But with aggressive expansion plans, 7-Elevens across the U.S. might soon look a little more like those here. --- Everyone has their favorite 7-Eleven food: For one friend, whose first job out of college was stocking cigars at 7-Eleven, it’s the shrimp pork hash that reminds her of her childhood manapua truck. For another, it’s the fried chicken musubi, his energy bar for a paddle run. A farmer’s guilty pleasure is the ingeniously cellophane-sheathed tuna sushi that you roll in the still-crisp nori. And of course, there’s the ever popular Spam musubi—7-Eleven Hawai‘i sells 14,000 every day, requiring a pallet’s worth (2,000 cans) of Spam. For me, it’s the lup cheong manapua, warm from the steam case, the Chinese salami wrapped up in the dough equivalent of a puffer jacket. 7-Eleven Hawai‘i feels like one of those brands in Hawai‘i, like McDonald’s and Longs Drugs, that gets us. You won’t find our level of affection for 7-Eleven on the Mainland, just as you won’t find lau lau and kālua pig, recently spotted at the Second Avenue location in Kaimukī (the first 7-Eleven in Hawai‘i when it opened in 1978) and others. […] Franchisees manage the majority of Mainland 7-Eleven stores. In Hawai‘i, all are owned by 7-Eleven Hawai‘i, which reports directly to Japan. But that doesn’t mean every store stocks the same items: Each outpost is responsible for its own daily ordering, to better adapt to its customers. Roadwork outside the Waipahu location meant the store manager there had to order larger bentos and more drinks to keep up with construction workers’ appetites. And when schools closed last March, 7-Elevens saw a drop in musubi sales as students stopped coming into the stores every morning.

Secret codes. Legal threats. Betrayal. How one couple built a device to fix McDonald’s notoriously broken soft-serve machines—and how the fast-food giant froze them out.

Te phrase "genetic memory of honey" is lodged in my brain permanently, and here's where it comes from. None of the items described in the video could accurately be described as either shocking or secret.

Organ Grinder Pizza, in Portland, Oregon, was the first to serve me pizza that wasn’t a frozen Totino’s. Its most memorable menu item was a hamburger-topped taco pizza called the Percussion, to be exact, and it was served under the twinkling light of disco balls, to the euphony of live organ music. Seated on a platform in the middle of the dining room sat a gleaming, gilded organ played by the Liberace du jour, accompanied by a mechanical monkey playing the cymbals. The organ was a four-manual Wurlitzer with 51 ranks and nearly 4,000 pipes. There were arcade games in the back of the restaurant, and gilding the lily was a hurdy-gurdy player stealing kisses from a real live capuchin monkey named Pizza Pete, who jumped around the dining room, tipping his hat to the audience members and shaking them down for cash with his little tin cup. […] Because of the crowd-friendliness of their primary offering, pizza parlors are generally a louder type of restaurant. There’s typically one large dining room, which lends itself well to the unsubtlety of a pipe organ. In 1962 (four years after opening), Ye Olde Pizza Joynt in Hayward, California, was the first to put the two together. This coincided neatly with the birth of dinner theater, which picked up momentum in the 1960s and ’70s. In the mid-1970s, the pizza-and-pipes trend spread like fireweed; by the 1980s, there were close to 150 organ-boosted pizzerias in North America. Organists played everything from the predictable “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” and the jaunty ragtime stylings of Scott Joplin to thunderous renditions of “Pinball Wizard” and “Tubular Bells” (better known as the Exorcist theme). Star Wars medleys were likewise in heavy rotation; the colorful mixtures in a tutti-heavy “Cantina Band” were always met with rapt enthusiasm. These pizzerias were so acutely popular that some of the organists even cut albums, which were sold in the restaurants.

• raspberries, blackberries • asparagus • artichoke • rhubarb • perennial herbs: sage, thyme, tarragon, mint, oregano • rosemary • mushrooms (mycelium plugs or forage) • leeks • garlic • tomatoes • fig tree • asian pear tree • pecans or hazelnuts

Turns out letting "efficient" monopolies control our food supply was a terrible idea. --- “If you pull out one little thing in that specialized, centralized, consolidated chain, then everything crashes,” said Mary Hendrickson, a rural sociology professor at University of Missouri. “Now we have an animal welfare catastrophe, an environmental catastrophe, a farmer catastrophe, and a worker catastrophe altogether, and we can trace a lot of this back to the pursuit of efficiency.”

