this was delicious, but it took all day

or

this doesn’t even taste that good, and it took all day

Are either of these outcomes what we deserve with our time?

quality vs. technique

I think there is an inverse relationship between ingredient quality and cooking technique. As ingredient quality goes up, the technique required to make something good goes down. A peak-season tomato from a farmers market in August needs a knife, some salt, and maybe a tin of ventresca. That’s it. When I lived in Spain, that exact dish at Bar Desy was one of the most satisfying meals I’d eat during the summer. Three minutes of preparation. No technique. The ingredient did everything.

The corollary is just as true. As ingredient quality drops, the technique required to make something worth eating climbs. More acid correction. More fat to carry weak flavor. More heat to concentrate what isn’t there. More time masking off-notes that a better ingredient wouldn’t have. The cook’s job expands exactly as the ingredient’s contribution shrinks.

This holds at the home cook level, but at the professional level it gets more complicated. The best chefs in the world often have access to exceptional produce and still apply significant technique, but the relationship between the two is different. At Blue Hill or anywhere serious farm-to-table cooking is happening, technique serves the ingredient rather than substituting for it. Molecular gastronomy took the opposite route and pushed technique to almost entirely decouple it from ingredient quality itself. The swing back toward Blue Hill, toward Sweetgreen, toward produce-forward cooking is the market implicitly agreeing with the thesis: when the ingredient is genuinely good, getting out of the way is often the most compelling thing you can do. The home cook rarely gets to make that choice.

Our food system has spent decades optimizing for the wrong side of that curve. The priority has been shelf life, uniformity, and year-round availability, not flavor. The result is that most home cooks are working with ingredients that structurally require more technique to make edible, at the exact moment when fewer people have the time or interest to develop that technique. The Bar Desy salad is only replicable in August, at a farmers market, if you’re lucky with the variety. The rest of the year the tomato needs help, and most home cooks don’t have the tools to give it.

The outcomes are predictable. People get burnt out trying to make mediocre produce taste like something. They stop cooking and reach for highly processed food that has already done the flavor intervention upstream in a factory. Or they outsource the technique requirement entirely to a restaurant or a delivery app, where someone else absorbs the labor of making commodity ingredients edible. The food system created this problem and then built an entire industry on top of the gap it left open.

build your capsule wardrobe of cooking techniques

The exit ramp is less sexy than the TikTok content landscape suggests. People who cook well at home tend to make the same things so often that those things become second nature. They become fluent in the way their oven, pots, and pans work. They know when their knives need sharpening (and that that’s more valuable than the $100+ blade they bought at a knife shop)

A clear example for me was learning how to cook rice. I’ve cooked rice at least once a week for so many years that I’ve learned how different pots behave, what type of rice gives me the texture I want, and how to adapt from there. Once I mastered boring-ass white rice, I could add cooked vegetables to it, season it before it cooked, pre-fry the dried rice with spices and herbs and know how much more stock I needed to offset the water content. Each layer had to be built on the knowledge of how to make the simplest version first.

This is what a capsule wardrobe1 of cooking looks like in practice. A small rotation of staples, cooked repeatedly until they stop requiring conscious effort. Salmon, chicken thighs, rice, roasted root vegetables. Not mastered in the culinary school sense, mastered in the sense that you know how they behave and what to do when they don’t behave as expected.

Becoming a capsule home cook2 also means you practice on ordinary produce year-round and learn how to make it sing. So when you find a beautiful ripe heirloom tomato at the farmers market, you recognize the difference immediately and know what to do with it. You’re comfortable cooking Perdue chicken thighs low and slow, so when you buy duck thighs you’re not terrified of wasting the money. The ordinary builds the reference point, and that reference point is what lets you handle the extraordinary.

And when you do decide to pick up a cookbook (or a reel!) and make the Ottolenghi silken tofu caponata for your dinner party, it becomes a layering of skills you’re already comfortable with, applied to slightly new presentations and ingredients. The dish that looked intimidating from the outside is just a slightly different walk through the same park. That’s a different relationship to cooking than the one social media is selling. It’s slower to build and actually works.

If you’re not sure where to start, reach out. I’m thinking about turning this into a series: a practical look at the staples worth mastering, how to read when an ingredient is different from what you’re used to, and how to build from there. The capsule wardrobe is a small thing that compounds. It’s worth starting somewhere.

We tried acclimating to the elevation of the Peruvian Andes, and got on Diamox to help with the effects. The plan was always to go to Machu Picchu, and we chose the four day scenic route through the Salkantay Pass, rather than the Inka Trail. Our small team included Canadians and Americans that got along incredibly well, and led by the indomitable Fredy. He tasked us with thinking of our team name during our briefing meeting the night before. Vicious Vicuñas (a type of llama, and the name I threw out as competition) lost out to Fredy’s Mercury. He gave us a team chant that we all struggled to remember for the entirety of the hike: “I want to break free!”

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Recap

Total Miles: 13,087 mi

Miles Traveled: 3,801 mi

Current City: Salkantay Pass Trail, Peru

Current Elevation: 15,190ft (Denver is 5,280ft for reference)

4 Lessons from the hike…

1. Perú expects you to come unprepared:

Cusco has one of the highest densities of trekking and camping equipment in the world. If you ever come to hike down here, don’t plan to bring more than a few pairs of base layer clothes because you can rent backpacks, gloves, rain gear, winter jackets, headlamps, and more. Altogether you could easily rent all of this for less than $20 per day.

2. Herbs and spices are all around you, if you know what to look for like:

Chiqchipa (Tagetes minuta):

An herb with a strong smell, with a mix between mint, anis/tarragon, and citrus. It’s related to huacatay, which is used extensively throughout Peru and is a leaf with similar profile. We were told it’s use to flavor cuy (guinea pig) and is likely part of the Matacuy spirit we had talked about last time.

Muña (Minthostachys mollis)

If you don’t drink coca tea, there’s more than enough muña tea flowing for a nice digestive and diuretic effect. It has a strong eucalyptus and vegetal flavor, unlike many of the mints popular in North America. I guess I like Andes Mints more than the mint of the Andes.

All the others

Achupaya, a type of Bromelia related to pineapple that is used for drinks among other things; 1000’s of orchid varieties, pinko pinko, allaczapatilla, tumbos (loved these ‘banana passionfruit’), granadillas (another passionfruit-esque fruit, but sweeter), and so many other things that I couldn’t spell or find online outside of these days.

3. Elevation must be respected.

Everyone on our trip had some form of effects from altitude sickness. Fiona had it the worst in our group, with headaches, nausea, and more. Diamox only dampens the effects, but comes with tingly fingers and altered taste buds. The latter of which we noticed primarily through sparkling water literally tasting flatter and more bitter, even though it was the same brands we’ve always had in the US.

4. Tough efforts make fast friends.

The second and third days were each over a half marathon of walking, with thousands of feet of ascent and descent. Fredy made sure we saw one another as a team and that we all made it to the spaces safely and helped each other when we needed it. Long, breathless climbs turned to story-filled declines and flats that gave us time to learn more about each other’s homes, desires, and reasons for being on this difficult trek. Despite it being only four days, Fiona and I now feel we have a smattering of friends throughout parts of North America we may have not met otherwise.

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Gratitude…

The people made the trip for us and truthfully gave us such a high for the first leg of our honeymonth. The conversations we had, the attention to detail from our guide, the friendly children we met on our penultimate day of hiking, the waiters, the cooks, the horsemen, and all of the folks we didn’t get to meet along the way made it a time worth remembering. Our legs need a long break after the forty miles of hiking, and our hearts need the same amount of time to fully soak in the deep connection with humanity we felt during our time in the Peruvian Andes.

Our small cooking team, Eynar, Jackie and Rosalino made us a delicious cake to celebrate our honeymoon. Another team of hikers had used an appliance that shorted out the electricity and heat in our whole facility, so they managed to make this cake on the stove in the dark…it was one of the best experiences of our lives, but we’re glad to be in the front country again.

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We’ve been working in Cusco y’all. The grind doesn’t stop and neither do we. We rented our equipment for the hike through the Salkantay Pass from Señora Norma at Speedy Gonzalo. Cusco has so many hiking equipment rental stores, it’s not even funny and we are ready for the briefing tomorrow. It’s been cold, but that’s why we keep the coca flowing.

