I cannot tell you why this was part of the annual curriculum at Perry Elementary School, nor why it started in first grade. At that age, I’m not sure any of my classmates had ever seen a largemouth bass; they may as well have asked us to sculpt a particle collider. I can only tell you the results were predictable. My first bass was a cursed, torturous creature, mostly mouth by volume. It looked like someone had tried to turn a fish inside out and gotten bored halfway through.

Still, I thought I could rescue it with design. The school had given us tempera paint in fluorescent colors, but I was hell-bent on creating something new. I stirred the Day-Glo pinks and greens together and watched them collapse into a muddy brown—the dusty, dull brown of a moose without a skincare regimen. I was delighted. My art teacher wasn’t.

This was when I first learned to think of complexity as an aesthetic burden, a lesson I’d be re-taught in almost every creative field. To let colors (sounds, flavors) shine, conventional wisdom dictated, you had to keep things simple.

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The year I shaped my first bass was also the year I sipped my first “suicide”—the slang term for mixing all of the flavors at the soda fountain into a single plastic cup.1 Perhaps you know it by that name, or by another equally disturbing one. Some people call the soda a “kamikaze”; in pockets of the Pacific Northwest, it’s better known as a “graveyard.” The exact etymology is fuzzy—it’s not clear which term came first—but it’s death spirals all the way down.

The terms are also surprisingly old. In my research, I found references to both “suicides” and “graveyards” starting in 1950. In the same year the Detroit Free Press referenced a “graveyard soda,” the Akron Beacon Journal published a note about “suicide sodas” that was ostensibly a trend piece but actually an excuse to publish feet pics.

It’s tempting to think of the suicide as a novelty or a gimmick. But I’m not sure kids would still be drinking them 75 years later if that was their only appeal. My memory of childhood suicides—there’s a setup that will get my mother to call—is of a soda that defied the aesthetic principles I was only just starting to absorb. I remember a soda that stayed pleasant and drinkable even as it was tugged in a dozen different directions. I remember a soda that was, if not greater than, at least equal to the sum of its parts.

But like a child sculpting a largemouth bass, I wanted to know what would happen if I added one part too many. So in April, I flew to Atlanta to visit the World of Coca-Cola, an innovative museum where customers pay to see advertisements. The main draw (for me, at least) was Taste It!, a very sticky library of more than 100 different soda flavors. The room was a United Nations Assembly of fountain beverages, from Peru’s bubblegum-adjacent Inca Kola to China’s Fanta Sour Plum, which tastes like Liquid Smoke and cabinet hinges, to Zimbabwe’s Sparletta Sparberry, a surrealist soda designed to showcase the flavor of an imaginary fruit.

But the marquee attraction for irredeemable soda jerks is “Beverly.” Beverly is an aperitif-aping Italian soda that’s become infamous not only for its name but for its flavor, which I would describe with great affection as “carbonated Malört.” You will be unsurprised to hear that I loved Beverly and consumed several glasses of Her before refocusing on my mission: creating the world’s largest, most inclusive suicide.

I quickly ran into a predictable constraint: It is impossible to fit even the merest splashes of 100 different sodas into a single 8-ounce cup. In the end, I needed four cups to collect all my samples. I combined them into a fifth cup by furiously decanting them back and forth like some sort of carnival mixologist.

The result was an affront to received wisdom. The ultimate suicide—I’m calling it the “International Incident”—wasn’t muddy. It was complex. It tasted like a lychee cream soda with floral, jasmine-y notes and a surprisingly bitter backbone. There was a little raspberry, a little Beverly, a little plum. I liked it better than most of the sodas in isolation. I liked it better than most sodas.

Even the color was surprising—a deep red, the devil’s hue.2 It seemed implausible that 100 sodas mixed together could yield a vibrant, primary color. I can only assume there is an ancient color memory hidden deep within sugar molecules. The soda yearns to be red.

For reasons that have nothing to do with my soda consumption, I’ve started waking up at 3 AM most days with a mounting feeling of unspecified dread. At first, I tried to fight it by purchasing a soft, lavender-stuffed goose that I could heat in the microwave. But Goosetace didn’t fix the problem, and I have since given up tacking against the feeling. I now spend my too-early mornings reading about dismal subjects like “redshift”—the cosmological color of objects moving away from us as our universe expands. As stars and galaxies hurtle ever farther from Earth, their light stretches out to us in longer, redder wavelengths.3 Redshift is inherently lonely. It’s a visual reminder that the rest of the universe can’t wait to get away.

The International Incident at the World of Coca-Cola introduced me to the opposite of redshift—a ruby-red tint created not by distance, but by proximity. Blending 100 different sodas together is an insane act, but it’s also a hopeful one. Conventional wisdom says it shouldn’t work. It does, anyway.

I suspect my elementary school art teachers may have gotten a few things wrong, though my bass technique is vastly improved. I don’t think complexity is an aesthetic burden any more than I think simplicity is an aesthetic gift. Overdoing it and underdoing it have the same moral weight. And we’ve erred in favor of simplicity and specialization long enough.

It’s time to embrace the sunny side of the suicide: an invitation to a busier, more crowded Age. It is time to embrace chaos—to embrace doing nothing well and a lot of things poorly. It is time to paint the largemouth bass in moose-y neutrals. To grind all the spices together. To name an ice cream flavor “Chris.”4

The rest of the universe is on the lam; the clutter of this world might be all we have to work with. Humanity is a messy, sticky, destructive business, but it’s the only one I want to be in.

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But I wrote a speech about restaurant design and regionality, two topics I’m passionate about, and I had great fun delivering it while weaving from side to side like a particularly pliant cobra. The designers fed me a nice plate of pasta, paid me well, and didn’t complain when I stole a very nice candle intended for their members on my way out the door (scent: “Tobacco Sage”).

I thought I might never hear from them again, but last month, they asked me to give the same speech again for a group in Wichita.

So today, I am sharing it with you! If you have ever wondered what makes a restaurant feel “local” or how much we should all be worried about Ozempic (a medium amount), this talk is for you. It was designed to orated by a shifty woman with the voice of a wharfman, but I trust you all to hear it with the intended inflection.

Thank you for inviting me despite all the red flags.

Someday, I hope to be able to open a talk by launching immediately into a compelling anecdote, like those motivational speakers with suspiciously youthful hairlines. But I have neither the name recognition nor the hairline for that, so instead I am going to open this keynote with the answer to the question on everyone’s minds right now: “Who am I?”

I am not a designer! Let’s get that out of the way. I’m a food writer. From 2016 until 2023, I was the restaurant critic for The Pitch, an alt-weekly in Kansas City, where I developed a lifelong love for speaking to hostile audiences.

These days, my work is mainly in one of three areas. First, I write my own newsletter, Haterade, where I develop recipes for things very few people would want to eat, like soggy school lunch pizza or thick apple pucker or, yes, haterade. Second, I’m a food writer and recipe developer for outlets like Serious Eats, where I try to make things people actually want to eat. And third, for the last four years, I’ve worked for a food industry nonprofit in a role that keeps me traveling to restaurants all around the Midwest.

Given those qualifications and my chosen career path, you might be surprised to hear that I have long told people that I have “no taste.” At one point, I actually wrote a monthly column titled “Tasteless.”

This is a bold thing to admit to a room full of designers. And I recognize that this quality—tastelessness—would make me a nightmare client. But I think it’s actually a boon for a critic, and maybe for some of you as well. Because when I say I have “no taste” I don’t mean I have bad taste. Having “no taste” means abstracting from personal preferences and evaluating what’s “good” in every category.

I’ve spent most of my career traveling around the region looking for exactly that. I can tell you the best place to get an incredibly brisk and clean martini with Japanese gin and a foraged sea grape garnish, and I can also tell you the best place to get a super tart, poison-green appletini made with industrial gut-rot liqueurs. I couldn’t tell you which I like better. The role of a critic is to look for the best in every genre—steakhouses, izakayas, mid-century diners, taco stands. And that role requires you to try to zoom out from your own biases and preconceptions as much as you can.

I think that lens is transferable and useful in any creative field. I suspect a lot of you have clients that gravitate toward your work because they share and admire your aesthetic. But I also suspect that many of you have been asked to design a space that you wouldn’t personally want to live or work in. So how do you think clearly about what makes something “good” that isn’t to your taste and preferences?

Back when I was writing restaurant reviews, there were two questions that I would ask myself before I sat down to write each review. They’re questions that still guide the way I think about and evaluate restaurants today, and they’re design questions at their core. They are:

• What is this restaurant adding to the city?

• What is this restaurant trying to be?

The answers to those two questions tell you a lot about how to evaluate a restaurant and whether it’s going to be a success. Let me start with the first.

What is it adding to the city?

So maybe you, the critic, don’t love Sichuan food (I love Sichuan food). But if it’s the first upscale Sichuan restaurant to open in the city, that’s meaningful, and that context matters for how you interact with the restaurant and tell its story.

Alternatively, maybe the restaurant you’re visiting is the 30th “elevated comfort food” spot to open in the past year, and maybe you like the short rib risotto just fine, but it doesn’t feel meaningfully better or different than the short rib risotto on any of those other 30 menus. The answer to “What is this place adding to the city?” might be “Not much.” But you still have to contend with the second question:

What is it trying to be?

You don’t have to think a project is worthwhile to evaluate whether it’s living up to its promise. Every restaurant, even the most utilitarian, has a goal. The Costco food court has a goal. And you don’t want to compare it to something it was never trying to be, like Eleven Madison Park.

So you can ask: What are the expectations of someone who goes to grab lunch at the Costco food court? How does the experience live up to those expectations? Is it better or worse than the fluorescent-lit food courts at other big box stores? You get the idea. (Admittedly, I never reviewed the Costco food court, but I did once review a coffee trailer inside my local Home Depot.)

The point is, regardless of whether you personally think a restaurant should exist, you have to ask, What is it trying to be, and how successful is it at achieving that?

I said earlier that these are design questions at their core. And the reason I think these questions are design questions is that they’re ultimately about differentiation and identity. And design plays an outsized role in signaling both of those.

I also think design is going to become even more important to the restaurant industry as diners are forced to get choosier about where they visit and what they spend. I think that because I’ve seen it happen just over the past two years. A lot of news articles about the industry right now are focusing on rising costs and menu prices, and they point to how price-conscious consumers have become as they deal with the effects of inflation over the past couple of years. People report that they’re dining out less. And everyone’s on Ozempic now, so we might expect them to be eating less when they do.

(This is a side point, but one I find kind of interesting, so permit me a brief digression: Several researchers have tried to quantify how GLP-1 use is changing food consumption. One study estimates that the current level of GLP-1 use corresponds to a $7 billion drop in annual food spending just at quick-service restaurants like fast food joints. Another study projects that a modest uptake in the usage rate could lead to a more than $50 billion drop in total food spending annually.)

These are real trends and considerations, and you might assume, based on our apparent price sensitivity, that a table at the Costco food court is about to become as coveted as a table at 1587 Prime.

But there’s a more subtle shift happening here. The National Restaurant Association (tagline: “Not that NRA”) conducts a broad survey of consumers every year. And in their 2025 state of the industry report, they highlighted that 64 percent of customers at full-service restaurants—that’s anywhere you’d sit down and have a server take your order—say their dining experience is more important than the price of the meal.

The James Beard Foundation conducts their own survey of independent restaurant owners every year, and the results from their 2025 state of the industry report might seem surprising as well. Despite all of the anecdotes about how price-conscious we’ve all become in the face of inflation, restaurants reported a slight increase in performance in 2024 relative to 2023. And they reported that while also reporting a drop in overall traffic.

This is sort of confusing, right? How are some restaurants making more money if they’re serving fewer customers? Well, one, they’re raising their prices. But there’s a limit to how much that can help. The same James Beard Foundation survey suggested that restaurants that dramatically raised their prices (by more than 15 percent) saw their performance fall relative to restaurants with smaller price increases. That suggests diners are willing to absorb some price increases—but at a certain point, we get turned off and turn away.

The second—and to me, more interesting—explanation is that diners are cutting back on the frequency with which they dine out, but maintaining or even increasing the amount they spend when they do.

Official government data, not just survey data, seems to bear this out! Per capita expenditures on food away from home have continued to increase every year since the pandemic. People say they’re cutting back, but at the macro level, it really looks like they’re just becoming more selective. They’re spending more on fewer visits. They don’t want (just) dinner. They want an experience.

I’m talking about consumer trends in a general sense here, but I want to be specific: This is also what I’m looking for! And I use the word “experience” intentionally. A few years ago, it seemed like every restaurant review said something about how “Instagrammable” the decor was. That might have helped get a few people through the door, but it’s not enough to make them stay—or come back. A restaurant is not a mural that you take a photo with and then leave. It’s a space you’re experiencing intimately for maybe two hours. It’s closer to a home than a lot of other commercial spaces, because it’s a space you have to want to inhabit as a diner.

And increasingly, I’m hearing from diners that they want that space to feel rooted in place. I mentioned earlier that I work with an industry nonprofit, and part of my role involves talking to food writers and chefs and diners all over the region about what’s going on in their pocket of the Midwest.