But in a world where everyone’s struggling through the quicksand of reality, Fieri is a king among slugs. During the height of #MeToo, he escaped unscathed. There are remarkably few stories about him being a dick in public; in fact, the majority of public opinion is just that he’s the nicest guy. And now, the latest news coming in piping hot from Flavortown, just like one of his recipes, such as I’ve Got the Need, the Need for Fried Cheese! (Jesus Christ, buddy, I’m trying to help you here), is that Fieri is doing a lot more for out-of-work restaurant employees than most people. Since the coronavirus outbreak, he’s raised more than $20 million for a relief fund for restaurant workers. You know who didn’t do that?? Any of your extremely chill, fashionable faves, probably wearing $350 chunky mustard mules, including every single one of the people on Instagram currently trying to convince me to make bread.

Food product dating, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls it, is completely voluntary for all products (with the exception of baby food, more on that later). Not only that, but it has nothing to do with safety. It acts solely as the manufacturer’s best guess as to when its product will no longer be at peak quality, whatever that means.

Sometimes, you’re haunted by your own stories. I wrote “So Much Cooking” in 2015: in it, a food blogger describes cooking in quarantine during a pandemic, feeding an ever-increasing number of children she’s sheltering at her house with an ever-decreasing supply of food. […] Researching the story in 2015 was when I first encountered the phrase “social distancing.” Obviously, you’d close the schools, and public gathering spaces like movie theaters; you’d have everyone telecommute who possibly could. How would you get food? Would grocery delivery services be instantly overloaded? Would restaurants continue to serve take-out? What are the ethics of ordering delivery if you’re just outsourcing your own risk to someone more financially desperate? […] I’ve been struggling to end this essay—I think because we’re still in the midst of the crisis. But I think part of what appeals to people about the story is that it ends with the crisis unresolved. There’s hope; the protagonist absolutely believes that she’ll see her household through to the other side; but it’s not over, any more than it’s over for us.

“It’s a great move,” said Adrienne Keene, a professor at Brown University, author of the popular Native Appropriations blog and citizen of the Cherokee Nation. “It makes me really happy to think that there’s now going to be an entire generation of folks that are growing up without having to see that every time they walk in the grocery store.” But Keene thinks the company missed an important opportunity in not explaining why they removed the image of the Indian maiden from their brand. “It could have been a very strong and positive message to have publicly said, ‘We realized after a hundred years that our image was harmful and so we decided to remove it,’” Keene said. “In our current cultural moment, that’s something people would really respond to.”

I like pizza, and I make it often. You also like pizza. Perhaps you’d like to make it as well? Here’s the recipe for my sourdough pizza, ideal for Neapolitan or NYC-style pies, baked in a home oven with a baking steel or stone, or in an outdoor oven. Scroll past the recipe if you’d like to learn more!

When our best impulses seem at odds with necessity. --- Thursday is shaping up to be a decent night. A bit slow, but decent numbers considering WHO has officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic. My sous chef informs me that El Gaucho Steakhouse downtown has closed and laid everyone off. This strikes me as a wildly premature move, although given that they’re so dependent on tourists and client lunches, they wouldn’t have much business now anyhow. Nostrana, my restaurant, is in Southeast Portland, a world away from downtown. Our people are locals, families, regulars.

How Japanese-Americans helped launch the California tuna-canning industry—and one of America’s most beloved sandwiches.

This really made me feel better about eating food, ordering takeout, and grocery shopping. Questions about COVID-19 and food safety, answered.

To fight the pandemic, restaurants are shuttering across America with no aid in sight. What will happen to the rest of us? --- The boldest action on the parts of government includes eviction bans and more funding for paid sick leave and relaxed liquor regulations. What do these regulations offer an undocumented dishwasher who just got laid off, beyond the hope that his landlord might not demand four months’ back rent in due time? What do they offer business owners trying to keep their employees employed, beyond hope for a fraction of the revenue needed to pay for rent, supplies, and staff? Restaurants are suffering from this pandemic because they’re the center of communal life in America, but the awful cascade of consequences lays bare how broken American life has become. American restaurant culture is a glorious public-works project, like a train station or a bridge, built during more prosperous times; its rusting supports and cracked concrete would have been tough but possible to fix oh, any time, for decades. But no one did. And now, the earthquake has come. Without major and unprecedented government intervention and responsible community support, independent food culture could go the way of the neighborhood pharmacy and department store in the wake of this pandemic. In high-rent neighborhoods in American cities, the transition is already underway, with high-rent blight stuffing neighborhoods with chains, fancy and otherwise. And as restaurants go, so will independent stores of all kinds, whether it’s repair shops or clothing stores or bookstores like the one I worked in, which are now struggling to survive and temporarily laying off staff. Any retail that’s not a grocery store is in serious danger. In the aftermath of the Great Shuttering, without help, the only operators with capital to reopen will be the same massive corporations whose irresponsible treatment of their workers is threatening to worsen the outbreak.