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Recap

Total Miles: 13,087 mi

Miles Traveled: 3,778 mi

Current Elevation: 11,221ft (Denver is 5,280ft for reference)

Current City: Cusco, Peru

Best thing I’ve consumed

After a walking tour, we rushed over to Oculto to have a nice candle-lit dinner. Fredy, our server, was amable and more than happy to discuss the cusqueño carta they had put together. He was a cook before becoming a server, and we could tell his affability would have been lost on the line in the back of house. We were interested in the different varieties of pisco sours and Fi got a delicious passionfruit one (maracuyá, not granadilla) and I went for the matacuy sour. Matacuy is a digestif made outside of Cusco, in Ollantaytambo, and is made of over 50 spices. It primarily tastes of anis, which is a popular flavor in the region and I’m always game for.

“Matacuy” is also a compound word meaning “kills guinea pig” and comes from a saying after eating the famous roast cattle, unique to Andean cuisine. After loosening the belt a few notches after a good meal, sipping on this delicious distillate, it would be common for the one serving to say “que mates el cuy” or “that you might kill the guinea pig.” It’s a play on words because you will likely have had some cuy and this helps you digest it quickly.

I didn’t really have much of an appetite for cuy, but Fredy did put me on to alpaca tenderloin. It’s a very lean animal and he told me from his days in the back of house that it was best when cooked tres-cuartos, or medium-well. Tender, meaty and almost like a mix of beef and pork with minimal fat. The cuy may have not been mata-ed, but that camelid1 certainly got hit with 50 herbs and spices.

We flew up to Cusco early in the morning so that we could get to our hotel before the work day started. I’ve never had the effects of altitude until coming here, and seeing it’s more than twice the Denver’s altitude, I totally get it. Cusco is cute and nestled beautifully in its own valley in the Andes. We met cute dogs along the roads and in our hotel (I named one Snowball, even though he’s a bit dirty) and tried to test our bodies against the impending hike to Machu Picchu.

Recap

Total Miles: 13,087 mi

Miles Traveled: 3,778 mi

Current Elevation: 11,221ft (Denver is 5,280ft for reference)

Current City: Cusco, Peru

staving off the altitude monster

Part of writing myrecent post about Coke’s attempt to escape its cocaine past is because I was interested in coca tea as an aid in altitude sickness. The leaf that made Pablo Escobar’s empire is completely legal in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay and Ecuador to drink as a tea. Its most famous alkaloid, cocaine, makes up about 0.8% of the dry leaf which normally extracts about 5mg of it into your tea. Enough to test positive in a urine test, but nothing physiologically noticeable.

The tea is legal because many communities, especially those living in the high altitude of the Andes Cordillera, claim that it helps with altitude sickness. While I love the the governments of the Western South American continent have not outlawed a plant that has been part of these communities, there has been no credible, double-blind studies showing the efficacy of this help. When compared to acetazolamide (Diamox, a prescription drug for altitude sickness), it is a classic placebo. But there is something beautifully powerful to the placebo effect, and if we could somehow make that a medical drug, we’d be in a better spot. Sitting in the cold mountain air to catch your breath with a warm beverage is always going to hit the spot and feel regenerative, but if it were coffee, it’d likely be the same feeling as coca tea.

That being said, I enjoy the taste of coca tea quite a bit, but understand the internet disagrees. It’s likely because it reminds me of yerba maté, the Argentine holly that may be responsible for Messi’s dominance, but it is quite earthy, vegetal with a smell of oversteeped green tea. It does seem to give me some vim and vigor, but I’ll let you know if it helps as we continue to ascend, but trust I’ll keep the Diamox closer.

Fiona and I embarked on our trip from Chicago to Lima to kick off Honeymonth! The city was covered in thick humid fog the night that we came in. So thick was the fog that we couldn’t tell if it was truly fine rain, Stephen King’s greatest novella or simply niebla. It reminded us of the fog that often covers San Francisco (which the twitter dubbed Karl for some reason) and felt dewy and fresh. The Mario Vargas Llosa books that we’ve been reading had made it sound like the city was quite rainy and when we arrived, it seemed to live up to that image we had in our minds.

As the sun rose, we found that Lima was pleasantly warm and upon further reading it is one of the driest capital cities in the world, surprisingly drier than Cairo, Egypt. What we had witnessed was the winter garúa, or a combination of fog, mist and a fine rain, which seems to provide enough to keep the Costa Verde…green. We are working this week, so we mainly hunkered down but we had a beautiful dinner at the Muelle de la Rosa Nautica, watching surfers and el sol drift under the clouds far off on the horizon. Pisco sours, scallops, corvina (sea bass) tiraditos (a Japanese-influenced ceviche) and rice dishes. We had a great sobremesa about our next steps in life and how much we are excited to support one another.

Recap

Total Miles: 13,087 mi

Miles Traveled: 4,133 mi

Current City: Cusco, Peru

Best thing I’ve consumed

The last few months, I have been on an absolute tear of Coke Zero. I haven’t had Coke Heavy for many years, but all of a sudden a new dog graced the cooler that I had to try. I always wanted to like Diet Coke, but the flavor was not for me. It wasn’t my Coke. My Coke always had HFSC and a red can and tasted the way it was supposed to in my mind’s eye, while Diet Coke missed the soul I was looking for. It’s clearly not the sweetener I learned because both Coke Zero’s and DC’s use aspartame (though CZ adds acesulfame potassium, referred to as Ace-K to round out the aspartame’s bitter aftertaste). I think there is logic to DC’s use of citric acid, to bring brightness, in place of its conjugate base potassium citrate, which works in the opposite direction.

Aaaaanyway, my eyes have been reopened to the world of soda, and one of my favorite’s has always been INKA KOLA (queue sick guitar rift).

Inka Kola came to the world in 1935 by a British immigrant to Lima, who used the prized hierbaluisa (lemon verbena) to create a soda that is truly unique. I have loved it since I first tried it over a decade ago at a pretty solid Peruvian spot near my hometown. It tasted like bubblegum and cream soda had a baby, and it cloying sweetness paired well with the plate of roast chicken, rice and french fries (why choose one carb?). As a younger guy, I didn’t care much about the 40g of sugar in a can, but I don’t operate in that world anymore. So when I saw Inka Kola Zero, I knew there was another food scientist out there doing God’s work.

Daily Gratitude

Today, I’m grateful that the Coca-Cola Company got their ass kicked in Peru by a little start-up called Inka Kola. So much so, that they acquired 50% of Inka Kola as a defensive strategy to be able to turn a profit in Peru since their own products could not outsell a local product tied to national identity. This joint venture gave Inka Kola more resources to churn out a zero-calorie version of their soda, which has made me almost weep tears of joy today.

About a month ago, Fiona and I got married and, boy, how quickly the time has seemed to pass. It’s difficult to believe that the activity that consumed so many waking hours lives solely in our memory. But fret not! We got to spend all this new found time on planning a honeymoon, affectionately dubbed a ‘honeymonth’ by our three-year-old niece.

Another friend’s wedding was already in the books (one of eight we have this year) outside of São Paulo at the end of May, and with both of us having remote jobs, we figured we could extend the front end of that to see more of South America and that blew up into a five week jaunt through Peru, Chile, Argentina and Brazil.

Recap

Total Miles: 13,087 mi

Miles Traveled: 3,778 mi

Current City: Lima, Peru

Best thing I’ve consumed

We arrived around 1AM with some delays in Miami and woke up late to go to a coffee shop in the Barranco neighborhood. It was a cute little spot with incredible coffee, homemade almond milk, and beautiful pastries. The staff was kind, willing to speak Spanish and hit us with some English when we least expected. I had my eye on the cruffin, but I had my eye on too many things.

After a pair of poached eggs on toast with a solid Geisha pourover, we were served something I haven’t seen before, but I have a feeling is going to be a new staple given my affinity for corn-based flavors: la cachapa peruana. A base of hominy, egg, milk, sugar and salt, fried in butter and stuffed with a fresh cheese, typically guayanés (like mozz) or queso llanero (a saltier variety). The mixture of sweet and savory hit every note and I have a feeling this is going to pair veryyy nicely with the other breakfasts I’ve got in my back pocket. I’ll have the polymorv-approved (™ - pending) recipe out when I get back to my regular kitchen.

Travel Tip

Hiking, working (yeah, still working 60% of this time, but c’est la vie), and attending a wedding put some stress on our “never check a bag” policy. I’d definitely recommend getting yourself a solid 40L backpack that can still technically be a carry-on with hip straps. I got packing cubes to keep things organized along the way for each of these activities and I’ll let you know how we hold out.