And I’ve noticed a subtle shift in what some of them are looking for. I got on a call with a friend in Minneapolis recently and mentioned a spot I was planning to visit. They said something that’s stuck with me: “It’s a great restaurant. The food is technically perfect. But I feel like this could just as easily be in New York.”

Not long ago, that would have been a compliment. They meant it as a critique.

And I understand that critique, because I’ve dined in some of those restaurants myself while I travel around the region.

A few months ago, I went on a multi-state research road trip to try some new restaurants. In Iowa, I dined at a farm-to-table restaurant using local, seasonal ingredients. There was a chalkboard by the front door with a list of all the local purveyors. There were smooth, camel-colored leather banquettes and cordless brass table lamps and a reclaimed wood bar.

I drove to South Dakota the next day. I ate at a farm-to-table restaurant using local, seasonal ingredients. There was a chalkboard by the bathrooms with a list of all the local purveyors. There were smooth, tawny-colored leather banquettes and cordless brass table lamps and a reclaimed wood bar.

From there, I went to North Dakota. I ate at a New American restaurant using local, seasonal ingredients. There was a chalkboard behind the bar with a list of local purveyors. There were camel-colored banquettes and cordless brass table lamps and a concrete (!) bar.

This is the point I’m belaboring: regional identity and differentiation has to happen in the design, not just the menu. Because in many ways, these were hyper-regional restaurants! Everything I was eating had been sourced 5 or 10 minutes away. And yet, as I sat in my booths at each of those restaurants, sipping tap water out of the same amber-colored Duralex Picardie tumblers, I realized I had no idea where I was.

But I can also tell you a different story about some restaurants I visited on the same trip.

In Fargo, I went to the Sons of Norway Kringen Lodge, a place with deep red carpets and brown brick crackling fireplaces and a dining room with cathedral ceilings made from huge pine beams coated with moody black pine tar that made me feel like I was on board an ancient Nordic ship.

In York, Nebraska (population 8,000), I went to the Chances “R” Restaurant and Hob-Nob Lounge, a 100-year-old fossil record of bottle-green carpets and custom stained-glass windows and etched-glass booth toppers with the silhouettes of wild horses. The bar wasn’t used for drinks. It was there mainly to support a thoroughly Midwestern salad bar that stretched to the next county. I don’t know if any of the ingredients on the salad bar were locally sourced. But I knew exactly where I was. And I couldn’t think of anywhere I’d rather be.

One of the reasons these restaurants are so compelling to me is that they’ve been able to maintain their identity through eras that rewarded a very different approach.

Because while diners may want regional differentiation now, that has not always been the goal of restaurants, even independent ones. I was born in 1989, and my childhood was marked by the rapid proliferation of chain restaurants like Applebee’s and Chili’s and Outback Steakhouse whose whole draw was the consistency of the experience. It didn’t matter whether you were eating your quesadilla burger and chicken wonton tacos in Baltimore or San Jose—you were eating them in the same place.

I think there’s a direct through-line between the placelessness of these Y2K era chains and the design tropes of the 2010s. A lot had changed: maximalism was out, minimalism was in, and while diners had started prioritizing independent coffee shops and restaurants over chains, the overall aesthetic of those independent spots was still familiar and flat. I’m thinking specifically of the third-wave coffee shop / Airbnb aesthetic the writer Kyle Chayka called “AirSpaces” in a widely read 2016 essay.

The appeal of AirSpaces—white wall minimalism, white marble countertops, Scandinavian light-toned wood accents—is a frictionless existence. Homogeneity is the point. You can “drink local” at a coffee shop in San Francisco that looks identical to your neighborhood coffee shop in KC. You can leave home without ever traveling.

I should be clear that I don’t think diners have fully evolved beyond this. In fact, in 2025, Chili’s saw 31 percent growth in sales relative to the previous year. Minimalism is out, maximalism and nostalgia is in. But I do think there’s something more interesting happening than just the usual endless seesaw of trend and counter-trend.

As our lives become more digital and depersonalized, I think there’s a growing hunger for spaces that feel specific and soulful and grounded. I definitely feel it. I walked into the Snack Shack a couple weeks ago—a casual burger spot in the KC metro that I’ve been to a dozen times, with an aesthetic that feels perfectly authentic to what it is—and I saw these AI-generated advertisements all over the doors. It’s a recognizable aesthetic, AI art: it tends to be grim and alien. The colors are always strangely dark and muted, like you’re looking at a picture through a tinted window. And staring at these posters, I felt something like a taste preference forming for the first time: I hated this. I was repelled by it.

I recognize that this is getting a little abstract and touchy-feely. I’m really talking about restaurants’ souls. But that’s where the second question comes in: what is this place trying to be? It’s a question of identity, but it’s also a question about soul.

And that is something that you tend to feel in a space more than you see it. Let me give you an example in a tale of two restaurants: a TGI Fridays, circa 1995, and The Sloop Tavern, a 1953 Seattle dive bar and no-fee “yacht club” back when that meant something very different.

If you just just looked at a tiny 2x1 Instagram photo of these spaces, you might conclude they have a similar vibe. But there’s a difference between the random trophies and pennants from non-existent sports teams hanging on the walls of a TGI Fridays and the case of sailing trophies and plaques earned by regulars of The Sloop Tavern. The first one is an empty aesthetic. The second one is an identity—a story. The Sloop has a clear connection to and purpose for the artifacts in its space. I can attest that it feels completely different to inhabit those two restaurants, and there’s only one I want to go back to.

The concepts of identity and authenticity and storytelling can be hard to wrap your arms around. So I want to keep this in the realm of the concrete by talking through a specific space, and a specific design and designer. While I was preparing for this talk, I called up my friend Brian Miller. Brian lives and works in DC, and he’s my polar opposite in one very important respect: Brian has taste.

Brian is also an interior architect whose passion is restaurant architecture and design. He’s responsible for some of DC’s most iconic restaurant interiors, including the Michelin-starred (and, I would argue, quite regional) restaurant The Dabney and the Michelin Guide–recommended sandwich shop Your Only Friend.

When I talked Brian through my two questions—What is this space adding to the city, and what is it trying to be?—he didn’t need me to explain them. He doesn’t ask his clients those questions, per se, but they’re implicit in the work. With Your Only Friend in particular, “What is this place trying to be?” needed to be answered in an explicit and upfront way through the design of the space. Because Your Only Friend is not a pleasant farm-to-table restaurant with mason jar vases and a chalkboard menu. Your Only Friend is a super weird, playful sandwich shop with Cool Ranch Dorito flavored onion rings and a plate-sized chicken nugget and nerdy, meticulously built cocktails inspired by Orange Juliuses and Dole Whips.

He said:

For us, it was about creating a design where, first of all, somebody intuitively knew what it was. I always use the example of seeing an older couple approach a place with some trepidation—like, come in, sit down, get handed menus, read over the menu, then look at each other and, without saying anything, get up and leave. That’s a failure of design to set an expectation.

Approachability was an important theme for the space, and one of the ways he helped set diners expectations was with an enormous stained glass ceiling with a bottle of Duke’s mayonnaise at the center, like a saint. I’ve been in that space and can confirm that that stained glass felt just right for the restaurant’s menu and focus. But there was something about it that also felt distinctly regional to me…and distinctly Midwestern.

Brian confirmed when we talked that it was an homage to a sort of Midwestern community restaurant. I felt vindicated, but I also felt a little panicked. This was a restaurant in DC, not York, NE. It seemed to undermine my flimsily constructed thesis about regional differentiation and rootedness.

But when I looked into the restaurant a little more, I realized the stained glass wasn’t an exception. Instead, it seemed right at the intersection of differentiation and identity. Because the nod to the Midwest wasn’t random. One of the co-owners got her start working in restaurants outside of Detroit and cut her teeth in the Chicago restaurant scene before moving to DC. Whether you know that background or not, it helps inform the restaurant’s story and visual aesthetic. If you care about place, you could call it picture-in-picture: a kind of micro-regionalism that both differentiated the space and helped define what it was trying to do.

Brian put it in slightly different terms:

I think moreso, a micro-regionalism has given way to a sort of micro-personalism, where people’s individual stories about who they are and how they see the world is what they want their restaurants to reflect. Think of somebody who’s like, “My parents are Mexican, but I was raised in Texas, and now I’m living in Maryland, and this is what I want my restaurant to reflect. And I want the space and menu to make sense with that story.”

So maybe we’re in an era of micro-personalism now. I’m willing to concede the point. But it’s notable to me that his example—the second-gen Mexican immigrant raised in Texas and living in Maryland—now has to reflect a connection to three places instead of one.

No one’s obligated to be a regional designer. No one’s obligated to operate a regional restaurant. But every restaurant has a story to tell. And the one thing all stories have in common is that they have to take place somewhere.

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My dad, a high school band director, spent his summers driving charter buses full of retirees to exotic places like Mt. Rushmore or Winnipeg. We needed the money—and sometimes, he got to take the family along.

I owe many things to that tour bus company, including my love for Midwest roadside attractions (old people have to stop to use the bathroom a lot). How many other 10-year-olds got to spend their summer vacation visiting the De Klomp Wooden Shoe Factory in Holland, Michigan?

But my fondest memories were of the cinnamon candies dad kept in his driving briefcase. Sometimes, they were Fire Jolly Ranchers. Often, sticks of Big Red chewing gum. The important thing was that they burned. When you’re piloting a 20-ton land frigate full of senior citizens, it is helpful to stay alert.

This unfortunately meant that I was not allowed to consume them on tour. They were business candies. It would have been like stealing the balancing pole from a tightrope walker. But at the end of every trip, dad would come home in his mint-green company Oxford and matching polyester necktie and slide that briefcase under the daybed, where he assumed it was secure.

This is when I would strike.

In my mind, I was judicious—never taking so many that he’d notice they were missing. In reality, I think I left the wrappers behind, making it come off less like a heist than a threat. Try staying awake on I-35 now, old man.

My dad, it must be said, was using all that cinnamaldehyde for its intended purpose. Cinnamon is not a flavor for aesthetes. It is a flavor for dopamine chasers and chronic smokers—for people inured to subtlety, who need to be jostled just to feel. The highest achievement of a cinnamon candy is giving your taste buds a lingering chemical burn. It is, you will be unsurprised to hear, my favorite flavor.

It also seems to be dying out. The Cinnamon Fire Jolly Ranchers were discontinued in 2022. Gum manufacturers Orbit and Extra both dropped their cinnamon flavors within the last few years, and Mars Inc., which owns both, did not respond to my request for comment about why. (This is a predictable consequence of asking to interview people for a newsletter called “Haterade.” If I could do it over again, I’d call the newsletter something like “Brand Lover,” or “The Business-Friendly Times.”)

The Google Trends graph for “cinnamon gum” has been flat for 20 years, save a single spike in June 2025, when the New York Times crossword featured the clue “Brand of cinnamon-flavored chewing gum.” It’s a bad sign for Big Red that so many people had to Google the answer.

I’ve been doing my part. In an accidental (but loving) homage to my father, I’ve started chewing a pack of cinnamon gum a day whenever I’m on deadline, a habit that seems somehow more depraved and weak-willed than simply chain-smoking cigarettes. Until recently, I haven’t even been brand-loyal. I tend to buy whatever’s at the grocery store, knowing that I’m going to rip through it like a vulture with a carcass.

But with artificial cinnamon fading from the shelves, I figured it was time to take a more methodical approach—to harness my weak consumer power for the greatest preservational good.

It was time to mint a winner in the Cinnamon Gum Olympics.

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The Competition

With a dwindling market, I settled on what seemed to be the five largest commercial competitors and jotted down some initial impressions.

Big Red. Big Red has Kleenex-like dominance in this category; picture a generic “cinnamon gum,” and you’re probably picturing Big Red. Has resisted the “sugarfree” trend in gums and tastes like it. Sticks have a plush texture with gently building heat.

Dentyne Fire. The only blister pack contender. Each piece is small and feisty, sized for the delicate jawbones of a Dickensian urchin. A good “classic” cinnamon flavor.

IceBreakers Ice Cubes. Like many women my age, this gum is “powered by crystals.” While a visual oddity, the cubes are lithe and supple, with a modest but durable heat.

Trident Cinnamon. Trident’s tiny sticks have always seemed undignified to me, in the vein of a cocktail weenie. Worse, the cinnamon is “augmented” with a bizarre menthol/eucalyptus flavor. If IcyHot were a gum, it would taste like Trident Cinnamon.

PÜR. The Fruit Stripe of cinnamon gums in a Chiclet-y package. An eye-watering, burnt-potpourri flavor that fades almost immediately. The brand is Swiss, which may explain its pathological conflict-avoidance.

I was content to begin formal testing when a dark-horse competitor appeared in the form of a banner ad. The brand was called JAWCKO, and it was designed for JAWLINE TRAINING and FACIAL DEFINITION. It promised to add a new dimension of displeasure to the gum-chewing experience by being EXTREMELY HARD TO CONSUME.

