenges. In the Strata sample, 37% of those units’ patients were on Medicaid in 2024.

Spencer Hospital, which has a total of 63 inpatient beds, has maintained both its birthing unit and its psychiatric unit, and its leaders plan to keep them open. Amid a critical shortage of mental health professionals, it employs two psychiatric nurse practitioners and two psychiatrists, including one providing care via video from North Carolina.

Local resident David Jacobsen appreciates the hospital’s efforts to preserve services. His son Alex was assisted by the facility’s mental health professionals during years of struggles before he died by suicide in 2020.

David Jacobsen knows how reliant such services are on Medicaid, and he worries that more hospitals will curtail mental health offerings if national leaders cut the program. “They’re hurting the people who need help the most,” he said.

People on Medicaid aren’t the only ones affected when hospitals reduce services or close treatment units. Everyone in the community loses access to care.

Alex Jacobsen’s family saw how common the need is. “If we can learn anything from my Alex,” one of his sisters wrote in his obituary, “it’s that mental illness is real, it doesn’t discriminate, and it takes some of the best people down in its ugly swirling drain.”

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.