Yet, the birth of this blog was for me to document food history and science wormholes that I’ll spend the next two hours reading on, and today that was red velvet cake.

Presentation

First off, red and white is a pretty shocking color for something that isn’t full of berries. And unlike your standard chocolate cake, red velvet has cream cheese frosting. The king of frostings (fuck off buttercream, I need that lactic tang). Off the slice, it’s your typical tiered layering of cakes that claim to be handmade, while the only thing that hand did was turn on the production equipment.

Regardless of how you weigh the prominence of the material that touched your cake, it’s sharp. Hard lines, ivory matte sheen: this guy’s ready for the big leagues. It makes its way into cupcake molds at times and with a blueberry and strawberry to confuse all expectations. Line up snug on a July Fourth buffet laid out on a picnic table and people are impressed to see them parallel park next to the Costco cookie tray. Quick to be eaten, though leaving false impressions of a raspberry cream cheese dream.

This is where red velvet begins to lead off the trail for me because we eat with our eyes first, and if you ate an apple that tasted like a banana, you might not be disappointed, but you’d have questions. The history of red velvet, and its modern mutation, are interesting, though I don’t think you can get into that nuance after your second beer brat off the grill.

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Science

Natural, or non-alkalized, cocoa powder (NACP) is quite different from its Dutch brother. It is still raw from fermentation and, many times, you can buy it unroasted. With this lack of heat and acidic transformation, NACP is fruity, tangy and bitter in a vegetal sense. More importantly in the context of our cake, color compounds in cocoa, called anthocyanins, are undisturbed. See, alkalization by soaking the raw cocoa in a base (normally K2CO3)transforms these color compounds and chain them together into brown polymers. This becomes important in making that red color when you look at the history of red velvet.

The original cake calls for buttermilk and vinegar, where virtually no modern recipe will list these. The reason is that these two ingredients are quite acidic, and this shift in pH is doing the actual work. Anthocyanins are cation-based pigments, meaning their color is determined by their protonation state. In an acidic environment, the anthocyanin stays intact and holds its red hue. Push the pH up toward neutral or alkaline and the ring structure opens, the molecule destabilizes, and you land somewhere between purple and brown depending on how far you go.

So the original red velvet was red for a real chemical reason: natural cocoa with its anthocyanins intact, hit with enough acid from the buttermilk and vinegar to lock the pigment in its red form.

History

The modern version lost both of those things at once. Dutch process cocoa became the default pantry cocoa through the mid-20th century, which meant the anthocyanins were already gone before we even had a chance. And without the anthocyanins, the acid had nothing to stabilize, so the buttermilk and vinegar hit the road. Red 40 became the patch given our proclivity for turning petroleum into everything. The cake kept its name, its look, and its cream cheese frosting, and quietly lost the only thing that made the color make sense.

I don’t want to pick sides on the Adams Extract versus Waldorf Astoria origin story dispute, but both versions end up at the same place. The Waldorf claims their kitchen developed it in the 1930s, a guest loved it, asked for the recipe, got charged for it, and published it publicly out of spite. Adams Extract, a Texas flavoring company, printed the recipe on their red food coloring packaging in the 1940s as a straight marketing move. One story is about a recipe escaping a luxury hotel kitchen. The other is about a company handing home bakers a bottle of dye to fill a chemical void left behind when natural cocoa stopped being the default. Both are probably partially true, and neither changes what ended up in your grocery store.

At some point in the 20th century, red velvet stopped being a chemistry outcome and became an aesthetic category. The buttermilk, the vinegar, and the natural cocoa couldn’t outlast the eye-appeal. It’s one of the cleaner examples of a food that survived its own obsolescence by keeping the visuals intact, and we all suffer for it.

We spent months on a choreographed dance that went off without a hitch, ate Spanish food from Cafe Ba-ba-Reeba, then moved through the room trying to hold as many people as we could for as long as we could. A friend (shoutout Abi) made our cake, and she gave us options for flavor and frosting weeks before. She had alluded to her design and blew us away with a stained glass window pane design that mirrored the gardens we got married in. It was tasteful and tasty, and by the end of the night we had roughly three quarters of it left, having gotten sheet cakes for our party.

How do you store a singular event? Seventy-two hours of celebration that took eighteen months to plan and four years to arrive at. Time was warped throughout the process, where we always had more to do than there were hours in a day, yet our wedding day went by in a flash. We sat in bed until noon the next day, going through photos, trading stories, checking instagram for angles we hadn’t seen. The disposable cameras are still being developed. The comedown is real, yet we were both grateful for our presence throughout the whole day and will relish those memories for the rest of our lives.

The cake came home that afternoon after a few stops to see family. There is something unique about a piece of food that existed on the day you got married that makes you want to protect it carefully. Freezer burn is entirely preventable and entirely your responsibility, but boy what a responsibility that is.

the wrap

Unwrapped, place the cake in the freezer for two to three hours until the frosting is firm to the touch. Wrap tightly in three layers of plastic wrap, pressing each layer close. Follow with three layers of aluminum foil. Clear a dedicated space in your freezer where it won’t shift or get buried. Store for up to one year.

I’ll let you know how it tastes.

Nobody uses their broiler. This is a fact I am prepared to defend in any room. It sits there, at the top of your oven dial, fully functional, completely ignored, like a treadmill that came pre-installed in your apartment. You know it exists. You have made peace with never really using it. You once turned it on to melt cheese and it went fine and then you never spoke of it again.

Meanwhile, someone became a billionaire selling you a small convection oven and calling it an air fryer. You put it on your counter. You make chicken thighs in it. You tell people about it at dinner parties. This is the world we live in.

the pitch

Here is what I am proposing, and I am proposing it to anyone with a manufacturing contact and a tolerance for moderate risk: a countertop broiler. Not a toaster oven. Not another beige rectangle. Not a salamander, which is the professional kitchen version of this idea and is the size of a small car and costs four thousand dollars and would absolutely solve your problem if you were willing to knock out a wall to install it. Something thin, something that folds down from under your cabinet like it has somewhere to be, with a single heating element pointed directly at your food and a timer that shuts itself off before you destroy anything. A window so you can watch. A name that does not sound like a home improvement project.

Think the thing that lives above the stove in every serious restaurant kitchen, miniaturized, made beautiful, built from medical-grade materials it does not need, given a name that sounds like a verb, and sold at a price point that makes you feel like you are investing in yourself rather than your kitchen. A Breville designed by Apple. One button. Brushed aluminum. A founder note on the website about how they went looking for the perfect broiler and couldn’t find one so they had to build it themselves. It does one thing and it does it faster and better than anything else in your kitchen and it fits in a drawer when you are done.

the market

The broiler is already in your kitchen and you are afraid of it. That fear is the entire market. The air fryer became a cultural phenomenon by competing with a deep fryer that nobody owned. This product gets to compete with something you already have and already avoid, which is a much more honest value proposition and frankly a lower bar.

the names

I am giving this idea away. I want nothing except to see it exist and to be proven right about the broiler.

The following names are also free:

• Skorch

• Searify

• The Flame Tamer

• The Scorcher

• Broilboy

The margins are real. The counter space conversation is already happening in every kitchen in America. The only thing standing between you and a hundred million units is the word broil, which we have agreed to retire, and a form factor that does not look like something from a 1987 Sears catalog.

I’m willing and able to try first products, dm for my address when you announce the pre-launch.

a phantom competitor

This continues the discussion about skeuomorphs from last week. This idea centers around new technology masquerading as an old one for mass adoption. An air fryer is a phantom skeuomorph, because it’s poised to compete with the home deep fryer, which no one owns. It’s a convection oven dressed as an oil fryer for Halloween. It’s simply making a convection oven feel like an upgrade rather than a lateral move. The naming does all the work here because “air frying” positions this gadget against calories, mess, and the guilt of eating fried food. It’s not actually competing with your oven at all, but with one you are never going to have in your kitchen in the first place.

just a very small oven

All an air fryer is is a convection oven on a countertop. Essentially you’re forcing hot air circulation through a small cavity, which reduces cook time and improves browning. The technology for convection has been around since 1945 and has been standard in commercial kitchens for decades. Slightly changing the name is not the same as innovation. I’ll admit it is more ergonomic and spatially condensed, but it has not changed the thermodynamic qualities of something that came out when my grandparents were alive. The arguments I’ve heard center on faster preheat and closer proximity to the heating element, but the real difference is the name and its positioning against hot oil. That matters for specific use cases, but it’s a real estate decision more than an invention.