The packaging was lurid, the copy irresistible. “Stop skipping face day,” the back of the bag admonished. But also: “Take rest days as needed.”

This was, I realized, chewing gum for looksmaxxers, a cadre of young people running deranged science experiments on their bodies for clout. I mock them at my peril. The only real difference between me and the young men smashing their cheekbones with hammers is that I am striving daily to become less appealing.

I purchased the gum.

Jawcko. Despite all the warnings, I didn’t find Jawcko to be particularly aerobic. For real gum freaks like me, this is a daily chewer. It admittedly takes some effort to bite into the shell, but this is less a matter of jaw strength and more a matter of having confidence in the durability of one’s teeth.

The Verdict

I tested each gum three times, on different days, and averaged the readings. With a stopwatch in hand, I rated the initial intensity of the cinnamon flavor, then assigned a heat rating for each minute until the flavor had fully dissipated. I have plotted the results below:

In the end, IceBreakers and Dentyne took gold and silver, respectively, for their balance of intensity and durability. I recommend—but wouldn’t rave about—both. The flavor half-life for most gums is surprisingly short. We have work to do. With the exception of IceBreakers and their ~crystals~, gum manufacturers don’t seem to be innovating toward a more persistent heat.

I think this is a mistake. First, they’re missing out on the highly reliable audience segment of “sleepy bus drivers and attention-deficient journalists.” But second, they’re missing out on an opportunity to corner the Jawcko market—to do for cinnamon what decades of toxic masculinity did for capsaicin. To turn flavor into a FEAT OF STRENGTH.

None of these gums have even approached the intensity of the best cinnamon hard candies. For pure strength of sensation, I’m going to fall back on my earlier recommendation:

But for now, when I’m on a writing deadline, I’ll stick with the gum. I’ve chewed through all of my competition leftovers but the Jawcko now, and I’m on my third piece this hour, in flagrant disobedience of the manufacturers’ warning (“DO NOT EXCEED MORE THAN TWO PIECES PER DAY.”)

“Feeling the burn” is a double entendre. If I can’t scald my tastebuds, at least I’m getting a workout in.

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Thanks to January subscribers, Haterade was able to send more than $700 to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, which provides free immigration legal representation to low-income immigrants and refugees in Minnesota and North Dakota.

In my home state of Iowa, Pizza Ranch was neither a condiment nor a grange for Italian cowboys but instead a disappointing chain of pizza buffets. The chain now has more than 200 locations in 15 states, but if you’ve been to one Pizza Ranch, you’ve been to them all. They all have the same mural of a Conestoga wagon and a fretful-looking horse. Their buffets offer the same dewy, heavily cheesed pizzas nestled under heat lamps in an okay corral. They serve a streusel dessert pizza inexplicably called “Cactus Bread” and have a very affordable party room. I know this because my family gathered in the party room of a Waverly, Iowa, Pizza Ranch after my beloved granny’s funeral—fitting, as she would never have been caught there alive.

But I do not want to dwell on Pizza Ranch as a business. Many talented political journalists have already chronicled its weekly blog of Bible verses, its importance as a campaign stop for Republican politicians, and its co-founder’s arrest for trying to collect semen samples from teenage employees for a fake research study.

I am more interested in its semantic deficiencies. The ultimate betrayal of the Pizza Ranch is that it serves neither ranch-flavored pizza nor pizza-flavored ranch.

Like a lot of Midwesterners, I grew up dipping my pizza in bottled ranch dressing. Before you speed off on your Vespa in a fit of pique, silk scarves snapping menacingly in the breeze, consider the pizza in question. The “default” pie in my hometown was much thicker, softer, and less wholesome than its Neopolitan ancestor. A doughy slice of Casey’s pepperoni could be transported by a tangy splort of ranch. The dressing’s acidity seemed to cancel out the grease, the buttermilk and cheese balancing like a math equation. Central Time pizzaiolos have mostly embraced the combo. Today, many of the region’s higher-end pizzerias make and sell their own ranch for dipping.

To be clear, many people outside of the Midwest also enjoy ranch dressing on pizza. I’m not trying to be one of those people who region-locks basic human experiences, like owning a lawn goose or experiencing weather. But in other regions, the pairing seems more controversial. It has enough national fans that Bath & Body Works made a pizza and ranch candle last year and enough national haters that they almost immediately stopped making it. (If anyone tracks down that candle, I will send you my mailing address with such speed, there will be no time for me to check CaseNet to see if you are a murderer).

I will let the haters adjudicate whether ranch dressing on pizza is “allowed.” This is a question on par with “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” in that it was designed to be answered at excruciating cocktail parties attended by the most boring people you know. My view on this is known. I have done far worse things to ranch dressing for this newsletter.

It was time to do something good to it. For too long, pizza-on-ranch lovers have struggled like goons in an infomercial, fumbling their slices and sauce ramekins with oafish hands. It was time to fuse the flavors. It was time to make the pizza ranch.

My first few batches were needlessly fussy. I tried augmenting a buttermilk base with fresh Italian herbs and homemade tomato powder, or the brine from some lacto-fermented tomatoes I had vac-sealed and then forgotten about for a few months. In recipe development, we call this “the Coward’s Gambit”; the goal is to appease food snobs by reminding them you own The Noma Guide to Fermentation.

But this is not a recipe for the snobs. My ultimate goal was a dressing that tasted not like funky chef bait but like a ‘90s scratch-and-sniff pizza sticker. For that reason, the final dressing augments a classic buttermilk-and-mayo base with mostly dried herbs, powdered alliums, a little fresh parm, and both tomato paste and tomato sauce. The paste and sauce combo was crucial to unlocking the requisite pizza-sticker must.

Yes, that combo also means that I’m going to make you open two different cans and only use parts of them. This is the kind of thing that drives my husband, a more practical recipe developer and benevolent soul, completely crazy. He would go out of his way to scale or adjust the recipe so that you wouldn’t have to put two unfinished cans in the fridge.

But I am a hostile recipe developer who believes in struggling against her readers like Jacob wrestling God.

The end result is worth it—pizza- and ranch-essenced, a multi-dimensional meal rendered on a single plane. It’s a Willy Wonka invention without the sinister finger-wagging. We are all gluttonous children, sprinting toward whatever wild and wonderful things this violent world still holds.

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Thank you for supporting Haterade! All proceeds from Haterade subscriptions this month are being donated to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, which provides free immigration legal representation to low-income immigrants and refugees in Minnesota and North Dakota. Email me at lizcook.kc@gmail.com if you’d like to receive the receipt at the end of the week. You can make your own donation here.

Ingredients

• ½ cup buttermilk

• 2 teaspoons tomato paste

• 2 tablespoons canned tomato sauce

• ½ cup mayonnaise

• ½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

• 1 teaspoon onion powder

• 2 teaspoons dried Italian seasoning

• ¼ teaspoon garlic powder

• ½ teaspoon kosher salt

• 2 teaspoons fresh dill, finely chopped

• 1 tablespoon Parmesan cheese, freshly grated

1. In a medium bowl, whisk together buttermilk and tomato paste until paste is fully incorporated, with no lumps. Add tomato sauce, mayonnaise, and Worcestershire and whisk until mixture is smooth.

2. Add spices, herbs, and cheese, and whisk to combine. Serve immediately or refrigerate in an airtight container for up to two weeks.

Note

I like the combination of dried and fresh herbs in this dressing, but you can easily substitute 1 teaspoon of dried dill for the fresh if it’s what you have on hand. The annoying combination of tomato paste and tomato sauce is intentional: the tomato paste gives the dressing its characteristic cooked-pizza, scratch-n-sniff flavor, while the sauce adds brightness and acidity. I’m sorry for making you open two cans.

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It is unfashionable, in this era of preoccupation with ultra-processed foods and Kennedys, Jr., to promote mysterious powders and gums (never mind that xanthan gum is as “natural” as a cabbage). But I am neither a fashionable woman nor a modern one. I long for a return to the Good Old Days, when we embraced laboratory-grade goos not as monsters but as the scientific marvels they are.

I am speaking, of course, about Flubber (1997).

Flubber is an unromantic comedy about a chemistry professor, Philip Brainard (Robin Williams), who approaches his inventions the way I approach mine: with a wanton disregard for others’ health and safety.

His most exciting invention, Flubber, is a poison-green, non-Newtonian fluid that can shape-shift into an array of appealing and alarming forms. Much of the film plays like an extended infomercial for a product you cannot buy. In one of the film’s key epiphanies, Brainard discovers that he can aerosolize Flubber into millions of droplets that make everything from bowling balls to people supernaturally bouncy. Could this be medically useful? Shut up, nerd! If you spray it on the bottoms of children’s sneakers, they get really good at ball.

Aerosolized or not, Flubber always glurps its way back to a cohesive form. Left to its own devices, the substance defaults to a mambo-ing, pot-bellied homunculus, proving that all lifeforms long to be thicc.

The Flubber’s ability to mambo at will raises ethical questions. Is it sentient? We must assume so. And yet, we must also assume that it is not fully sentient, or it would surely balk at being sprayed on the bottoms of peoples’ shoes.

I leave this to the philosophers. My chief scientific interest is that Flubber exhibits the precise shear-thinning properties of a fluid thickened with xanthan gum.

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Introducing: Flucker

Let’s suspend pretense: there was only one poison-green liquid I was ever going to choose for homemade Flubber.

Longtime readers know I am a fan of appletinis in general and Sour Apple Pucker in particular. I admire the liqueur’s steadfast refusal to taste like any fruit. Instead, Apple Pucker tastes like an electric guitar played badly, under many feet of water.

I measured out a cup of Pucker and eyed the xanthan gum, feeling an increasing sense of unease. If you haven’t used xanthan gum before, the first thing to know is this: It’s incredibly powerful. It’s typically used in only homeopathic quantities. If you don’t have a jeweler’s scale, the best way to measure it is to borrow a coke spoon from a line cook.

The second thing to know about xanthan gum is that it demands violence. It is almost impossible to fully incorporate in a liquid with just a whisk and a prayer. Like me, it is most powerful when agitated. To harness its thickening power, you really need to blend.

With the amounts I was considering, I didn’t even try to use my immersion blender. I poured the Pucker directly into my Vitamix and started shearing in the xanthan a couple coke spoons at a time.

I know what you’re thinking: “A Vitamix! Well, lah-dee-dah. I wasn’t aware we were in the presence of a countess.” And to that I say: what do you think your subscription dollars are for? Health insurance? No. Every dollar earned from this newsletter is spent voiding manufacturer warranties.

I kept adding xanthan until the mixture started to resemble Flubber. I topped out at about a third of a cup. Truthfully, I wanted to keep going, but the Vitamix had started to emit a high-pitched wheeze, and the base felt uncomfortably hot.1

I turned the substance out into a parfait glass before it could get any highfalutin’ ideas about its purpose. The Flucker was Flubber-like in elasticity and viscosity, but unsettlingly opaque. (I’ve heard you can clarify a xanthan gum solution with a chamber vacuum sealer, but I don’t have that many paid subscribers.) It also refused to mambo, even when I played Harry Belafonte.

I ate a few spoonfuls of the Flucker alone on my deck. It tasted like someone had blended Apple Pucker with a chapstick. It was not entirely unpleasant—only mostly. And I can think of some practical uses. Until now, it has been impossible to take an appletini on a drive. Just think of the sloshing! Flucker is a mess-free solution: Squeeze it from a tube and call it Nogurt.

There’s something I find aspirational about Flubber, a movie where “Man Creates Substance” is treated as a sufficient premise. I relate to Professor Brainard, a man who refuses to conceive of a higher purpose for his invention than helping high school boys dunk.

We should all feel a desire to use our talents for a greater good. But we don’t always have to use them for the greatest good.

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A few years ago, this would read like the setup for a COVID-19 story. But mom didn’t need a nasal swab. She knew what was eroding her sense of taste and smell: 24 hours earlier, she’d had her first chemotherapy treatment for an especially aggressive form of breast cancer.

Did you know chemo can damage your taste buds? That was news to me. Cancer is like an IRS audit, or the music of Ted Nugent—we all have some baseline awareness of it, but if we’re lucky, we never have to learn the particulars. Until mom was diagnosed, I thought cancer was cancer and chemo was chemo—both blunt instruments of destruction that one could wield on any part of the body. I didn’t understand why it mattered that the mass the radiologist found on her kidney wasn’t metastasized breast cancer but a different cancer altogether.

But breast cancer is not kidney cancer much in the way that a shallot is not a scallion. And the chemo drugs that treat the shallot might have no effect on the scallion at all.

What chemo drugs do seem to have in common is a puritanical penchant for vacuuming up joy. Roughly 75 percent of people who receive chemotherapy experience some change in their sense of taste, though the effects vary by person and by drug. Women, for example, are more likely to be tasteless than men *looks directly into camera.* Docetaxel, one of the drugs in mom’s cocktail, is a notorious taste-killer, responsible for some of the strongest and longest-lasting taste alterations of all the chemo drugs.1

While they’re busy destroying your taste buds, chemo drugs can also create tastes of their own. Many people receiving chemo via IV report tasting something metallic or bitter while the drugs are seeping into their bloodstreams. I experienced a mild version of this phenomenon a few years ago when I did a couple recreational IVs for a magazine assignment. Almost as soon as the dubious fluids began seeping into my arm, I tasted the unmistakable Fruit Metal of a Flintstones vitamin. Parts of our body are connected in unpredictable, unsettling ways. (This is true for the human organism, but also for human organization. We’re chained together in ways we often don’t understand, or particularly like.)

