I’m really sorry to do this on a Monday, but I come bearing bad news. Late last week, Dairy Queen announced that it would cancel its annual Free Cone Day for 2021 to avoid unnecessary crowding during the COVID-19 pandemic. I know, I know. It hurts me, too.

Fermented food has had a long, long history, going back thousands of years. Humans first started out fermenting with dairy as far back as 10,000 BCE. That is a lot of fermentation, aka controlled decay. Fermentation not only creates more complex flavor in foods, it lengthens shelf life, creates different nutritional…

Twitter is mostly bad, but it does have a way of resurfacing nostalgic pop culture touchstones. That happened over the weekend, when a long-running coffee ad campaign from late Muppets creator Jim Henson reappeared and went viral. Of course, these aren’t just any coffee ads: these are coffee ads that involve a…

Dog food is expensive. If you have a dog, even if it’s just a tiny teacup pooch with a dainty appetite, you already know this. People who are out of work have a hard time buying food for themselves, let alone their pets, but it’s still an awful thing to have to give up a furry or feathery family member when a new job…

A few weeks ago, I was looking up waffles for dinner for some reason (maybe a formal justification of one of my regular habits?) and came across the term “waffle supper.” Like anything that uses the term “supper,” it sounded like a quaint and old-timey custom. Out of curiosity, I entered it into the Library of…

I’m lucky. I live in a big city that offers an unending supply of different African cuisines. I can eat from one end of the continent to the other, sampling Moroccan, Ethiopian, Nigerian, Senegalese, and Ghanian dishes. So when I visited Ghana, I was prepared to be dazzled by the West African country’s culinary riches…

Stories of relief efforts in Texas due to the storm and power outages are trickling in, and it’s been heartening to see people band together. It’s important to acknowledge essential workers who have been feeding people throughout the pandemic and local emergencies, because they get very little credit for their work. A…

I don’t have a breakfast nook. I have a dining table in my dining room, which feels weird and formal since I live alone. Most of the time, breakfast is 1.5 servings of Special K snarfed on my couch. But if I were, say, an esteemed Roman emperor, I’d probably want fancier breakfast digs. Like the “imperial breakfast…

If you were tuned into NASA’s live streaming event yesterday, following the landing of Mars rover Perseverance, you might have seen a big jar of peanuts sitting next to one of the commentators walking us through what was happening.

Whenever I have gone to a restaurant, it has never once occurred to me to leave a tip in the form of anything other than money because, frankly, that would be insane. The entire purpose of a tip is to pay someone’s salary, because in America, any employee that receives more than $30 a month in tips does not need to be…

Donald Trump sits at Table 72 and only Table 72. We learn this in a new piece in the March 2021 issue of The Washingtonian, titled “Trump Hotel Employees Reveal What It Was Really Like Catering to the Right Wing Elite.” The piece, written by Washingtonian reporter Jessica Sidman, details a series of unimaginably…

One of my favorite things about traveling overseas is strolling into the local convenience store and just looking at all the snacks. I’ll pick out a couple random ones, childishly based off of whether or not I like the packaging, then tear into new flavors of chips, candy bars, and other things I can’t get at home.

These past few years have seen an increase in activism: more petitions, more protests, some leading to real change. It’s been very exciting—especially to someone who grew up listening enviously to Baby Boomers’ stories of how they took to the streets and changed the world.