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the instant pot did it better, imho

Consider the launch of the Instant Pot, which preceded the air fryer craze. Stovetop pressure cookers were genuinely intimidating. In 1679, this was a mind-blowing piece of equipment, but a difficult one for the home cook. The hissing top, the manual pressure management, the psychological weight of something that could fail catastrophically if done wrong. The Instant Pot removed the friction that made the underlying technology inaccessible, in a space-saving package. It brought electric control, passive venting, and a sealed lid that communicates clearly what you should be doing. The result is a device with a genuinely expanded use case that I still don’t think many people use to its full capacity. For me, yogurt incubation and steaming alone justified the dedicated counter real estate in a way that feels genuinely earned. The skeuomorphic branding worked, and the engineering delivered something the original couldn’t: accessibility, and the convenience of cooking a healthy meal quickly that a Crock-Pot could only wish for.

how appliances actually spread

Air fryer market growth tells you something about how appliance adoption actually works. It spreads through social proof and gifting. “Healthier frying” is easier to sell than “faster convection cooking,” even if the second description is more accurate. Compared to the versatility of the Instant Pot, which can do many things beyond pressure cooking, the air fryer is a one-trick pony. And your boy doesn’t have enough counter space in his West Town apartment.

losing ground slowly

I continue to fight the good fight on behalf of convection ovens everywhere. I’m not moved by what the kitchen engineering gods have brought down from the mount. At the same time, I realize I’m losing ground, as I’m not the only person who lives in my apartment, and there’s a real possibility that one of these will be in my kitchen in short order. My point isn’t simply to resist the air fryer, but to understand what I’m actually buying and whether the costume that marketing has placed over this popular appliance matches what’s underneath.

Food works the same way. When you’re designing a flavor system for a completely new product, you’re not targeting the thing in the abstract. You’re targeting what people already expect the thing to taste like. The folder doesn’t just have to look right. It has to perform like the one people already have on their desk.

That distinction, between the idealized version of a food and the version people actually carry in their heads, is one of the most consequential constraints in product development. Nobody learned it more than the alternative protein world.

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The Wrong Folder

When Impossible Foods launched about a decade ago, the economics of plant-based meat were brutal. Building a genetically modified yeast capable of producing soy leghemoglobin2 at scale costs serious money. The only way to make that pencil out was to price against premium beef, specifically grass-fed. This meant a premium flavor target, a premium bleeding-burger experience, and a premium price point to match.

The logic made sense on paper. Grass-fed beef carries cultural weight. It signals better farming, cleaner inputs, a more considered relationship with the animal. If you’re asking someone to pay a premium for a plant-based patty, you want them to feel like they’re trading up, not across.

The sensory reality didn’t follow. Most Americans eat corn-fed, commodity 80/20 ground beef. That is the reference point. That is the folder already open on the desktop. Grass-fed beef reads differently to a palate trained on feedlot corn, leaner, sometimes gamier, occasionally carrying what trained tasters call “off-notes” and what most people would just call wrong. When early Impossible prototypes were designed to taste like grass-fed beef and put into sensory studies against conventional beef, they didn’t consistently win.

So the R&D team recalibrated. They moved the target from the aspirational benchmark to the actual one. They stopped designing for the consumer people imagined themselves to be and started designing for the consumer standing in front of the refrigerator case at 6pm on a Tuesday. That pivot, unglamorous and invisible to most people who ate the burger, was where the product started working.

Same Problem, Different Kitchen

I saw this from the inside when I was at Simulate. We were building a chicken alternative, which meant the first question in the room wasn’t “how do we make it taste like chicken”, it was “which chicken?”

Rotisserie chicken is not the same product as fried chicken. Chicken soup pulls entirely different compounds forward than a poached breast. Each preparation builds a different aromatic signature, hits different Maillard3 thresholds, lands differently in the mouth. They all taste like chicken the way all folders look like folders, but the basecode underneath is distinct.

I brought in The Chicken Issue of Lucky Peach at one point, an entire magazine dedicated to one ingredient, including a piece on the flavor biodiversity that exists across breeds. Chickens raised slowly on varied diets produce meat that tastes nothing like what you find in a standard grocery case. Most Americans will never eat any of them. What we eat is the Cornish cross, the broiler, optimized over decades for rapid growth and maximum yield. Familiar, mild, and almost totally without edges.

That’s what “it tastes like chicken” actually means. Not that the flavor is simple, but that it’s so universally internalized it functions as a cultural data point rather than a description. Everyone knows exactly what you mean. That shared expectation is the target. It’s also the folder you have to build.

I spent a lot of time trying to understand what that folder actually contained. I made reaction flavors in a pressure cooker, sealing amino acids and reducing sugars together under heat and pressure to drive Maillard reactions and capture what came off. I filled ampules with the results, each one a slightly different variable, temperature, ratio, time, and spent hours smelling the differences. I also tried to distill chicken itself, the way Ben Reade documented at the Nordic Food Lab: a pressure cooker, homebrew tubing coiled in ice water, vapor condensing and dripping out the end as a liquid that looks completely like water. Transparent, odorless to look at. Then you smell it and it’s overwhelming, pure chicken aroma in a few drops. The top notes are all there and nothing else.

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That’s the difficulty. What you collect in that distillate is real, recognizable, and almost impossible to stabilize. Those volatile aromatic compounds are exactly what makes chicken smell like chicken the moment it hits a hot pan, and they’re also the first thing to evaporate, degrade, and disappear when a product sits on a shelf or gets frozen and reheated. But the distillate was never going to go into a vegan chicken nugget. What it gave us was a map: here is what you are actually chasing, here is how volatile it is, here is how quickly it disappears under the conditions of manufacturing, freezing, and reheating at scale. That understanding was the starting point for the work we did with external flavor houses, building a system that could survive the supply chain and still land in the right place in someone’s memory when they bit into it.

Impossible’s R&D team figured this out through formal sensory studies. We figured it out in a conference room with a food magazine and a pressure cooker in the test kitchen.

Whose Folder Are You Building?

This is where the “Developer’s Dilemma” gets uncomfortable. The question in the R&D war room is never purely technical. It’s always, underneath everything, about who you’re designing for.

There are two consumers in the room. The first is the person your marketing team wants to reach: someone who cares about sourcing, reads labels, who would choose grass-fed or free-range or heritage breed if cost and availability allowed. The second is the person who will actually buy the product repeatedly: someone whose palate was formed by commodity inputs, who has a strong and largely unconscious model of what this food is supposed to taste like, and who will notice immediately when something is off, even if they can’t say why.

You cannot build a functioning brand for the first consumer alone. The math doesn’t work and the repeat purchase rate won’t hold. But building entirely for the second consumer means losing the story that got people to try the product in the first place.

The decline of plant-based meat has been written about extensively, with diagnoses ranging from price to nutrition to texture. But underneath most of those explanations is a skeuomorphism problem. The products were positioned for a consumer with aspirational values and a familiar reference point. They assumed that someone who cared about the environment would be willing to update their sensory expectations, that the folder could look a little different and people would still know what to do with it. Many didn’t. Omnivores weren’t going to trade texture and nutrition for a burger that almost tasted like a burger. And committed vegans, it turned out, were never that interested in verisimilitude to begin with. Go figure.

So when you pick something new off the shelf, it’s worth asking: whose palate was this designed for? Not who the marketing is talking to, but whose actual sensory memory was the development team trying to hit.

Skeuomorphism in food is not about aesthetics. It’s about market access. The folder has to look like a folder, yes. But it also has to open the right way, hold the right things, and feel like something you already know how to use. Getting it right means knowing, precisely, which folder people already have open.

Fashion projects how society wants to see itself. It is belonging: dressing similarly to your peers or people you admire. It reflects status: brand, cut, cleanliness, and awareness of what is trending. Along with that can come the subtle signaling of financial status. Fashion also projects values. If you care about sustainability, you may choose one brand. If you care about fitness, you may opt for breathable technical fabrics. Clothing can be functional, symbolic, and a way to express yourself without ever speaking.

Interestingly, food functions much the same way.

Food fashion moves slower than clothing fashion because it is bound by biology, regulation, and infrastructure. A hemline can change in a season. Reformulating a national snack brand takes years of development and waiting for supply chain efficiencies. Clothing doesn’t need FDA claims. Food does. Clothing doesn’t require agricultural inputs locked in multi-year contracts. Food does. Fashion in apparel resets every quarter. Fashion in food compounds through supply chains, retail resets, and capital cycles.