Mom is through her first round of chemotherapy, now, but her taste still hasn’t returned. I called her a couple weeks ago and asked her to run down the changes. Mostly, she said, things taste flatter, if they taste like anything at all. Desserts have been simplified into one ur-flavor: sweet. Spices and peppers have lost their complexity and become especially harsh and strong.

“Eating barbecue ribs would be like rubbing the roof of my mouth with hot sandpaper,” she said.

I asked her if other meats were any better.

“Rotisserie chicken tastes better than chicken breast,” she offered.

“Mom, I think that’s true generally.”

“I never tried tofu,” she said. “It probably still tastes like nothing.”

For mom, the things that taste the most like themselves are certain vegetables—broccoli, lettuce, pickled beets—and potatoes of any kind. When I go home to visit, now, grocery store potato salad is almost always in the fridge. It was never her favorite food, but it’s become an unlikely symbol of normalcy. If everything else has to change, at least potato salad tastes the same.

Can you see where this is going? Five points to anyone who darkly muttered “potato salad for one.” I set out to customize a potato salad for mom’s maimed taste buds, and I’ve emerged with the recipe linked in a separate post below. It’s a hybrid between a Japanese and American potato salad, which means the potatoes are mostly mashed but also overdressed.

While this potato salad has been designed for the tastebuds of exactly one chemotherapy patient, some of the principles are transferable. The big one is to not be precious about flavors. Even now, I can hear you fussbudgets clicking through to the recipe and clawing at your throats. “Do you really expect me to use YELLOW HOT DOG MUSTARD, like some kind of peasant concessionaire?” To that I say: Chemo is not the time for subtle, nuanced flavors. It is a time for blunt instruments wielded with precision.

I suspect people don’t talk much about chemo’s taste and smell changes—dysgeusia, dysosmia, anosmia, and all the other disgusting words for it—because it seems frivolous compared with the nausea, the fatigue, the sores, the hair loss. Taste, we’ve concluded, is a tertiary concern, of little interest to people who are working very hard not to die. This seems to me like poor accounting. We only have one head of hair. We have over a trillion different smells to lose.

But you see similar sentiments all over the place. When one’s life is on the line, the things that actually make it worth living—food, sex, laughter, videos of cats dancing to “party on u”—get treated like embarrassments, or worse, impossibilities. A playwriting professor of mine once spent a whole class lecturing on a (likely misattributed) Chekhov quote: “A man with a toothache cannot be in love.” I got periodontal surgery the summer my high school boyfriend dumped me, and I promise this is not true.

I’d rather hear a lecture on the slogan from the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike: “Bread for all, and roses, too.” Subsistence has always been about more than just biology. We need the conditions for life and the conditions for joy.

I’ve been thinking more lately about what’s frivolous and what’s essential, and what we gain in drawing firm distinctions between the two. Over the past few months, I’ve watched so many friends and fellow artists hand-wringing and apologizing for doing lifestyle journalism or promoting a show they’ve been working on for years while people are suffering and dying. But suffering and dying are not the only things suffering and dying people do. They laugh. They read the paper. They play stupid little games on their stupid little phones. By and large, they don’t need our ghoulish sacrifices. We attend to suffering in so many ways, and very few of them are by staring at it without blinking.

Right now, my mom is at the Mayo Clinic for three weeks of radiation therapy. She’s staying with her sister, who just lost her husband to ALS in May. I don’t know the depths of the pain they’ve experienced. I do know that last night, they went to see an ABBA tribute band. It was 71 degrees in Minnesota, Mom said. It was a beautiful night.

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Note: this is a recipe associated with the post below and needs the context. If you haven’t already, read it first:

Ingredients

• 1 ½ pounds russet potatoes, peeled and quartered

• Kosher salt, to taste

• 2 large scallions (about 20 g), whites and greens very thinly sliced

• 1 small cucumber (2.4 oz; 65g), peeled, halved lengthwise, and thinly sliced into half-moons*

• ¼ cup (40 g) pickled beets, roughly chopped

• ⅓ cup (80 g) mayonnaise, preferably Kewpie

• 1 tbsp. bottled yellow mustard

• 1 tbsp. granulated sugar

• 1 tbsp. lukewarm water

• Coarse-ground white pepper, to taste

Preparation

1. In a large saucepan, cover potatoes with water by 1 inch. Season water generously with kosher salt. Heat on high until water just comes to a boil; reduce heat to medium-low and cook at a gentle simmer until potatoes are tender and easily pierced with a fork, 12-15 minutes. Drain and set aside to cool.

2. Using a handheld potato masher, coarsely mash potatoes, leaving rough chunks for texture. Do not use a food mill or another ~heavy duty mashing appliance~ or potatoes will be too creamy and loose. Once potatoes have cooled to room temperature, add scallions, cucumber, and pickled beets and and stir gently to combine.

3. In a small bowl, whisk together mayonnaise, mustard, sugar, water, and salt and pepper to taste. Pour over potato mixture and stir until evenly coated. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

Notes

Many recipes for Japanese-style potato salad will ask you to salt the cucumbers in a colander first to remove excess water and preserve their crunch. I’m not suggesting you do this because 1) I don’t have all day, 2) this is a hybrid potato salad where crunch isn’t really the goal, anyway, and 3) the dressing is supposed to be a little moister and looser. The final texture should split the difference between a fluffy Japanese-style potato salad and the saucy American potato salad one might buy in a square plastic container at Hy-Vee.

You can substitute the bottled mustard—“cheap yeller mustard,” as Jill would say, imitating a bargeworker—for Dijon, stone ground, or any other variety you like. But a more nuanced flavor profile isn’t the point, for reasons this recipe’s parent post elucidates.

Estate sales are the closest you can get these days, but they come with the baggage of raiding someone’s burial mound. It was on one of these raids where I stumbled upon Cooking with Dom DeLuise (1995), a two-disc CD-ROM set from Allegro New Media.

I have long felt a kinship with the actor Dom DeLuise, who I recognize as a fellow gremlin of appetite and delight. Dom was an enthusiastic ham in movies like Blazing Saddles and Robin Hood: Men in Tights, but he was also a ham enthusiast, with two physical cookbooks and one digital one. I couldn’t help but admire a man who looked like Paul Prudhomme, clowned like Paul Reubens, and displayed a lifelong commitment to dismantling his own gravitas. A few years ago, I gave a talk on criticism that required a headshot, and I asked the organizers to use a photo of Dom DeLuise instead.1

Cooking with Dom DeLuise, then, was an irresistible artifact. There was only one problem: technology has advanced modestly since 1995, and I could not play the 20-year-old CD-ROM on my PC. Instead, I had to mount it in VirtualBox, a piece of open-source software for running virtual machines, using an image of Windows 95 that I downloaded with zero concern for the safety of my computer.

This took me an embarrassingly long time to do. I do not describe myself as “technologically savvy,” but I do not describe myself as “savvy” in general. When I finally got to the loading screen, I felt a rush of accomplishment I have not felt since 2013, when a fiction professor described my work as “willfully obtuse.”

Cooking with Dom DeLuise is an encyclopedia of both culinary and foley arts—think Microsoft Encarta with a whoopie cushion. The dishes are an eclectic blend of competent Italian classics, ‘90s mod-slop, and stolen valor such as “My Agent Robert’s Wife Jeannie’s Gefilte Fish” (serving size: 120).

Each recipe is accompanied by a video clip with a 30-pixel resolution and a frame rate of two. A few of them capture Dom actually talking about the dish on the screen, but many are just soundtracked by his deviant chuckles. I have transcribed a few of them below.

• “Hee-HEE!”

• “HOOO-ha-ha-ha! Pfffbbbbbttt”

• “OOOOH hohohoHO ya-YAA-yaa.”

Mostly, there are fart noises.

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At the bottom of each recipe is a button simply labeled “DOM,” which you can press at any moment to rotate through one of dozens of catchphrases.

“WOW, is that delicious?” you can make Dom say. “Piping hot, and it is so good.” This is admittedly confusing when laid over a recipe for an iceberg salad.

Cooking with Dom DeLuise was not a smash hit—the business plan for these early multimedia cookbooks was ultimately stymied by the fact that no one had yet invented a computer they could take into the kitchen.

Dom winks at this in a section of videos titled “Computer Cutups,” where he offers impractical, mostly facetious kitchen tips—say, juicing lemons with the tray from the CD drive. If nothing else, it’s a nostalgic look back to an era when people had more faith in the strength of consumer electronics. We watch breathlessly as Dom “cracks walnuts” by bludgeoning them with his keyboard, as he grinds herbs in a molcajete with a computer mouse.

Less explicable is a collection of videos titled “The International Diner,” in which Dom impersonates the sounds of a dozen languages, from Japanese to Ethiopian to Swedish. Why was this included? It is not for us to know. Pre-broadband media was destined to Age Badly, largely because it was not designed to age.

Some of the recipes similarly feel like time capsules—say, Dom’s “Strange but True Salad,” which lives in the uncanned valley between a fruit salad and a guacamole someone forgot to finish.

I was compelled to make it by the accompanying photo of brightly colored shapes. I immediately drove to the Hy-Vee to hunt for out-of-season tomatoes and the ripest cantaloupe I could find.

The salad tasted exactly like the 1990s, which is to say: like an idea that someone might later come along to refine. It looked like a bunch of colors and shapes. I liked it! The lemon juice kept the avocado from browning, the tomato added body to the dressing, and the cantaloupe made everything taste like cantaloupe.

The Italian recipes feel more timeless—chicken cacciatore, pasta e fagioli. One recipe—the “Fastest Sauce in the West”—simply calls for doctoring a jar of Paul Newman’s tomato sauce with extra garlic and oregano. I don’t think Dom’s trying to own Newman, but the implication seems clear: anyone with a jawline that chiseled is too prone to restraint.

Ultimately, Cooking with Dom DeLuise has a culinary aesthetic that’s neither trendy nor aspirational—less Crate and Barrel, more CompUSA. Its deliberate un-sleekness feels like an antidote to the Giada deLaurentises, the Stanleys Tucci. Who today would dare to wear a chef’s toque the color of a clown nose? Who among us has the courage to bring buffoonery to the buffet?

I worry about these things as someone with a niche newsletter that, like Cooking with Dom DeLuise, seems designed for a bargain bin. We have so few bargain bins left! I suppose the drive toward optimization and efficiency is a net good, but I like a good that’s gross.

It is time, I think, to recover what we’ve lost. It is time to manifest the menu we deserve. The era of self-serious sex symbols trying to min-max dinner is over. Welcome to the era of Big Goons Making Goon Food.

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Haterade is a free newsletter sustained by the intoxicating aroma of cantaloupe. Sharing a post is a great way to mimic the Bargain Bins of yore and get this niche content in front of the weirdos who might appreciate it. If you’d like to support the newsletter, you can become a paid subscriber (no perks! no rules! perfect vibes!) or stuff some money in the tip jar here: Venmo | PayPal

I first spied the “Shaq-A-Licious XL Gummies” in a Cincinnati Kroger, where I snatched them off the shelf with a Gollum’s avarice. I intended to present them as a joke-offering to my nephew, Malcolm, a sixth grader who I alternatingly love and fear. Malcolm enjoys both gummy candy and impenetrable references, but I knew he would mostly be excited about the fact the gummies were purchased in Ohio, a state Gen Alpha has colonized and turned into a meme.

As a gift tax, I insisted that Malcolm open the packet and share one with me. Then I asked for a second. Then, a third. You can see where this is going: I am no longer invited to his birthday parties. But this is a small price to pay for culinary knowledge.1

I should be clear upfront that I am not talking about the original Shaq-A-Licious XL Gummies, which are shaped like Shaq’s head and appear to have been developed to simulate its texture.

No—my objets d’ardor are his sour gummies, which may be the best I have ever consumed. They are supple, but they are also substantive—steak-like. Each gummy is approximately 7’ tall. A serving size is three. Three. The flavors are ostensibly green watermelon, mixed berry, and pineapple, but they all taste like Fruit (Unisex) and citric acid. This is not a criticism.

The flavors correspond to three alluring shapes: a four-leaf clover, a cactus, and a big rig rendered from the POV of a person about to be mowed down by it. The Shaq-A-Licious XL website informed me these represented “Shaq's legendary nicknames: Diesel, The Big Cactus and The Big Shamrock.”

I had never heard of these “legendary nicknames,” but I was sure this was a personal problem. Despite owning an Orlando Magic Starter jacket between the ages of 8 and 10, my knowledge of Shaquille O’Neal’s basketball career is embarrassingly thin.

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So I marshalled the most powerful, noble tool of the Fourth Estate, and I Googled it.