Mark Bittman and Dr. David L. Katz patiently answer pretty much every question we could think of about healthy food. --- In fact, the basic theme of optimal eating — a diet made up mostly of whole, wholesome plant foods — has been clear to nutrition experts for generations. What does change all the time is the fads, fashions, marketing gimmicks, and hucksterism. How do you avoid the pitfalls of all that? Focus on foods, not nutrients. A diet may be higher or lower in total fat, or total carbohydrate, or total protein, and still be optimal. But a diet cannot be optimal if it is not made up mostly of some balanced combination of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, legumes, nuts, seeds, and water. If you get the foods right, the nutrients sort themselves out. But if you focus on nutrients rather than foods, you quickly learn that there is more than one way to eat badly, and we Americans seem all too eager to try them all.

It’s a simple formula for weight loss: burn more calories than you consume. How come that often doesn't work? --- The discrepancies between the number on the label and the calories that are actually available in our food, combined with individual variations in how we metabolize that food, can add up to much more than the 200 calories a day that nutritionists often advise cutting in order to lose weight. Nash and Haelle can do everything right and still not lose weight. None of this means that the calorie is a useless concept. Inaccurate as they are, calorie counts remain a helpful guide to relative energy values: standing burns more calories than sitting; cookies contain more calories than spinach. But the calorie is broken in many ways, and there’s a strong case to be made for moving our food accounting system away from that one particular number. It’s time to take a more holistic look at what we eat. […] It increasingly seems that there are significant variations in the way each one of us metabolizes food, based on the tens of thousands—perhaps millions—of chemicals that make up each of our metabolomes. This, in combination with the individuality of each person’s gut microbiome, could lead to the development of personalized dietary recommendations. […] Or maybe the focus will shift to tweaking your microbial community: If you’re trying to lose weight, perhaps you will curate your gut microbiome so as to extract fewer calories without harming your overall health. […] None of these alternatives is ready to replace the calorie tomorrow. Yet the need for a new system of food accounting is clear. Just ask Haelle. “I’m kind of pissed at the scientific community for not coming up with something better for us,” she confesses, recalling a recent meltdown at TGI Friday’s as she navigated a confusing datasheet to find a low-calorie dish she could eat. There should be a better metric for people like her and Nash—people who know the health risks that come with being overweight and work hard to counter them. And it’s likely there will be. Science has already shown that the calorie is broken. Now it has to find a replacement.

Because a fig is actually a ball of flowers, it requires pollination to reproduce, but, because the flowers are sealed, not just any bug can crawl inside. That task belongs to a minuscule insect known as the fig wasp, whose life cycle is intertwined with the fig’s. Mother wasps lay their eggs in an unripe fig. After their offspring hatch and mature, the males mate and then chew a tunnel to the surface, dying when their task is complete. The females follow and take flight, riding the winds until they smell another fig tree. […] There are more than seven hundred species of fig, and each one has its own species of wasp. When you eat a dried fig, you’re probably chewing wasp mummies, too. […] Our pre-human ancestors probably filled up on figs, too. The plants are what is known as a keystone species: yank them from the jungle and the whole ecosystem would collapse. Figs’ popularity means they can play a central role in bringing deforested land back to life. The plants grow quickly in inhospitable places and, thanks to the endurance of the fig wasps, can survive at low densities.

When many lower-income Americans feel isolated and empty, they yearn for physical social networks. All across US, this happens organically at McDonald’s.

Investigating the tallest tale in the ice cream business.