We used to see food primarily as a mode of celebration and community. That still exists (we still celebrate Thanksgiving, for example) but in our day-to-day lives the emphasis has shifted toward nutrition. We hear stories of Babe Ruth consuming incredible amounts of steak, or athletes learning about electrolytes and sugar during competition. Today, that has evolved into tracking precise amounts of protein. We are saturated with optimization rather than communal eating.

From Celebration → Nutrition → Optimization

Previous generations saw food as celebration, ritual, and gathering — whether at a wake or a “be home by dinner” curfew. We read M.F.K. Fisher describing entire days devoted to preparing simple meals for friends. She wasn’t calculating protein macros. She cooked to fill hearts socially and bellies intentionally.

Only fifty years later, gathering around food has increasingly turned into personal hyper-optimization. Targeting macros, hitting protein goals informed by emerging science, and discussing longevity have become embedded in eating. The sociological aspects of food have thinned, ritualized mostly in secular holidays like the aforementioned Turkey Day. Convenience and nutrition now dominate. What you eat is viewed through the values of discipline, control, and health literacy. Rarely do we layer communal meaning onto CPG wellness foods.

Food Has Always Followed Fashion Cycles

Protein has clearly had its day in the sun, as numerous Substack essays and traditional media articles have proclaimed. Initially, niche CPG brands began adding protein to everything. Magic Spoon was genuinely innovative in the cold cereal aisle. Then protein became unavoidable. More numbers were plastered on packaging. Influencers added whey to pasta sauce. The market ballooned with bars, shakes, and fortified snacks offering convenience and nutrition.

Coca-Cola purchased a majority stake of Fairlife In 2020, Coca Cola acquired the remaining 57.5% of Fairlife that it didn’t own, paying $979 million and valuing the brand at $1.7B. What started as a joint venture in 2012 became a behemoth very quickly. An overnight success, eight years in the making.

Similarly, as consumers shifted away from sugary sodas and toward protein-enhanced beverages. Diet soda no longer met the moment. Large players entered later, and we now find ourselves in the late-majority adoption phase. Protein appears in legacy snack brands that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago. That signals maturity. Some versions will likely remain, while the aesthetic excess fades. It is fascinating how quickly protein moved from subculture to default expectation.

This mirrors the saturated fat cycle of the 1980s. Studies suggested links to cardiovascular disease, and the food system reformulated en masse. Olestra emerged as a fat substitute. Margarine became the default table fat. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter thrived. Then came backlash. Today, we see renewed interest in saturated fats, with beef tallow having its own moment.

The backlash cycle has begun with protein as well. Ultra-processed plant-based protein products have faced skepticism. Meanwhile, the pendulum swing toward “whole food protein” often relies on consumers not looking too closely at beef protein isolate, which is effectively a second-wave collagen product wrapped in neo-pastoral packaging.

Fiber: The Next Climbing Trend

Fiber is now in the early adoption phase. Innovation initially concentrated in fiber sodas using fructooligosaccharides (FOS)1 and other soluble fibers, paired with alternative sweeteners. Now that innovation is spilling into snack foods, chocolate, and beyond. Incumbents are beginning to move. Pepsi’s acquisition of Poppi, much like Coke’s investment in Fairlife, shows more than aesthetic appeal. It suggests fiber aligns with modern health literacy.

Fiber will likely climb the adoption curve rapidly. At the same time, I see fiber fanning into distinct subcultures over the next two to five years.

The Whole-Food Purists

This group will oppose isolates like those in Metamucil or soda-style FOS additions from sunchokes. They will prefer eating the whole sunchoke (damn, I love sunchokes). This mirrors seed oil scrutiny less about processing mechanics and more about source. These consumers will emphasize oats, beans, lentils, mesquite, and traditional vegetables.

The Influencer-Macro Majority

This will likely be the largest group. They will not scrutinize fiber source. They will target a number suggested by a podcaster or Instagram influencer. Convenience, taste, and cost will dominate decision-making. Expect green-powder-style fiber blends with increasingly polished claims.

The Bleeding-Edge Optimizers

This group will treat fiber like performance nutrition. They will balance soluble and insoluble types. They will care about agricultural sourcing and microbiome specificity. As probiotic science advances, targeted fiber protocols could emerge something surely already explored in elite athletic and military environments.

Every fashion develops internal sophistication. Some people enjoy Keurig coffee; others source specific lots of geisha beans for home espresso. Both claim to like coffee. The same fragmentation will happen with fiber.

So if food is fashion, how do we choose what to wear?

Fashion is neither inherently good nor bad. It accelerates conversation and adoption among those willing and able to pay. It also amplifies noise, making signals harder to detect.

When food conversations repeat with increasing intensity, we should pause and investigate before adopting them. For me, that means asking:

• Is it actually healthy?

• Does it taste good?

• Is it sustainable?

• Do I genuinely like it?

• Am I choosing it, or inheriting it from someone influential in my media feed?

In fiber’s case, I hope it sticks. Colon cancer rates among people under fifty have risen by 1.1-2% yearly since the year Benefiber came out2, and most Americans fail to meet recommended fiber intake levels3. I’m excited about fortified products that help fill gaps when I can’t access fruits and vegetables. There are simply times when I don’t have the time to cook, and I still want to support my long-term health.

Food fashions are rarely just about nutrients. They are about what we fear, what we admire, and what we believe will signal competence in our time. They are not accidents. They emerge from science, capital, media, identity and more simultaneously. The question isn’t whether they exist. It’s whether we understand what they’re signaling about society and what they’re leaving in the scrapbin.

It works because you are in Spain. You are standing at a bar mid-morning, the street bustling, ceramic cups clinking against saucers, the air flowing freely through the open door. The espresso arrives quickly and cheaply. No one is narrating flavor notes. The charred beans become part of the rhythm of the place. Spanish coffee bar culture is great, but focuses on milk and foam combinations: un nube, una sombre, un cortado . That gap between poor beans and a great hang is the difference between a dish, a cuisine, and gastronomy.

A dish is the smallest unit. A cup of coffee, a warm tortilla or a bowl of gumbo. It is bounded and specific. You can isolate it, reproduce it, judge it. It can succeed or fail on technique of the cook alone.

Cuisine is the patterned set of dishes and techniques that belong together over time. It is a repertoire shaped by geography, repetition, and shared expectation. It’s almost a language of how to assemble ingredients from your region. Mexican cuisine uses nixtamalized corn and the comal. Cajun cuisine includes roux and crawfish and cast iron. Danish cuisine includes preservation, rye, cold-water fish, and bitter spirits. Cuisine is an organized memory that gets transmitted through generations and across borders.

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You can see cuisine at work when dishes migrate. Pizza becomes a platform for Mediterranean pitza: basically an open faced kebab. A Jordanian flavor logic given an Italian form. The dish is recognizable, so the techniques for pizza and kebab both shift. Both cuisines refracts slightly differently than had before.

Gastronomy sits above that level. It is how people eat within their constraints. Not just what is cooked, but when it is eaten, how often, by whom, and under what pressures.

It includes whether tortillas are made daily because corn is local and labor is structured around that cadence. It includes whether coffee is taken standing at a bar or carried in a paper cup through traffic. Gastronomy binds ecology, labor patterns, infrastructure, climate, and pleasure into a coherent pattern that makes certain cuisines durable and others fleeting.

This is why I think that while nutrition science is important, gastronomy is greater.

Nutrition science can tell you about caffeine levels, lipid oxidation in dark roasts, the amino acid profile of nixtamalized corn. It can quantify and optimize. Gastronomy explains why the burnt espresso is still satisfying and why daily tortilla-making persists even when industrial bread is cheaper. It accounts for meaning and constraint at the same time.

Food endures when it fits how people already live. A dish can be flawless and still feel misplaced if it does not align with daily rhythms and shared habits. When it does, it stops being novel and starts being normal.

Some dishes taste good once. Others taste good enough to define an entire culture. Gastronomy decides which is which.

We celebrated Ash Wednesday growing up, and I know the quiet shuffle forward in the line between pews. The crisp, dry press of an ash-loaded thumb against the forehead. Lent always felt serious to me in a way that other seasons did not. More than any other time of the year, it asked you to publicly declare your faith. The Lenten season asked you to show these ashes at school or work and to give up something for forty days. What strikes me, seeing it share the calendar with Ramadan, is how deeply food anchors both traditions.

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In Catholicism, fasting and abstinence shape the weeks leading to Easter. You feel it in small domestic ways. The absence of meat on a Friday, the deliberation and negotiation over what counts as a real sacrifice with my parents, the parish Friday fish fry that turns restraint into gathering. Hunger, even mild hunger, becomes a reminder that desire is being kept at bay for something greater.