I understand we’re supposed to treat Google’s AI assistant in particular (and AI-as-search-engine in general) with some skepticism, but I could not possibly improve on the “Explanation” section here.

Nor is it far off!

1. “The Big Cactus” is a nickname Shaquille O’Neal gave himself, which I had previously thought illegal.2

2. By his own admission, Shaq does “go crazy” when he sees a cactus. I do not believe that I or anyone else can restrict his movements, but I must nevertheless insist that he be barred from Saguaro National Park.

Of these nicknames, “Diesel” feels the most apt, as Shaq’s gummies have both the appearance and branding of something you can only buy at a dispensary. They feel slightly illicit—which, like most illicit things, makes them more desirable.

My opinions have not been bought and paid for by Big Cactus. The man simply knows his sweets. In hindsight, this is perhaps unsurprising. All of the interviews I have seen with Shaq lead me to believe that he is foremost a meddling, mischievous man—a Willy Wonka whose stature makes Oompa Loompas of us all.

I have eaten three bags of the Shaq-A-Licious Gummies since I learned of their existence. I “go crazy” when I see them. I show no signs of stopping.

Perhaps it is gauche of me to write about candies when there are Horrors. But they are there, outside my window, whether I acknowledge them or not. Little wolverines with their bloody faces pressed against the glass.

You do not need me to tell you about the wolverines. You see them, too! And while they chew their way through the dog door, maybe you would like to hear about the NBA’s Paul Newman and the gummies that made me laugh out loud.

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Thank you for reading this unusually prompt Haterade! This is shorter than a usual post, and if I were a large media conglomerate I would call it something like HATERADE: UNCHUGGABLE or JUICE MODE. But I am not going to differentiate it in any way because I do not know how to market things, and at this point, I refuse to learn.

If you would like to support my new Shaq-A-Licious lifestyle, you can become a paid subscriber or stuff some money in the tip jar here: Venmo | PayPal.

We are going to exercise more, but we are going to do it in a way that will not change our bodies. We are going to lose weight, but we are not going to diet. We are going to prioritize “health” and “eating real food” and we will not be answering any follow-up questions about what those concepts mean.

It is in this season of confusion that I think of turkey bacon.

The first thing to know about turkey bacon is that it is not technically bacon. I am required to tell you this lest someone tedious write in. In the United States, “bacon” means pig belly, and anything carved higher off the hog has to be labeled as such. As a nation, we believe in consumer protections largely to the extent they protect us from consuming alternative meats.

What turkey bacon is is a long strip of mechanically separated and reconstituted meat sludge. Or, to borrow from a 1984 Wendy’s commercial: “pieces-parts.”

I never saw that commercial—my atoms had not yet congealed into their current, terrifying form—but I remember my mom quoting it. For most of my childhood, I was at least 10 percent “pieces-parts” by volume. Many of my breakfasts involved dewy slices of turkey bacon that had been microwaved on a hard plastic tray—ridged for no one’s pleasure—until they were not crisp so much as warm and wet.

To be fair, I don’t think the turkey bacon was meant to taste like bacon. It had a flavor all its own: flabby, metallic, bologna-esque. It was everywhere when I was a kid, and I assumed this meant it had always been everywhere.

But turkey bacon—“facon” to its myriad haters—turns out to have been a relatively recent invention. It wasn’t a matter of technology. We’ve been mechanically separating meat with a prospector’s zeal since the 1960s. We simply lacked the will. What about bacon could science improve?

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Enter the low-fat, low-sodium, low-taste craze of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

A Terse Timeline of Turkey Transitions

• 1974: Sizzlean, a brand of lower-fat “breakfast strips” made from assorted meats (including turkey), enters the market with a series of commercials riffing on “bringing home the bacon.”

• 1979: Oscar Mayer acquires Louis Rich, a turkey processor, to expand their meat empire and experiment with new turkey products.

• 1987: Armour Golden Star releases “turkey breakfast strips” with stats comparing their calories relative to regular bacon as well as to Sizzlean.

• 1989: Louis Rich debuts the first official “turkey bacon” in a few test markets, including Ohio, Louisiana, and Texas. The facon goes national a year later, captured in ads such as the one below from the Scottsbluff, NE Star-Herald.

The low-fat craze couldn’t last forever, of course. Before I started researching the history of turkey bacon, I assumed it was just another ‘90s fad, like body glitter or D.A.R.E.

But facon has had more staying power than either of them.

If you look at USDA charts, you can clearly see a spike in turkey production during the 1980s and 1990s, when turkey bacon entered the market. More puzzling—to me, at least—is that production never really came back down. It’s not just because we’re eating more club sandwiches. A 2020 Purdue study found evidence of stronger consumer demand for and perception of turkey bacon than deli turkey. And Butterball added a dedicated production line for turkey bacon to a North Carolina plant as recently as 2018.

The modern-day audience for turkey bacon may not be loud, but it’s surprisingly large: dieters, heart-disease battlers, people who don’t eat pork for religious reasons, people who don’t eat pork for climate reasons.1

I think I was surprised by turkey bacon’s popularity because the dominant culture has so soundly rejected it. We are supposed to sneer at turkey bacon the way we are supposed to sneer at Snackwells or Sean Lennon. We have moved on from caloric consolation prizes into an era of anti-Puritanical purity: whole milk, real butter, Bagel Thicks.

On the whole, I think this is the right balance. But there’s something I admittedly find snobbish and preening about our criticism of faux-foods. The usual line is something like, “I’d rather do without than have a pale imitation.” It is almost exclusively uttered by people who have never had to do without.

Plus, I have a genuine love for some of of those imitations! I didn’t taste real crab meat until I was in my 20s—which was also when I saw the ocean for the first time—and I’ve been fortunate enough to have it many times since. I’d still rather pluck a cold, rubbery hunk of imitation “krab” from a packet than dig a feather of crab from its shell-shard cave. I don’t care that the krab is made from Pisces parts. To me, it tastes like luxury.

Could I have forgotten turkey bacon’s similar pleasures? I went to the grocery store to search for a pack, but nothing looked the way I remembered it. The turkey bacon of my youth had been tantalizingly, unnaturally striated with layers of dark meat and white meat masquerading as fat. My modern-day grocery store sold only “natural,” unmarbled turkey bacon the shade of NARS Orgasm. I suppose this is a sign of the times: the people inclined to buy turkey bacon in 2025 might find mono-hued meat more wholesome. But I missed the streaky simulacrum.

I brought my Pink Meat home and decided to treat it the way I’d treat any good bacon: I heated it gently in a cast-iron pan. Every few seconds, I prodded hopefully at the strips, searching for some evidence that the fat was rendering (forgetting, of course, that there was nothing to render). The turkey bacon never got crisp so much as it eventually turned to leather. I struggled to cut it with a knife and fork. It did not taste like bacon. It tasted like deli meat someone had singed in a pan.

In hindsight, I was a fool to go off my childhood script. The best preparation for turkey bacon is the one I grew up with: microwaved on a plastic tray until dewy and limp, each strip flexible enough to be accordion-pleated on the tines of a fork. It’s not good. It’s not bacon. But it’s good for what it is.

A friend and I sometimes joke that we plow through life at “one speed”—fast—but this is of course an exaggeration. We can move at whatever speed we will. We have more choices than all or nothing, full-fat or an empty plate. We are a people of degrees. We can have a little pleasure, as a treat.

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I’ve dropped some recent articles and updates at the end of this newsletter if you’re curious about what I’ve been up to, but for now, let’s just dive into reader questions.

Andrea:

What is something that is obnoxiously intricate to make but worth the effort?

I believe in keeping this newsletter as un-aspirational as possible, which means I am not going to tell you to make a beef Wellington. I have made puff pastry from scratch, and I feel zero obligation to do it again. I live with someone now who makes his own koji and garum and vinegar and other little tinctures, and I am very impressed by all of it, but I look upon these feats much as I look upon the feats of an Olympic gymnast. Is it theoretically possible for me, with my equivalently human body, to do these things? Yes. But it is not what I wish to do ~with my one wild and precious life~. I wish to eat potato chips, and some day to lie down in a ditch to die.

Anyway, “intricate” is relative. So from the perspective of a lazy, workaday Cook, my answer is homemade pasta. 

I resisted for a long time, and I still cook with dried pasta most often. I belong to the Sfoglini pasta club (flex!) and the shipments have been load-bearing, from a mental health perspective.

But you really can’t beat the taste and texture of fresh pasta. Rustic biangbiang noodles or gnocchi are relatively straightforward. But every time I have to pull the pasta roller out from storage, I wince. Is it worth it for perfectly smooth and symmetrical ramen or fettuccini? Yes. It is also an immensely frustrating machine designed for freaks with at least three hands. 

I’m told there are models you can clamp to your prep table, which would solve most of my problems, but I prefer to stick to what I know and complain about it.

Jerry:

How do home food safety rituals align with (or diverge from) restaurant standards?

No one’s asking, but I would rather lick almost any surface in a restaurant than in someone’s home. 

At my last restaurant job, every closing shift required me to unlock the wheels of a 400-pound prep station, pull it out from the wall, and sweep and mop behind it—never mind that the restaurant retained a separate janitorial staff.

Compare that to the kitchen in the home where I’ve lived since 2016. Do you know the number of times I have pulled my prep table out from the wall so I can clean behind it? It’s not zero, but it is also not 10.

Restaurant food safety is a completely different animal, with restrictions most home cooks would never consider. Do you have a separate hand-washing sink that you never use for food prep? Do you only store raw chicken in the lowest drawer of your refrigerator? Do you date every container of leftovers before you pop it in the fridge? If the answer to any of those is “no,” you’d likely fail a health inspection.

My partner has attempted to impose some of these rules in our home kitchen, with limited success. We are locked in a perpetual stand-off between my sensible, Midwestern aversion to food waste and his unreasonable, elitist aversion to food poisoning. 

Granted, some food safety requirements can feel like hygiene theater. Most health departments ban wood surfaces in restaurant kitchens—cutting boards, knife racks—despite conflicting research about their safety relative to plastic.1

But the long and short of it is that most restaurant kitchens are a hell of a lot cleaner and safer (at least, from a public health perspective) than home kitchens. This is one reason why I encourage people to be a little more circumspect about blaming restaurants for food poisoning. 

There’s been a lot of awful reporting on restaurant food safety from lazy news outlets, most of which repeat the same claim from this 2014 CSPI study: “you’re twice as likely to get sick eating at a restaurant than you are at home!” The reporting never mentions that the CSPI study measures the prevalence of foodborne illness by “outbreaks”—meaning two or more people fell ill from the same source—reported to the CDC.

Comparatively few people are going to experience an “outbreak” of food poisoning in a private home, and even fewer are going to be self-reporting their spouse’s home cooking to the CDC.

It’s true that if a restaurant is cooking with contaminated food, it has the potential to get dozens of people sick. But that’s a function of volume, not risk. The number of people who get sick at restaurants is always going to be higher than in a private home. But the percentage is likely a hell of a lot lower.

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Darren:

When I go out to restaurants, I often look at the menu from a perspective of what's "worth it" to order because it isn't something I'd make at home, or something that restaurants just get "right." Do you have any go-to restaurant dishes you'd recommend for reasons like that?

Given my earlier rant, the answer is obvious: fresh pasta. 

I do order fresh pasta whenever I can. But my honest answer to this question? A beautifully composed salad. 

I do not make big, beautiful restaurant salads at home because I do not wish to prepare and serve 23 courses in one afternoon. My house salad these days is whatever kale’s salvageable from the garden, carrot ribbons lopped off haphazardly with a vegetable peeler, and a fake Caesar dressing (mayo, garlic, parm, lemon juice, fish sauce, S&P). In the vein of imitation crab, I suppose I should call it Kaesar. 

But at a restaurant! At a restaurant, I will order the bowl of mixed greens with pearl barley, marinated asparagus, roasted Jimmy Nardello peppers, za’aatar seasoned sourdough croutons, pickled onions, thick wedges of heirloom tomato, toasted pepitas, and a 12-ingredient dressing.

At a restaurant, Maximalist Salads make sense. Few of the salad’s components are going to be used in just one dish. The pickled onions and toasted pepitas on your salad are probably cribbed from a chicken mole plate; the marinated asparagus or roasted red peppers might be from a pasta primavera or a “harvest bowl.”

Try hunting for remixes and repeats the next time you read a restaurant menu. It doesn’t ruin the magic—it makes me more appreciative of the ways a practical chef or GM can manufacture abundance by making the most of what’s at hand. 

Jonathan:

It seems like Japanese food might be having a moment in Kansas City. I say that with hesitation, remembering that it was less than five years ago that Komatsu, Columbus Park Ramen, and Shio Ramen all closed within a few months. Curious to hear your thoughts on this one. Personally, I think KC is long overdue for a Japanese food revolution.

Despite a few recent openings, I think the Japanese food scene in KC, like the pizza scene in KC, is a bit dusty. Sama Zama doesn’t get a lot of buzz these days, but it’s still pretty good—and has miraculously held on despite moving to a setback location in Westport that seems destined to hold a vape shop. 