Alienation is not only a feeling of detachment from the world, in Marxism it is a condition of literal theft. Workers exit the day with less than they had when they entered — Americans know this instinctively if not explicitly, which is why our national dream is to “work for myself” before a company “uses me up.” A reality show about the line cooks at a moderately expensive brunch place wouldn’t feel anything like Nosrat’s slow-food explorations; there’s nothing calming or even appetizing about the corner-cutting necessary to cook for someone else’s profit. When it comes to food, industrial efficiency is often gross. Contrariwise, unalienated labor is sublime. This is virtuosity performed for its own sake, and it’s the truth behind the saying “the best things in life are free.” For example, hallowed above all on fine-dining TV from Top Chef to Chef’s Table is the concept of the “family meal” — the pre-service food that chefs cook for their restaurant staff. Unlike the alienated dinners they’ll serve later, family meal is a place for experimentation and risk. You can’t buy your way in, it’s the workers’ privilege alone. Most creative professions have their version of the family meal, and those of us who work in those jobs are willing to trade a lot for the occasional unalienated moment when we can give and/or receive work directly.

F. Nephi and Golden Grigg were two determined young Mormon entrepreneurs, willing to do anything to get their shot of the American Dream. Born in 1914, Nephi came of age during the Great Depression and was the leader of the two. He was a high school dropout prone to hyperbolic business proverbs. “Bite off more than you can chew,” he wrote, “then chew it.” “You can never go broke by taking a profit,” he relentlessly repeats in his letters to colleagues and his own “History of the Tot,” all found in his personal archive, currently housed at the J. Willard Marriot Library at the University of Utah. (In 1989, an employee of Ore-Ida foods reached out to Nephi Grigg desperate for the story of Tater Tots, noting there was no historical record of how the item came to be. Griggs responded with a five-and-a-half-page personal account that starts with the line, “The Tater Tot is the hero in the history of the saga of Ore-Idea Foods, Inc.” Since his death in 1995, Nephi’s response has

It’s not pumpkin or pumpkin spice that’s the problem; it’s the commodification of our resources as somehow exotic when used in non-white foods and comfort when used in white foods. And when we mock certain foods as “white foods,” particularly in America, we’re capitulating to a lie—the lie that anything we eat in the diaspora isn’t touched and flavored by people of color. It’s the ahistorical denial of the complexities of the role of colonialism, slavery, and genocide in the spice trade. And it further snarls the delicate balancing act all diasporic people are forced to embody, in constantly having to understand their selves in relation to the trauma of separation from home and capitalist violence.

This is how the omnivore’s paradox breeds diet culture: Overwhelmed by choice, by the dim threat of mortality that lurks beneath any wrong choice, people crave rules from outside themselves, and successful heroes to guide them to safety. People willingly, happily, hand over their freedom in exchange for the bondage of a diet that forbids their most cherished foods, that forces them to rely on the unfamiliar, unpalatable, or inaccessible, all for the promise of relief from choice and the attendant responsibility. If you are free to choose, you can be blamed for anything that happens to you: weight gain, illness, aging—in short, your share in the human condition, including the random whims of luck and your own inescapable mortality.

If there was one main negative takeaway from the raging fires of food tourist culture and the lists fanning the flames, it was that the people crowding the restaurant were one time customers. They were there to check off a thing on a list, and put it on Instagram. They weren’t invested in the restaurant’s success, but instead in having a public facing opinion of a well known place. In other words, they had nothing to lose except money and the restaurant had nothing to gain except money, and that made the entire situation feel both precarious and a little gross.

Can we build the perfect Frankencandy based on this information? On one hand, no, that’s a ridiculous oversimplification of a somewhat scientific process and is likely to result only in an abomination. On the other hand, that exact ethical dilemma did not stop Dr. Frankenstein, and ’tis the season!

I made this green tea ice cream on June 10, 2018 and it turned out really well!

There’s nothing inherently bad or good about cultural appropriation; it becomes unethical when you fail to consider the context of your actions.

What also makes O’Connor’s article so troubling is that he wraps the usual scurrilous myths about SNAP in a veneer of health promotion — a framing that’s sure to win over some left-leaning readers who’d otherwise recoil at the usual trumped-up claims about food stamps. Yet in the end, O’Connor’s health paternalism doesn’t just run aground morally, but empirically: the study provides no evidence that SNAP encourages soda purchasing, and no evidence that SNAP funds (as opposed to personal funds) were used to buy soft drinks. O’Connor writes a lot about sugar, and not much about social policy. So perhaps his main target here is the sugar industry. If so, he has thrown millions of food-insecure Americans — most of whom work or have significant disabilities — under the bus to advance his agenda. Just as political attacks on social protections are on the rise, the article panders to the worst stereotypes of “welfare,” ignoring the SNAP program’s many successes. In the process, it tells people who imagine the worst about food stamps that they’ve been right all along. Facts be damned.

What the different types of donuts are.