Ramadan orders the day around food in an even more pronounced way. The fast stretches from dawn to sunset, so the evening meal carries more weight. Your body feels the absence of food differently, and breaking the fast with your community at night must be a profound relief. There is something powerful about communal fasting that feels absent in today’s secular versions. The act of eating is better in a group, but the lack of eating may be as well. Sharing the suffering with a group of people is easier, knowing that it is worth it for eternity.

Fasting today often becomes an optimization exercise, a way of trying to live as long as possible in this lifetime rather than preparing ourselves for the next one. There are apps for fasting, continuous glucose monitors to ensure your insulin response is kept in check, and countless productivity podcasts touting its benefits. I think there is genuine science to support the healthfulness of fasting, but aside from those benefits, it can become a solitary resistance to the food system we live in.

We live in a moment where food is constant. Snacks in the car. Unlimited coffee refills. Late-night delivery. The idea that billions of people would voluntarily narrow their eating on the same day, for reasons that have nothing to do with productivity or aesthetics, feels almost subversive. It reminds me that eating has always been moral, communal, and symbolic long before it was optimized.

I do not need to collapse the differences between these traditions to notice the beauty of their overlap. It is enough to say that on this Wednesday, restraint becomes communal in two vast, distinct ways. Food is central to belief, regardless of the abstraction doctrine provides. Scripture reflects that centrality in many ways. There are over 200 references to eating in the Qur’an and well over 1,000 in the Bible. Food is to be shared and feasted upon with loved ones, and in the holiest of times, it is set aside to prepare the body for something greater.

On any given Wednesday, the world would see no difference in how to approach breakfast. But tomorrow, over a quarter of the globe will let faith choose how, when, and with whom the fast breaks.

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I was always a tad embarrassed how drawn I was to the self-help section at Barnes & Noble as a child. Looking at all the covers of pop psychology books left me dreaming at checkout, of how I could be better. Whatever that amorphous term ‘better’ meant to me at the time (and now, frankly). What drew me in wasn’t a grand plan to reorganize my life and zenmaxx in the world around me, but that I felt like part of a community. There was a universal desire to understand life, and I knew other folks would be buying this book to become ‘better’ too. And I don’t mean specifically becoming ‘better at’ cooking necessarily. To me, ‘better’ meant renovating how I approach the world.

Sports were a huge aspect of my life when I learned about self-help, so naturally ‘better’ meant ‘athletically’. There were books on a famous athlete’s mindset, but nutrition science wasn’t as accessible in our tiny town. It was a different time. In 2009, there weren’t nutrition or supplement brands like there are today, nor were there social influencers breaking down scientific studies (real, fake, or otherwise). There were books on the South Beach Diet, the battered Atkins approach, and one that scared me for some reason: Jenny Craig. If I wanted to look up studies, I still basically had to go to a library and pull them out. Damn, I never wanted to scratch out those last ten words.

What I’m getting at is that when we were doing long football practices and had to bike a few miles home after early morning workouts, we were told to drink quarts of chocolate milk for the protein and sugar. Essentially, my coach prescribed this as the way to get enough calories for two-a-day practices, sourced from the Citgo down the road. One hand on the bike. Another on a quart of ice-cold chocolate milk. My buddy, my little brothers, and I would ride home, trying to balance on the white line along the shoulder of the road and making milk mustaches cool.

There was a kinship there. Working out together, or at least in the same room, and then eating (...er, drinking?) something together, unaware we were making a memory.

I think this kinship is what many people were seeking as we got older. We outgrew the books on the shelves of B&N. People slowly replaced time spent thumbing through a book with a podcast on a morning commute, making use out of “wasted” time. Podcasts were direct access to people on the front lines of ‘better’. We got to hear experts talk about their research and the experience they could share with us mere mortals. What could possibly be better?

Andrew Huberman came into my orbit through the Tim Ferriss podcast, and was fully vetted by my younger brother telling me he listened fairly often. I found kinship again in knowing there were hundreds of thousands of other people listening too, all interested in getting ‘better’. There were real things I took away from his podcasts that I still incorporate into my life, whether because of the placebo effect or the habit that came with it. I gave many chances to his two-hour-long sermons before deciding that I respected his long-form discussions, but IG Reels were easier for me to digest his wisdom.

In the middle of that Huberman phase, Peter Attia was interviewed. He was on Tim Ferriss as well, so I trusted him to a degree. Though, I never listened to The Drive much because I couldn’t latch onto him. Maybe it was because he seemed to parrot Huberman, though I’m sure they shared studies among themselves and could converge the same recommendations from it. But also couldn’t do HuberDaddy’s pods and another guy’s similar takes. I was skeptical of his medical to consulting transition but I agreed with his general goal of lengthening healthspan rather than lifespan.

Despite my lack of interest, he cultivated a massive kinship: 1.6 million followers on Instagram, over half a million on X. Loads of folks that had more than a passive interest in him, and trusted the science he discussed. Words don’t fall on deaf ears at that scale of a community. If even five percent of your audience acts on what you say, that becomes football stadiums worth of people buying the latest supplement. This hard-fought-for trust turns into an asset with a very real price tag. He’s neither the first nor the last example of this, but incentives can outstrip decency.

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During Pandemic Times, I read For God, Country and Coca-Cola peer inside the world where Coca-Cola first made sense: patent medicines, traveling salesmen, pharmacists who blurred the line between relief and refreshment because the line barely existed. Dr. John S. Pemberton reads less like a visionary in that context and more like a man working inside the logic of his time. Food was survival or a tonic. Were you buying medicine or mental reassurance? If you wanted legitimacy, you found it from the pharmacy, because that was where trust lived.

The chapters on World War II feel familiar if you’ve ever been in a food company (or any company) under raw material constraint. Sugar rationing, distribution bottlenecks, bottling plants following troops across oceans for a taste of FREEDOM. Coca-Cola endured, and through doing so, it aligned itself perfectly with the machinery of the state. That story has been told well and often. Scale, after all, rarely happens by accident. What stopped me short was not a grand narrative beat but a quieter fact: Coca-Cola still imports coca leaves.

Not historically. Not symbolically. Literally still today.

Fi and I are heading to Peru soon (send recs), and that detail lodged itself in my mind more firmly than it probably would have otherwise. I have family members who’ve struggled with altitude sickness when arriving in Colorado from the Midwest. We talked about coca tea since my brother lived in Quito, so it comes up in those conversations the way it does for anyone who’s spent time in the Andes: casually, practically, without reverence. It’s a leaf in hot water that locals swear by for altitude sickness (even if it’s not proven to work). Not much to it.

For a moment, I wondered whether I could bring some back. Thankfully, I checked first. (read about my issues with peanut butter)

You can’t import coca leaves. You can’t import coca tea. You can’t import extracts, powders, or tinctures. Anything containing its compound of concern, cocaine, in any amount is prohibited. The only exception is a narrow one: a single, licensed industrial pipeline that imports coca leaves for the express purpose of removing the compound that makes everyone nervous. Outside that aperture, the leaf ain’t coming in.

Somehow a big song in my youth…I was a weird middle-schooler.

This isn’t an accident or a moral judgment. It’s the shape of regulation doing what it was designed to do. U.S. food and drug law doesn’t optimize for cultural context or *gasp* everyday use (good thing caffeine got through). It optimizes for worst-case outcomes at scale. Once a plant contains a compound that can be isolated, concentrated, and abused, the system stops caring about how that plant is actually used in the world. The claim isn’t that coca tea is dangerous. The claim is that cocaine has a significantly high potential for abuse, which, like, fair enough.

That’s why coca leaves are illegal in a suitcase but legal inside a tightly controlled factory. Not because one is safer in any intuitive sense, but because one is legible to the regulatory system. Stepan Company is the only company permitted to import and process coca leaves in the United States. At its facility, the leaves are processed into two regulated outputs. The first is a decocainized coca leaf extract, purchased by The Coca-Cola Company for use as a flavoring.

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The second is a purified cocaine isolate, which is sold into the pharmaceutical supply chain and used as a Schedule II drug, primarily as a topical anesthetic and vasoconstrictor in nasal and ophthalmic procedures. The plant is acceptable only when every fraction is accounted for, assigned a buyer, and tracked through an approved use. Control matters more than intent, and predictability matters more than tradition. This is why Coca-Cola never fully exited its pharmaceutical past: the regulatory framework did not evolve away from that arrangement, it stabilized around it. A single importer, processor, flavor customer, and medical outlet minimizes ambiguity and satisfies enforcement logic.