The new players have been hit-or-miss. KC Craft Ramen is justifiably well loved and has the best ramen in town (though this is not a super high bar to clear these days). Kata Nori has filled a definite niche with its focus on hand rolls, and I’ve liked both of my meals there.

I had high hopes for Noka, a restaurant that ostensibly opened to showcase “Japanese farmhouse” cooking and seemed to be banking on no one in the city knowing what that meant. It has since rebaselined to become the restaurant it was always meant to be, which is to say: a pan-Asian conceptual mess at war with its own aesthetic principles. I may be—am—a crank, but I have limited interest in eating Kung Pao Brussels sprouts in a haute-concrete dining room surrounded by enormous funerary urns. The best thing I can say about Noka is that it looks expensive, which it is. 

I miss Bob Wasabi and Shio Ramen. And writing restaurant reviews, apparently.

And finally, from Jake:

Why is Hot Ones so popular? I’ve watched a couple and I cannot tell you any of the questions that were asked because the physical pain of the interviewees was more interesting to watch than anything else. It also makes me uncomfortable so it is not something I watch regularly. 

The standard answer is that Sean Evans is a great interviewer, which I think is broadly true. He does his homework and asks interesting questions! The show’s gimmick—grilling celebrities while they munch through a series of progressively spicier wings—ought to help. Capsaicin, the compound that makes peppers taste spicy, can release dopamine and endorphins and provide some stress relief generally, which is good for loosening up your subjects.

But I’ve watched a few episodes and I, like you, tend to remember the subjects’ reactions more than any particularly revealing or insightful answers. I suspect most people watch the show for the same reason they read this newsletter: morbid fascination. Perhaps a few of you are here for the writing and culinary advice. But I assume most readers open these newsletters to see if I am about to die. 

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Liz, what have you done for me lately?

Thank you for asking! I am always here to Demonstrate Value.

I’ve published a few things for Serious Eats in recent months, including this recipe for Kansas-City-style cheesy corn, which I highly recommend you make. I’ve also got some new Eater pieces up on KC restaurants in general and barbecue spots in particular.

And this coming Saturday, I’ll be presenting a couple food writing workshops at the KC Library for the Heartland Book Festival! I would like the record to show that I did not title the workshop. Both offerings appear to be sold out, but send me an email if you’re desperate to come, and I’ll see if I can smuggle you in under a large trench coat.

Haterade is a free newsletter sustained by maladapted viewers like you. If you’d like to support the Haterade Foundation for Shoddy Food Science, you can become a paid subscriber (no promises, no perks!) or stuff some cash in the tip jar here: Venmo | PayPal   

“We can’t pay anyone else to work like that. If I’m honest, we can’t even really pay you to work like that,” my editor says.

It’s 2023, and I’m slumped in a hard-backed chair at a coffee shop across the street from the alt-monthly I’ve written for for the last eight years, waiting to hear if I’ll make it to nine. Outlook: not so good. 

I take another sip of my watered-down cold brew, waiting for someone to draw the obvious conclusion. My editor and two other staffers are arranged across the table from me like a firing squad, which I suppose they are. They asked to meet in person after I sent a couple prickly (for a Midwesterner) emails about perceived ethical lapses in the paper’s food coverage. 

I’ve been the paper’s restaurant critic since 2016, and have strong opinions about how a critic should approach a review. Specifically: three visits minimum to get a thorough sense of the menu and how the restaurant operates at different times. No review until the restaurant’s been open at least a month. No soft openings. No media dinners. No comps.

It’s an expensive way to work. It’s also a way of working that the paper’s newer reviewers, who stepped in when I took a few months off for a painful divorce, haven’t adopted.

“I’m not territorial,” I say. “But ideally, we’d be working under the same set of editorial standards.” 

A small, naive part of me is hoping my editor will ask me to recommit to the paper—that he’ll urge me to stay, and adjust the terms so I can. A larger, wearier part of me is ready to walk.

The weary part wins. No one proposes any compromises. No one proposes anything at all. We end on the same false choice we started with: I can accept the status quo or I can move on. 

There’s a third option, of course, one I want to shout into my cup: Stop publishing restaurant reviews.1

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I’ve been thinking about the business of restaurant reviewing again while I process the loss of my professional identity for almost a decade. It hasn’t been easy to write about, in part because it isn’t all that significant to anyone but me. I filed my last restaurant review this October to little fanfare. The paper didn’t formally acknowledge my departure, and I didn’t really, either. 

As a first step toward closure (#healing), here’s more fanfare than I deserve: an EP of my Greatest Hits. My hope is that these might be entertaining even if you’ve never heard of the restaurants.

1. Guy Fieri’s Dive and Taco Joint has arrived, and here is our review of it

2. They serve food at the Midtown Home Depot now. You will want to read the menu carefully. 

3. We live in a Society. 

4. Taco Bell Cantina welcomes Westport to the Hoobastank of nightclubs. 

This essay isn’t about my former employer. I will always be grateful for them and wish everyone there the best. The people were friendly, they paid more or less on time, and they almost never pushed back on my ideas (though this was perhaps more concerning than reassuring). It was a natural end to a relationship that I likely hastened with my own obstinacy. Over time, the paper started to engage with me the way one might engage with an exotic and expensive bird—a bird that might also, possibly, be a little bit violent? At any rate, they seem to have concluded that it was safer not to approach the cage.

I would now like to invite you to approach the cage. 

We still need (responsible) restaurant criticism…

In November 2022—about a month before my marriage imploded and I entered the Era of Complication—I gave a talk about restaurant criticism for the KC chapter of “Creative Mornings.” More specifically, I talked about what I saw as the role of criticism: 

I do believe that criticism, when practiced responsibly (and that’s a big caveat), is a form of love. Because you have to love something to meet it with honest curiosity—to take at face value what it wants to be or do and evaluate how close it’s getting. You have to love something or someone to spend hours studying it and engaging with it and giving it chance after chance to disappoint you. […]

True criticism always has to start from a place of sincere engagement and love. And that doesn’t mean it has to be gentle. Because when you love something—when you believe in a mission and the people tasked with achieving it—you feel the gulf between what’s promised and what’s delivered as an existential threat. When you care about something, the stakes are too high to sit back and watch it fail–or worse, to watch it cause harm.

At the time, I think a lot of people took it as a defense of negativity, which it was. I was worried about the peppy boosterism of Instagram sponcon and the ways it was priming us to conflate mild critique with censure. But I’m tired of writing about influencers. It’s gotten boring, the journalistic equivalent of the old-guard comedian pinning the death of his industry on “woke.”  

And negativity can be irresponsible too, of course. Possibly worse than naked boosterism is the clout-chasing “criticism” that relies on autofellatic outrage to mask a lack of sincere engagement. Journalists can do just as much damage here. I’ve been in rooms with national food personalities who adopt vainglorious JuSt AsKiNg QuEsTiOnS postures that make clear they haven’t tried all that seriously to find answers on their own. 

Responsible criticism takes courage, sure, but it also takes effort and attention. Everyone wants to loudly proclaim that the emperor has no clothes. No one wants to go to the palace and look in his closet.

And responsible critics have to—not to be fair to the emperor (though that is, in fact, required), but to be a credible and authoritative voice of dissent. 

The stakes of getting it wrong are high. As a critic, I considered reporting on industry issues part of my beat, which is why I occasionally wrote exposes like this one on Port Fonda. It was miserable work, convincing 14 people to go on the record and go deep about their experiences with sexual harassment, racism, and verbal and physical abuse. It took forever to fact check. And I feel a bit like a chump, now, when I read poorly or anonymously sourced stories from local and national outlets about “toxic” or “problematic” behavior that never define what those terms mean. 

Journalists love positioning those stories as attempts to “hold power to account.” What they’re actually doing is hanging their sources out to dry. Journalists don’t protect victims with abstract, context-collapsing language that makes audiences play MadLibs with the issues at hand. Journalists protect victims by telling their stories with details that are specific, compelling, and rigorously fact-checked so that no one can doubt the severity or veracity of what they experienced. 

That’s hard, awkward, and unglamorous work. It takes time, effort, and money. I empathize with writers who aren’t given all three. But the punishing conditions of the industry don’t give us carte blanche to do our work carelessly. We have agency. We can say no. There are so many other kinds of stories to tell. 

….but we don’t need criticism at any cost

Here’s your nut graf, squirreled away in the final third: I believe in the value of restaurant reviews. I believe in the value of reporting on industry abuses. I believe that doing that work poorly can sometimes be worse than not doing it at all. 

I understand the itch to keep going in the face of system failure. Some of the work I’m proudest of has been for this newsletter, but it’s not work that commands respect. I don’t believe anyone needs institutional backing to do meaningful work, but it’s admittedly gotten harder to explain what I do to strangers. When I told people I was a restaurant critic, they looked impressed. When I tell people I have a Substack, they look embarrassed.  

And I miss the work itself. I went to a buzzy new KC restaurant last week and felt the Old Urge. An ambitious and mostly competent meal was tarnished almost irreparably by the service, which managed to be simultaneously slow and overbearing. The server spent five interminable minutes explaining pét-nat unprovoked and incorrectly to my dinner guest—a 30-year veteran wine critic for a major metro daily. He forgot to ring in a dish we’d ordered, brought the wrong check twice, then asked us to write about his band.  

When I was a critic, I could power through an experience like that with the morbid satisfaction that it would at least make good copy. As a civilian, it just made me cross. 

I want restaurant criticism to survive. But I don’t want it to survive in any form, at any cost. Missing the work—or worse, missing the ego boost I derived from it—isn’t a justification for doing it poorly or unethically. And so my conclusion, ultimately, is this: If we can’t pay people to do it well, we’re better off not doing it at all. If criticism is dead, let it die, at least, in dignity. 

I’ve weighed the trade-offs, and I don’t want to make them. I don’t want to have to post FaceTuned pictures of myself in clothes I can’t afford to build a following for my work in a non-visual medium. I don’t want to add hasty disclaimers to the end of my #content so savvy followers can suss out which of my opinions were paid for. I don’t want to taste anything that will make me bite my tongue.

Nor do I want this essay to read like a high-maintenance shriek: I can’t work under these conditions! Of course I can work under these conditions. I can work under almost any conditions. But in the words of Bartleby, the Scrivener: I prefer not to.

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What I do have is a menacing blend of curiosity and obstinance. And so a few years ago, when a friend asked me to sign up for a half-marathon, I was dogged immediately by two intrusive thoughts:

I don’t think I’ve run a single mile in my life. 

And:

What if I ran…a lot of them? 

This was how I came to learn about running gels for the first time in my thirties. 

Running gels are joyless oozes that serve many biological purposes and no aesthetic ones. They are the closest thing humanity has produced to the cockroach bricks from Snowpiercer. They are named dystopian names—“GU,” “Hüma”—and come in flavors like “Chocolate Outrage” and “Watermelon Knife-Fight.” The variety is an illusion. Every running gel tastes the same, which is to say, like a Tootsie Roll that someone made wet. 

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Long-time readers know that I am morally opposed to anything that maximizes utility. I believe in aesthetic and hedonic excess as a rule. Still, a body has its limits. And when a body runs certain distances—for me, that’s anything over eight miles—that body cries out for Nutrient Paste™. 

I set out to improve on the model. It was not, I concluded, too much to ask that a food be both delicious and suited to my fast-paced modern lifestyle. This was the promise of Go-gurt. 

Plus, running nutrition is simple. All you really need is sodium, some amino acids, and a lot of simple carbohydrates—ideally, in the form of highly processed and bioavailable sugars.  

What you need is something like barbecue sauce. 

For the past 12 years, I’ve lived in Kansas City, Missouri, a city known largely for eating barbecue, winning Super Bowls, and encouraging our residents to date Taylor Swift.1 And for the past 12 months, I have been accumulating rib bones from 23 different Kansas City barbecue joints and stashing them in a bag in my freezer.

I didn’t start out saving them with any particular end goal in mind—like all people, I simply wished to amass a pile of bones. But I knew it was time to call upon them. I needed a base of amino acids and electrolytes. I was going to get them from the mother of all stocks. 

I threw a little over two pounds of bones into my InstantPot and covered them with water. An hour later, I had some of the smokiest, saltiest, most collagen-heavy stock I’d ever tasted. I chilled it overnight to what food scientists call “the Jell-O stage,” then combined it with equal parts powdered maltodextrin—the simple carb of choice in most running gels—and bottled barbecue sauce from Gates. (This was a considered choice. The cashiers at Gates are notorious for yelling at people, and I figured this could only fuel me on a run.)

The resulting mixture tasted like slightly thicker, more complex barbecue sauce, which it was. The only thing it was missing was the running gel texture. Maltodextrin has some thickening power, but not enough to yield the paste-like consistency athletes crave. 

I ended up augmenting the mixture with xanthan gum, which is one of a few Mysterious Powders I recommend all cooks (and Cooks) keep on hand. The uses are endless. A tiny pinch will get you silky hot sauces and emulsified salad dressings. A large pinch will get you culinary Flubber. 

