I feel like a shelter-in-place impostor. Not because I’m flexing the definition of “social distancing” to include anyone I feel like grabbing coffee with at any given time (I’m certainly not, and you shouldn’t be, either), but because there’s something that seemingly every other person in America currently under…

Follow food research long enough and you’ll start to feel insane. At least that’s how I feel, and that seems to be how medical journalist Clare Wilson feels, too. Her recent piece in the South China Morning Post magazine called “Food science: should we believe anything we read about nutrition?” dissects the…

Waffling carbs is almost always a great idea. After all, the original waffle—you know, the flour-based thing made with batter—is one of the greatest carbs ever invented, so it’s no surprise that other wheat-based foods would take well to this cooking method.

1999: What a time to be alive. The Matrix, Pokémon, The Sopranos, and Britney Spears. A global panic attack about Y2K. The Euro was created. Furbies abound. Brandi Chastain ripping her shirt off at the Women’s World Cup. Wild times! While time travel isn’t an option for us, pork belly just might be reclaiming to its…

Outside of my requisite purchases of onions and garlic, my number one pick for “best quarantine produce” is green cabbage. It happens to be my number one pick for non-quarantine produce, too, because it’s cheap, it has a long shelf life, and it’s damn tasty as long as you remember not to boil it. Cabbage, being a…

COVID-19 has interrupted nearly every aspect of American life. Our theaters, our restaurants, our ability to gather and form community have all been halted. But it’s also impacted perhaps the most precious American tradition of all: sending beret-clad tweens door-to-door to harangue strangers into buying boxes of…

I’ve been trapped inside my house with my adolescent sons for 20 days now, and things are starting to get... strange. Pants became optional by day five. By day ten the “hilarious” practical jokes began, like running into the bathroom while your brother is showering and pelting him with handfuls of spare change. On day…

Everyone knows that in times of peril, dogs can be trusted to rise to the occasion and do something heroic. They will be the first to sense danger with their amazing canine senses, they will be the first to raise the alarm with a ferocious volley of barks, they will be the first on the scene to pull little Timmie from…

America suffers from anti-Aldi sentiment. The lack of recognizable brands and disregard for traditional shelving can be unnerving, and no one helps bag your groceries. Many shoppers never return, but those fire-eating few who care more about prices than ambiance quickly become devotees just like me. Unlike me, most…

It’s summer 2010, the end of the month, and food costs are high. One of the sous chefs at Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Macaroni Company tells me I need to get rid of an excess of giardiniera from the kitchen. Giardiniera, you probably know, are the spicy pickled vegetables commonly found on Italian beef sandwiches, and…

Several pedantic editor types have been appearing on my Twitter feed lately to remind me that this period is not a quarantine, not technically:

The COVID-19 pandemic has been bad for nearly everyone, but it has given grocery delivery companies a bit of a boost. Instacart, for one, is looking to hire another 300,000 contracted shoppers to meet the growing grocery demand. The company’s current shoppers don’t appear to have benefited from that growth, though.…

Beating Lego to the punch, a clever inventor wants to turn breakfast into not only the most important meal of the day, but the most entertaining one as well with a waffle maker that makes fluffy, edible interlocking blocks for building syrup-soaked structures.