Once you start looking for it, this pattern shows up everywhere in modern food. Our grocery stores still answer to drug law, trade law, and enforcement logic as much as they do to agriculture or cuisine. The FDA didn’t so much replace those systems as layer itself on top of them, inheriting their anxieties and constraints. Ingredients persist because they were early enough, comprehendible for the time they entered this system, or powerful enough to survive regulatory crystallization.

This is where self-affirmed GRAS gets interesting. In theory, it’s an openness valve, a way to introduce new ingredients without waiting for years of formal review. In practice, it’s usable only by those who can afford the legal scaffolding, the toxicology studies, and the reputational risk. The current scrutiny from HHS exposes the underlying tension that never really goes away: do we want safety through permission, or safety through evidence and iteration? Both models reduce harm. They just reduce different kinds.

Europe answers that question more conservatively. Novel foods approvals are slower and narrower. There are fewer surprises, fewer failures, and fewer uncomfortable debates. There are also fewer chances to encounter something genuinely unfamiliar. For every person that sees a bug in this system, another sees a feature.

We regulate food to protect public health, ecosystems, and trust. We also decide, quietly and permanently, which experiments never get run, which traditions remain geographically trapped, and which flavors never get the chance to mean anything to anyone else. Coca leaves aren’t interesting because of cocaine. They’re interesting because they show how narrow the channel between “allowed” and “forbidden” really is.

When we regulate food, we don’t just reduce risk. We set the limits of curiosity. And once those limits harden, most of us stop noticing what we’re no longer able to try, hoping to break off this shell through travel and experiencing what other food systems find banal.

This dream always stuck with me. But I also loved my studies and had planned to be a doctor after those four years. The dream morphed alongside a desire to learn Spanish. Practicality tends to win over romanticism, and, given there are many more Hispanophones in the U.S., I saw German slip from the top spot.

I hadn’t fully appreciated that this great adventure to study abroad in Spain was actually a dormant seed finally watered after a long, cold Midwestern winter. This germination had fully set roots by the time I moved back, but I had no idea how I would even begin to consider medical school while carving out a life in Granada. These two lives felt diametrically opposed. Kids my age had fine-tuned their whole lives to go to med school. I had never shadowed anyone and was anxious about that lack of experience, and I wasn’t motivated to change that, deliberately kicking that can down the road till I found my dead end. I had done my research in laboratories on compounds I had little hope of scaling into a larger medical treatment (as if they’d give a sophomore that). As I failed on yet another Robinson annulation on the bench, I wondered if this was for me, and I was afraid to admit that a white coat was less appealing than chef’s whites. I was invested in learning how to bring part of Spain back with me, and cooking was the seed that flourished.

I distinctly remember my host mom gifting me a maybe four-ounce jar of peanut butter upon arriving at their home for the first time. Their family was accustomed to the often granola-minded K College student and had extended an olive branch, saying, “We know that this is important to you because over the years, this has been the only thing keeping students like you attached to us.” I could not have asked for a better host family experience. My host father loved teaching me expressions and explaining the meaning behind them. With a profound interest in etymology and a love of phrases myself, he showed me the encapsulated shreds of the underpinnings that made up Spanish identity over the years. He loved showing me fruit from around Spain, things I’d never had in the U.S., and which, looking back, were likely expensive and difficult to acquire in rural western Spain. Cherimoyas were my favorite.

My host siblings were always welcoming and still feel like long-lost cousins. My host mother was an incredible cook, and I still dream of her cocido cacereño. She was so patient with my toddler-level language skills. Never getting frustrated, always finding the humor in my bumbling twenty-year-old mind. She explained to me over time that students didn’t always like her cooking and would rely on peanut butter for tough nights. I could never understand that as she was an incredible scratch cook.

But her peanut butter was no Jif, the product I had grown up eating. It was “natural,” and I was artificial. My hydrogenated heart was made to withstand time and breakdown, never falling out of emulsion, sweet and salty, but a stranger in a foreign land. Natural peanut butter was never natural to my palate (that changed, but this isn’t that story), falling into two separate worlds of solids and lipids, something I didn’t have the mental or physical interest in combining.

By the time I had graduated, the sapling, nourished on memories of Spain and food, had poked its head out of the soil. The following two years of reading and cooking in Kalamazoo developed into such a tangle of foliage, it shaded out my med school plans and I dove head first into gastronomic grad school in San Sebastián.

Peanut butter was still hard to come by in those days, so when I came back to the U.S. for the holidays, I asked my mom to buy me Jif from Sam’s Club. Luckily, it fit in my backpack to bring back to the EU. I could finally show my United Nations of flatmates the peanut butter I had lamented was non-existent in Spain.

Returning home started off on the wrong foot as soon as I reached the airline’s front desk.

“Can I see your passport?”

My pockets emptied immediately, not even a coffee shop punch card in sight. My wallet and passport had fallen out in my parents’ car, into my oldest nemesis: the space between the console and my seat. Hands too thick to get a grip and fingers too weak to apply the pressure required to mechanical-claw it onto my lap. Thankfully, my parents found it and had barely left the terminal in Detroit before swinging back through to get it to me, safe and sound. Bags: checked.

As I made it through the millimeter scanner, my eyes rolled when I saw my backpack pulled aside. I was pretty used to this sort of affair. He asked about pointy objects and the like, and I told him to get after it. Arriving at the bottom of the bag, he said, “Aha, well this is the issue.”

“What? It’s just peanut butter. It’s not a liquid,” I stated, puzzled.

“You can’t have pastes either. If you want to grab your checked baggage, we can pack them. Otherwise, we need to confiscate them.”

I told him the jars were his, with a tone that said, “go fuck yourself.” I always used to imagine him and all the TSA agents in the break room eating my peanut butter, celebrating my ignorance. I now choose to believe that he kept it because he was a single father, benefiting from my stupidity by giving his nine kids sandwiches for a week.

Peanut butter became this shred of Americanness that felt approachable to others. It didn’t inherently carry nostalgia, but it was comfortable. A safe refuge for a hungry student when only bread or an apple was present (or just a clean-ish spoon, honestly). During the years I found myself abroad, it also tied me to home: to my time at my aunt’s house playing with my cousin, to high school lunches my dad dutifully packed each morning. It was a touchstone of America for me that wasn’t the blue-boxed mac and cheese that I deplored, or a hamburger and french fries that felt like an easy trope.

I was still babbling in the language of food, and when everything was excitingly foreign, peanut butter made sense. The comfort we derive from food, and the identity we develop alongside it, stays with us longer than we expect. We seek meaning and community through the textures, flavors, and experiences we know, and that will always feel like home.

Ayran is a salted yogurt drink, diluted with water and fermented before it ever reaches the bottle. It’s sharp enough to wake you up and steady enough to drink without thinking. It looks like a fermented product and tastes like one, tangy and alive, but it’s thin, savory, and stable in a way that suggests most of the biology has already been settled. It isn’t always easy to come by, though in my part of Chicago it’s decently available, to the point that I can walk around the corner for a mint-flavored one. Having it around eventually produced the question that tends to surface when something becomes familiar: could I make this myself?

That question turns out to be less about ayran than about where fermentation actually lives in the modern food system. What you buy is yogurt that has already been fermented somewhere else, under tightly controlled conditions, long before it reaches your fridge. Ayran is what happens after that work is done: yogurt diluted, seasoned, and stabilized enough to survive distribution. Once you see that, the foggy path ahead becomes clear. Making more ayran doesn’t start with ayran. It starts with yogurt. And making yogurt starts with milk that can still be fermented.

That’s where I reached for Fairlife and, after filling my Instant Pot, assumed I was about to learn a lesson the hard way. Ultra-filtered and lactose-free sound like a problem for fermentation, especially if you still think lactose-free means no lactose. No lactose should mean no substrate for yogurt cultures, and no substrate should mean no lactic acid. Instead, the yogurt set cleanly and quickly, with better structure than I expected.

If the yogurt had failed, it would have confirmed my “lactose-free milk means no yogurt” intuition and closed the loop. But fermentation doesn’t care about marketing terms. It only cares about chemistry in the matrix. And chemically, something was clearly still there.