I had my gel. I used my vacuum sealer to make a hasty, GU-sized pouch and then slipped it into my pocket for a long run at English Landing Park.

The park was another considered choice. A while back, I had attempted to run the trail system with my friend Elizabeth (no relation) mere hours after housing a pound of Night Goat barbecue. This turned out to be what gastroenterologists call “a bad idea.” I will spare you the full report and skip to the key takeaway: if you find yourself in English Landing Park, don’t go off trail. 

I needed to redeem myself. And so, like a decaying salmon sprinting toward its spawning grounds, I returned to the scene of the crime.

About eight miles into the run, I paused at the exact copse of trees I had once desecrated and downed the gel. It was savory. It was smoky. It tasted like a brisket that someone had made wet. 

Deep within my stomach, I heard the muffled voice of a Gates cashier admonishing me to pick up a tray. I sped up. 

Every now and then, someone will accuse me of using this newsletter for culinary “stunts.” I’m not offended by the insinuation—if I wanted to be taken seriously, I wouldn’t be licking mouse tape or making garlic bread chapstick. But I do want to be clear that I never engage in these experiments with anything but genuine curiosity and optimism. Taste is subjective, sure, but it’s also curated. Disgust is a reflex, and it’s one we can unlearn. 

And as experiments go, I consider this one an unmitigated success. Running gels taste bad; barbecue tastes better. 

Let the record show that I am willing to meet with investors. They’ll have to catch me first. 

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Ingredients

• 3 tablespoons (50g) chilled gelatinous rib stock

• 3 tablespoons (20g) maltodextrin

• 3 tablespoons (50g) Kansas City barbecue sauce (ideally, Gates)

• Scant ½ teaspoon xanthan gum

Steps

1. Combine all ingredients in a blender jar (or a cup that fits an immersion blender) and blend on low speed for a few seconds—just until thickened. You do need to use a blender here; without it, the xanthan gum won’t fully incorporate, and you’ll need to use more of it for the same thickening effect. 

2. Use vacuum sealer to heat-seal three edges of a vacuum bag approximately 2.5” by 5”. Spoon in gel, leaving at least 1” of room at the top. Seal final edge, then cut a small incision near the top of one side to facilitate an easy tear-off.

   Alternatively, decant into a snack-sized Ziploc bag and rip it open with your teeth. No one is going to demand decorum from a sweaty person splurting barbecue sauce into their mouth in public.

The book was How to Garnish by Harvey Rosen, a gleaming hardcover guide to the best edible garnishes known to mammal. These are not the twee botanical garnishes of your grocery-store deli case. Harvey’s only interested in heavy-hitters—a turnip mouse, a melon whale. I picked up the book because of its cover photo: a cucumber whittled into the shape of a shark, its body painted with liquid gelatin for that watery, just-beached sheen. 

Mostly, I picked it up for an antidote to the joyless, avant-garde plating that’s defined our Boring ‘20s. No one wants to make cucumber sharks anymore. We’re horny for massive spoons that we can use to smear coulis into giant commas. Our parched vision of luxury is a fleet of squeeze bottles daubing multi-colored sauces into confetti pinpricks. We are living in the era of Very Small Food served on Very Large Rocks. 

How to Garnish is both a practical guide to fine kitchen tools and a scrapbook of food trends of yore. My copy was published in 1983 by International Culinary Consultants—a publishing house so real, so selective, so elite, that it exclusively published books by Harvey Rosen. The back cover shows Harvey and three other garde mangers in double-breasted chef’s coats and crisp white toques, straight out of a recruitment pamphlet for Le Cordon Bleu. 

It’s the kind of thing you could only get away with in the ‘80s, when homestyle kitsch didn’t feel quite so removed from haute cuisine. Homemakers pored over issues of Family Circle for holiday garnishes: reindeer celery sticks with pretzel antlers, witch-themed Halloween cupcakes with ice cream cone hats. Swanky chefs packed up leftovers in swan boats shaped from aluminum foil. Those feel like retro affectations now, but they share a common impulse: to delight, not necessarily to impress. To treat food as a vehicle for someone else’s joy.

I’d like to resurrect that ethos. I went to a Christmas party and brought a hostess gift—a cucumber shark in a Ziploc bag. A couple weeks later, I assembled a cheese plate for a friend and nestled a shark alongside. I’m going to link to a tutorial below for anyone else who wants to try one for their next sharkuterie board. It’s a relatively easy garnish that requires few specialty tools. All you really need is a paring knife.

But for me, the shark was a gateway drug, not a destination. I had set my sights on something much more involved. I discussed it with friends in the hushed, reverent tones of a golf announcer. I was preparing, I told, them, for the Olympic Games of garnishing. I was preparing to tackle the Silly Goose. 

The Silly Goose, like many of Rosen’s garnishes, is a showpiece—more art than accent. It is technically edible, but that’s beside the point. No one’s biting into a raw yellow squash.

Crucially, the goose is also meant to be part of a tableau. Harvey does not want you to rest on your laurels, content with a single goose. Your guests deserve a flock.

The goose is deceptively simple. You really only need three ingredients: a curvy-necked yellow squash for the body, carrots for the feet and beak, and cloves for its beady little eyes. I formed the goose’s webbed toes with a crinkle cutter—one of a few tools Rosen insists you acquire if you want to take your garnishing seriously. Longtime readers will know that I needed no convincing. I cherish my crinkle cutter, an heirloom I have previously referred to in these annals as a “funhouse guillotine.”

I assembled my garnishes in a fugue state, gripped by Michelangelan agony and ecstasy. When I was done, I had assembled three geese, each alike in indignity. They wilted on my dining room table for a few days before Christmas, looking for all the world like a goose-themed nativity.

The longer they sat, the more their carrot beaks curled open—which is to say, the geese became even sillier with time.  

I aspire to the same. Harvey’s garnishes are delightful to me because they’re so impractical. They’re not an integral part of a dish. They’re ersatz appendages. They exist only to be silly and beautiful, and they’re relics from a time when that existence was enough.

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Exactly one week ago, there was a shooting at my old high school in Perry, Iowa—the high school where my dad (a retired band director and current auditorium manager) still works. 

After the shooting, multiple friends reached out urging me to cancel plans and “take some time to myself.” I wasn’t entirely sure what they meant. For most of my life, people have been telling me to slow down. Last year, I traveled a lot in the wake of my divorce, and a well-meaning friend called me to gently inquire whether I might be experiencing a manic episode.

Both of those gestures were well intentioned, but they also reminded me that we need better narratives around grief. We conflate “moving” with “moving on”—the implication is that grief is an emotion we can only process fully by sitting alone in a dark room with our thoughts. 

Of course, most of us don’t get the opportunity to sit alone in a dark room. We keep going; our thoughts go with us. That’s not a statement about resilience but about the practical necessity of growing around chaos like a crooked tree. Every day is a tragicomic exercise in emotional power clashing. We crack jokes in the hospital waiting room; we learn about a school shooting in the car on the way to a party, a cucumber shark balanced on one knee. I’m not sure what choice we have but to let emotion seep through our gills while we glide through dark oceans, menacing perpetual motion machines.

The joy doesn’t cover for the grief. They coexist. The joy is not a sufficient response to the evils of the world. Its utility is limited. But it might be a necessary complement to them—a garnish.

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Yield: One shark.
Note: For best results, buy a large cucumber that’s slightly curved.

1. Cut a 1/4 inch slice off the bottom of the cucumber so that the shark will lay flat on the plate. Keep the slice—you’ll use this piece later to make the shark’s menacing dorsal fins.

2. Cut a wedge out of the front of the cucumber (a little more than halfway down) to form the shark’s smiling mouth.

3. Cut two smaller, parallel wedges on each side of the cucumber, just behind the mouth, to form the gills.

4. Hollow out two holes for the eyes (I dug mine out with a toothpick, but a metal straw or similarly small cylindrical cutter would work here).

5. About two-thirds of the way back, carve out a 1/4 inch slice from each side of the cucumber. Each slice should be a neat oval—you’ll use these later to make the shark’s broader side fins.

6. Grab the slice you cut off of the bottom of the shark in step 1. Cut it in half diagonally, so that each piece has one rounded and one straight, slanted edge.

7. Use a paring knife to cut two slots in the top of the cucumber to insert the dorsal fins. This takes some trial and error—start with narrower slots than you think you’ll need, and dig them out as needed to wedge in the fins.

8. Using a similar process, carve two slots on each side of the cucumber, just behind the gills, and insert the side fins.

9. Present the garnish to your guests and/or take a giant bite out of your cucumber shark.

The baba ganoush is gray. Not the appealing gray of a baby rabbit, but a lifeless gray. Nausea-gray. Zombie-skin gray. A gray that screams “inedible, and possibly lethal.” 

I briefly consider eating it with a napkin over my head, like an ortolan bunting. Instead, I pronounce it “the nadir of baba ganoush” and eat it on my porch with a handful of carrot sticks, trying not to look down. 

In some ways, I trade on people’s trust that I know good food and am capable of preparing it. But at least 30 percent of the time, I fuck up. I get distracted. I get impatient. I overcook the pasta, I undercook the beans. I serve them anyway, wincing all the while. “Never apologize,” Julia Child famously advised—but I am not Julia Child.  

At the same time, I believe wholeheartedly that it’s okay to be a mediocre cook. I should know. I’ve been a mediocre Cook all my life. 

I’ve been thinking about mediocre meals in part because of a piece I read in The Atlantic titled “What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate.” I recommend it! It’s a good piece for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is its ability to make me feel real human empathy for a man named “Mitt.” 

But it initially got my attention—and the attention of a lot of other Food People—for a section on Romney’s eating habits. 

“On the day of my first visit, [Romney] showed me his freezer, which was full of salmon fillets that had been given to him by Lisa Murkowski, the senator from Alaska. He didn’t especially like salmon but found that if he put it on a hamburger bun and smothered it in ketchup, it made for a serviceable meal.”

As you can imagine, people reacted to this revelation in a very chill, measured way. Which is to say: people immediately began dunking on it, much in the way they dunked on Donald Trump for ordering a steak well-done. 

I’m not interested in defending either man. But I am interested in food as a cultural sorting mechanism, and the ways in which we treat “bad” food as a metonym for vice. Eating salmon with ketchup wouldn’t be noteworthy if it didn’t come with a host of assumptions about the eater’s character—their taste, their curiosity, their perspective, their skill. Either you reverse-sear your steaks to a perfect 130° Fahrenheit, or you chomp down a tasteless brick of meat dust on your way to your job at the Suck Factory.

I decided to make the salmon.

Romney didn’t describe how he cooked his salmon fillets, but I had an idea. I searched my heart: was there anything I wasn’t willing to do in the service of culinary empathy? Yes, I concluded: microwaving fish in my own home. 

I grabbed a bag of Alaskan salmon fillets from Costco and baked them using the Samin Nosrat method—about 20 minutes in a 225° F oven. The resulting salmon was tender and flaky but stippled with a pale white secretion called albumin. (Albumin, as we all know, is the part of the salmon made out of egg.) I scraped as much of it off as I could and turned my attention to the bun. 

I spread a little mayonnaise on the bun and toasted it in a pan, which was probably cheating, but otherwise followed my assumed script: soft supermarket hamburger bun, blanket of cold ketchup.

I took a bite. It tasted…fine. Good, even. The mere act of splurting ketchup on fish made my taste buds hallucinate that it was cocktail sauce. 

Would I do it again? Probably not. Was it an unforgivable culinary crime? Who would make the arrest? 

Food writers (the thoughtful ones, at least) try to cover the ethics of eating—the conditions under which fieldworkers labor, the contributions of animal agriculture to climate change. But the bulk of our output is a lot more frivolous. In the end, most people just want to read about taste.

But there’s no obligation to create food that tastes good—at least, no moral obligation. Chefs will sometimes wax poetic about what we “owe” to good ingredients, but any debt we owe is ultimately to each other. The salmon doesn’t care how I dress it.  

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I forget that sometimes. I’m always min-maxing dinner, always chasing the ur-version of any dish. Regularly, I find myself Googling “the best mashed potatoes” or “the best fried okra” as if this were a reasonable goal. The best fried okra was never going to be cooked by a haggard Kansas City woman who had consumed nothing that day but a martini and a 16-ounce can of wasabi peas. 

And that pursuit isn’t value-neutral. At its worst, our attempts to signal culinary sophistication can flatten American cuisine into a homogenous idea of a dish. We read a Serious Eats explainer or watch a season of “Good Eats” and decide that the only worthwhile fried chicken is buttermilk-brined and fried in shortening; we end up collapsing it into a genus when we could have had a many-splendored species.

I visited a restaurant in Oldenburg, Indiana recently that serves fried chicken seasoned only with salt and a prodigious amount of black pepper. It’s a style that might induce the more food-media-pilled among us to sneer: “where’s the seasoning?” But Indiana has its own storied fried chicken tradition—and it’s worth preserving even if it never makes it into Bon Appétit.

I’m conflating mediocrity with perceived mediocrity a bit, here. I happen to think Indiana’s lard-fried, pepper-spiked chicken is excellent. What I’m trying to get at is the cost of taking ourselves so seriously—of getting so caught up with improvement at the margins that we forget how to have a good time.

It’s okay to thaw a Costco salmon filet and slather it with ketchup. It’s okay to bake a chicken breast. It’s okay to spend all day cooking a beautiful, elegant, richly spiced meal. It’s okay to just have dinner. 

If this newsletter has a consistent theme, it’s that food should be a source of joy. But the “should” in that sentence isn’t an imperative—it’s an ideal. 

The joy comes first. And if it never comes, we may as well get dinner on the table without too much fuss.

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It’s true that when I go out to dinner, I rarely ask for a dessert menu (unless I’m there for work). But I always seem to find room for sweets that are savory: a miso-peanut-butter cookie, say, or a salt-stippled scoop of butter pecan. What I mean, I suppose, is that I’m not into uncomplicated sweetness—an endorphin rush without effort, sugar without salt. 

It’s a predictable viewpoint for a lapsed Catholic. Give me pleasure, but make me feel a little bad about it. 

I found the ultimate expression of self-flagellating sweetness—the most Gluttonous Punishment—in Finland. Specifically, I found salmiakki: an intensely salty, abrasive black licorice that tastes like the roof of a litterbox. 

Salmiakki is the dessert of my dreams, which does not mean it is any good. My dreams are largely inscrutable and unpleasant. The licorice derives its power from a peculiar kind of salt. The powdery coating on most candies isn’t sodium chloride but ammonium chloride—NH4Cl to table salt’s NaCl. Less chemically, it’s known as sal ammoniac—salmiac.  

Nordic countries in general consume a lot of salmiakki, but the Finns have turned it into an art. Walk into a movie theater in Helsinki and you’ll find bags of salmiakki in all its forms: dusty hard candies, salt-crusted gummies, sleek black licorice fish. In my view, the most concentrated expression of the candy—the ur-ammonium—are these diamond-shaped Fazer pastilles.

There are only two things you really need to know about salmiakki:

1. The ammonium chloride gives the candy an eye-watering, cat-piss-like quality.

2. Eating too much of it can give you hypertension.

As you might imagine, I’m a big fan. 

I was even more intrigued when I read an NHS warning that a sustained diet of black licorice could lead to “potentially serious health problems, such as an increase in blood pressure and an irregular heart rhythm.” I had a heart murmur as a small child, and I have long yearned for its return. I think it would be good for both my psyche and my longevity to hear my heart whisper “please, liz. stop.” 

Longtime Haterade readers can see where this is going. “Is Liz going to hook herself up to a blood pressure monitor and eat a bunch of cat-piss candy?”

Yes. 

I returned from Finland armed with bags of salmiakki as well as a couple bottles of my new favorite drink: salmiari, a salty-sweet black licorice liqueur that’s much more palatable than the candy itself.

I should acknowledge that I was gooseing the outcome, a little—alcohol can raise blood pressure on its own, creating a kind of experimental comorbidity. But as with most Haterade experiments, I wanted the experience to be Goblin Level.

As a robustness check, I measured my blood pressure two ways: first with my friend Warren’s electronic blood pressure machine and then with a sphygmomanometer (a manual instrument, and an incredible spelling bee word). I’m reporting the sphygmomanometer readings because they were a little more consistent, but the trends were the same across instruments.

First, I needed a baseline. My blood pressure is usually too low, so I drank a couple of Hamm’s and watched 45 minutes of an Arsenal game to get to a normal human reading:

120/85.

Then, I ate a couple pastilles and took two shots of salmiari from a three-ounce jigger. I measured again. I didn’t expect to see a big spike right away, but I thought it might at least go up a trivial amount.

Instead, it went down.

120/75.

I ate a couple pieces and downed two more three-ounce shots.

110/65.

I was beginning to question the safety of the experiment at this point, but I was unwilling to back down. Two more candies, two more shots.

110/70.

Two and two more.

100/75.

I’m not sure what this experiment says about my relationship with poisons in general and alcohol in particular, but I’m confident I’m not willing to hear it. I will simply choose to believe that my body thrives on trash the way a plecostomus thrives on pond scum.

To be fair, I’m not sure this short-term, unscientific experiment says anything about the hypertensive power of Helsinki’s finest, either. You can’t learn much from a sample size of one, especially when the “one” is a salt-crusted mischief monster fiending for self-destruction. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about self-destruction lately, in part because I spent the beginning of 2023 getting divorced—a delirious experience of unmaking my own future (or at the very least, the version of the future I’d banked on for the past 15 years). The ubiquity of divorce did not prepare me for its crude and singular intensity. Mostly, it did not prepare me for the months-long process of managing just about everyone’s emotions but my own. 

There were weeks when I felt bitterly lonely—abandoned by friends I thought I’d have for life, robbed even of the company of self-pity, because I knew I’d brought it on myself. And there were weeks in which the only thing that made me laugh was a sign outside of a White Castle that read “SHRIMP NIBBLERS ARE BACK.” Those were the weeks when I wondered whether I’d transposed risk and reward.

Evidence from this newsletter aside, I’ve never been a person with a lot of (emotionally) self-destructive tendencies. I’ve lived a relatively wholesome, straightforward, thoroughly Midwestern life in which I’ve largely done what’s expected of me. And I like that! I don’t have much patience for melodrama (despite my theatre degree) and the selfishness it often requires. If anything, I can be pragmatic to the point of coldness.  

I suppose the upside to doing something so out of character is that at least you know it’s not a habit or a vice.

Early in the split, my ex-husband said something that’s stayed with me: “Nothing gets between Liz Cook and having every experience she wants.” It was neither meant nor received kindly at the time, and I’m not sure it’s entirely true. (For example, I have never done cocaine on a jetski.)

But it’s true that I can be pig-headed about taking calculated risks. I do believe on some level that shaking things up every now and then—testing your limits a little, stumbling if you have to—can be good for you.

And there’s good reason not to code destruction as inherently negative. I work with economists for a living, which means I read a lot about “Schumpeterian creative destruction”—crudely, the idea that it’s necessary for inefficient businesses to die to make room for new and innovative firms. As with a lot of economic concepts, it’s true in the aggregate and callous in the particular.

Sure, drinking a traveler of salmiakki liqueur in an afternoon might not qualify as “creative destruction” (though it is, I would argue, a creative way to destroy one’s health). And I’m not going to pretend its virtuous. At best, it might be value-neutral. The trick, as with everything, is knowing where your boundaries are—and what it might take to make them move.

I used to teach composition to college freshmen, and I kept a running Word doc with my favorite lines from student papers. The morning after my divorce became final, one popped into my brain like a koan.  

"We need to have the comfortable sofa of normality torn and burned under our rump roasts."

It was a great line, from a terrible paper.

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I gave a talk and you can watch it online!

Way back in November, I spoke at an event series called Creative Mornings on criticism, the unkindness of naked boosterism, and my own struggle to balance “art” [raising my blood pressure as a bit] with a day job. I’m happy with how it came out! Would love for you to watch it here.

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Have you ever watched a man unmake a hot dog with such joyless efficiency? He’s dipping his bun into a paper cup of water! He’s squeezing it into a bolus with his fist! He’s working his hardest to experience nothing—the most nothing!—and to experience it faster than anyone else.

When people bang on about “empty calories,” they’re almost always talking about processed convenience food—soda, candy, chips. But there are so many ways to be empty, so many ways to feel full.

Food for me has always been about pleasure and curiosity—let’s just say “experience” and cap it there. Don’t misunderstand me: I, too, wish to eat 40 hot dogs. But I'd prefer to take mine leisurely, over the course of an afternoon. More importantly, I'd prefer to take mine with toppings. I have long fantasized about sampling every hot dog configuration in this famous infographic in one sitting, comparing them against one another and taking notes. (Never mind that I have lived in Kansas City for more than a decade and never once seen the purported "Kansas City" dog.)

The primary obstacle to that fantasy—aside from the obvious health and environmental concerns—is cargo room. I don’t have Joey Chestnut’s stamina.

The solution was obvious: What I needed was a small-time sausage, a miniature meat stick, a diminuitive dog. I needed a slider, a smokie—li’l.

A brief history of abbreviated dogs

Long before Oscar Mayer smoked his first li’l, there were “cocktail weenies,” the kind designed to be fished out with toothpicks from an ocean of glossy brown sauce. The weenie’s origins haven’t been well dogumented, but the first instance of “cocktail wiener” I could find in print was from 1934—a cursory ad in the Sioux City Journal that promised “something new in a meat.”

The “something new” traveled fast. By 1937, ads for cocktail wieners were showing up in papers across the country—including this one, from the Pasadena Post.

It took decades of study and innovation to birth the smoked ween. Ads for “little smokies” didn’t start appearing until around 1950, with Jones Dairy Farm, Oscar Mayer, and Stark & Wetzel all jockeying for miniature market share.

The name has changed a few times over the years, though the product has remained remarkably consistent. In 1984, Hillshire Farms started running ads for “Lit’l Smokies,” an attempt to differentiate the branding (and stake out a trademark).

I suppose it worked: Hillshire Farms’ “Lit’l Smokies” are still the easiest to find in Midwest grocery stores. But no one I know calls them that. The name never really took off, perhaps because it was impossible to pronounce without sounding like you were bullying Eliza Doolittle.

Instead, everyone just calls them “li’l.”

Introducing: Smoke Sheaths

Li’l smokies are easy to find in KC: Midwesterners never miss an opportunity to eat sweaty meat out of a Crockpot. But the smokies alone were not sufficient for my Tiny Hot Dog dreams. I needed a weenie holster—a smoke sheath—to match.2

On a whim, I reached out to Andrew Janjigian, a longtime baking instructor, recipe developer, and unrepentant breadhead who writes the excellent Substack newsletter Wordloaf. I originally asked Andrew for advice on smoke-sizing a standard hot-dog bun recipe. Instead of ignoring me, like a sane person, he offered to concoct the recipe himself—even after I confessed that I still own (and use) a bread machine.

Wordloaf

A thrice-weekly, IACP-nominated breaducational newsletter from Andrew Janjigian (https://linktr.ee/wordloaf) "Pedantic crap!"—A (former) reader

By Andrew Janjigian

The resulting recipe for Smoke Sheaths is linked at the bottom of this post. It’s a soft, fluffy, dollhouse bun enriched with milk and butter—a scaled-down version of Andrew’s shokupain de mie. It is also, critically, a New England-style bun, designed to be top-loaded rather than hinge-cut.

Here’s what Andrew told me about the style:

“I think the quality of the bun is more important than the style, but obviously the New England-style bun is superior to others. Leaving the long sides un-crusted makes them either soft and pliant, or (better yet) primed and ready for butter-griddling into crisp walls.”

Another bonus: New-England-style buns stand upright on a party tray instead of crumpling cowardly onto their hinged sides.

Do not lambaste me about the state of my sheet pan, and do not judge Andrew’s recipe by my toddling food styling. (I’m a writer, not a photographer. I’m trying to get better, but I’m not trying very hard.) Despite their pasty Hapsburg appearance, the buns were soft and buttery and absolutely delicious. I tore two of them apart with my bare hands and ate them steaming, dogless, like a lush.

But I also filled them. When Haterade turned two earlier this month, I threw a Tiny Hot Dog party in my living room. I bought condiments to cover as many hot dog styles as I could and tried one of each, plucking dog after dog from the tray with relish (and occasionally, relish).

It didn’t feel exactly the same as eating 40 different hot dogs. The l'il smokie brings its own eldritch flavor to the party.3 But it was close enough to be fun.

I’m sure some people would argue that this experiment isn’t all that different from Nathan’s hot dog eating contest—possibly, they’d argue it’s worse. The American view of gluttony seems more preoccupied with pleasure than consumption. Our national identity was partly forged by Puritans, and I’m not sure we’ve out-paddled our moralistic tendencies.

I’m not sure I have, either. Here I am, ranting about the joylessness of competitive eating, a hedonist clutching her pearls.

But hedonism has never felt like gluttony to me precisely because it’s never felt empty. There’s a difference between consuming and tasting, between a “body count” and falling in love. The difference isn’t volume—it’s attention.

A few years ago, I came into the kitchen and saw my husband contemplating a spoonful of whole grain mustard with rapturous attention. “People fought wars to taste these things,” he said to me, eyes red and wide. “And I get to eat them stoned, out of the fridge.”

Food is about so much more than pleasure, of course. But it is also about pleasure, and I’m tired of being told—implicitly, sometimes explicitly—that pleasure and humor and joy are less serious, less useful, less thoughtful responses to the world.

Getting stoned and tasting mustard is a prayer right up until the point where you call it one. The way to take joy seriously is to take it where it comes.

Wordloaf

Recipe: Smoke Sheaths

This formula is a variation on my shokupain de mie, scaled to make 12 mini hot dog buns in an 8x8-inch square cake pan, which I concocted for my friend Liz Cook, who plans to utilize it for an upcomi…

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4 years ago · 3 comments · Andrew Janjigian

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