Fairlife didn’t remove the sugar from the milk. It broke lactose into two new sugars. Lactose is a disaccharide, glucose bound to galactose and the enzyme lactase simply splits that bond. The sugar remains fully present, still fermentable, still caloric, just no longer recognizable as lactose to either a digestive system that struggles with it or a label that’s allowed to claim it’s gone. What’s more, lactose is perceived as significantly less sweet than either glucose or galactose, and the yogurt bacteria behave differently because the work of breaking things down has already been partially completed.

Once that clicks, the rest of the behavior lines up. The yogurt sets faster with more protein. The acidity tastes subtle. What looks like a home-kitchen quirk starts to resemble a design choice that scales well. Ultra-filtration concentrates protein. Enzymatic treatment simplifies sugars. Together, they produce a raw material that behaves predictably across both factories and homes. By the time I diluted the yogurt with water and salt and turned it back into something recognizably like ayran, the drink itself felt almost incidental. The meaningful transformations had already happened upstream, in semi-permeable membranes, enzymes, and assay limits, long before I picked up a whisk.

What made this worth sitting with was how ordinary the explanation became. In the U.S., we’re largely comfortable with homogenization, a mechanical process that reduces the size of milkfat globules, adsorbs casein and creates a Pickering Emulsion. Basically this prevents the fat from rising to the top. Filtration is fine because we’re used to Greek yogurt being filtered, but enzymatic breakdown feels different, more technical and therefore more “suspect”, even when Fairlife is addressing a constraint the dairy industry has never been able to wish away: a large share of the population can’t comfortably digest its core ingredient.

Lactose intolerance has always been treated as a consumer problem rather than a systems problem, something individuals are expected to manage by avoidance or supplementation. Of course, Lactaid exists, but it’s a stale brand and doesn’t fit into our new world of protein-maxxing. Fairlife takes a different approach by moving the work upstream, finishing part of digestion early and concentrating protein in the process, producing milk that aligns with contemporary demand for digestibility and nutrient density while remaining legible to both microbes, manufacturers, and consumers. That combination helps explain why a company like Coca-Cola would see it less as a novelty and more as a solid bet on upending dairy.

Seen this way, the yogurt actually fermenting wasn’t surprising. The factory hadn’t interfered with fermentation building blocks so much as changed the conditions under which it now happens. Home cooking didn’t disappear here. It inherited a narrower, more engineered starting point. And that’s the distinction that feels worth paying attention to in conversations that flatten all “processing” into the same moral space. The question isn’t whether food has been processed. It’s how, why, and which constraints that processing is actually trying to solve.

And yet, these images never work. Not in the way they’re supposed to. Not because people are ignorant or unwilling, but because the act of eating itself has been structurally altered in ways that no diagram can undo. The failure isn’t educational. It’s infrastructural.

The newest dietary guidelines lean into a language of food patterns, urging people toward whole, nutrient-dense foods and away from the highly processed. This is framed as progress, a departure from decades of nutrient accounting and macro math. In theory, it is a welcome shift. But food patterns do not exist on paper. They exist in kitchens, in routines, in the texture of daily life. And most of the systems that once made those patterns legible have been quietly dismantled.

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We did not simply forget how to cook. We were taught not to. Over the course of the twentieth century, cooking was reframed as inefficiency, as friction in a modern life that prized speed and productivity. Eating became something to complete rather than inhabit. Meals collapsed into moments between tasks. The ideal food was not nourishing but fast. The food system responded accordingly, and it did so remarkably well.

Now, policy is asking consumers to reverse that trajectory with a picture.

This is where portion guidance begins to feel almost farcical. Serving sizes assume a world of individualized eating, of rational fractions and clean stopping points. One third of a pizza makes sense only if pizzas are cooked as personal units and eaten alone. But that is not how food actually moves through households. Pizzas are shared. Pasta is poured from boxes. Meals are negotiated between partners, families, children. People eat halves and wholes, not thirds. Portioning is dictated by packaging and social context, not numerical abstraction.

When guidelines ask people to override the structure of the meal using willpower, they are asking for something fundamentally unnatural. This is not a failure of discipline. It is a mismatch between how food is designed and how restraint is imagined.

Overconsumption is often blamed on hyperpalatability, and there is truth there. Food engineered to be craveable does erode satiety. But the deeper issue is that we engineered eating to be without edges. We removed fixed meal times and replaced them with continuous access. We erased natural stopping points and replaced them with package bottoms. Satiety, once enforced by structure, is now a personal responsibility. Visual guidelines attempt to reintroduce boundaries after the system has removed them, which is why they feel so flimsy.

The call to eat whole, nutrient-dense foods carries its own quiet assumptions. It presumes time, skill, storage, equipment, and cultural permission to cook. It assumes that food is not just available, but usable. Without addressing those conditions, the guidance becomes less a policy than a lifestyle demand. When people fail to meet it, the failure is framed as personal rather than systemic. You didn’t plan well enough. You didn’t choose correctly. You didn’t follow the picture.

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I should say that part of why this latest round of guidance caught my attention is that I’ve been listening to Marty Makary talk through it, and for the most part I find myself aligned with his framing. I like the attempt to reclaim “science over dogma” as a governing principle, even if that phrase has been stretched thin in recent years. In particular, I’m glad to see protein finally treated as more than a minimum survival threshold. The long-standing 50 gram recommendation was never about thriving; it was about keeping people from wasting away. In a food system where muscle loss, metabolic dysfunction, and under-nourishment can coexist with caloric excess, raising the floor on protein feels less like a provocation and more like a correction.

Where I’m less interested in following the conversation is in reopening the saturated fat wars. That debate has become so polarized, so culturally loaded, that it now generates more heat than insight. I’m not convinced it’s the hill worth dying on, especially when the evidence remains context-dependent and the public discourse has hardened into dogmatic camps over hypotheses. But stepping away from saturated fat absolutism doesn’t require replacing it with a new villain. The growing impulse to demonize seed oils and “processing” wholesale still doesn’t make much sense to me. Processing is not a moral category; it’s a set of tools. Some of those tools have been misused, others are doing essential, invisible work to make food affordable, stable, and nutritionally viable at scale. Treating them all as suspect feels less like science and more like backlash dressed up as clarity.

This is where the conversation around fats reveals something deeper. The guidelines’ preference for fats from whole foods gestures toward a return to simplicity, a kind of nutritional pastoralism. But modern food innovation does not operate in that register. Much of the contemporary food landscape, particularly in protein-forward and calorie-conscious products, is built on sophisticated lipid (read fat) science. Emulsions, structured lipids, functional oils doing quiet, invisible work to make foods affordable and palatable.

You cannot celebrate whole-food purity while relying on industrial modification to meet modern constraints. That tension is not resolved in the guidelines. It is simply ignored.

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The skepticism toward seed oils feels less like scientific closure and more like a codifying a cultural pendulum swing. Saturated fat lost its moral authority, and something had to replace it. Policy followed the online discourse rather than settling it in scientific journals. The result is guideline instability, reformulation churn for manufacturers, and consumer confusion on what to eat. Ingredient theology replaced truth-seeking fundamental research.

And so we return to the picture. Not because it works, but because it is legible. Because it signals action without demanding structural change. Because it places responsibility downstream, with the eater, rather than upstream, with the systems that shape eating in the first place.

If dietary guidance were designed around how people actually eat, it would look very different. It would speak in meals, not servings. It would acknowledge shared eating and negotiated portions. It would treat cooking as infrastructure rather than virtue. It would separate nutritional science from ideological purity tests and be honest about where innovation helps and where it distorts.

The real question is not whether people know what healthy food is. It is whether the food system allows them to eat it by default, without heroics, guilt, or a diagram taped up on the wall of an elementary school. Until that question is answered, we will keep redrawing the same images and wondering why nothing changes.

I have still spent more time not drinking alcohol than bellying up to the bar. Frankly, I wanted to experience that again for an extended period of time to understand if it was what I wanted. The problem was that I didn’t actually want to quit drinking. I wanted to understand my relationship to it more fully. And to be clear, alcohol has always been adjacent to my life and work, from hop farms to Bell’s to Empirical. This wasn’t a rejection of that world so much as a pause to look at it head-on.

I knew that we had a big year with our pre-wedding festivities and that there were realistically times when I wanted to drink to feel more a part of the celebration, like my bachelor party, for example. Thirty felt like the right number to me. Two drinks a month, plus a few to sprinkle around on special occasions. Going fully sober wasn’t honest. I also knew I’d rationalize anything if I didn’t put constraints around it. So I treated it like a design problem and built a Drink Budget Bill of Rights:

1. Trying an alcoholic drink is not considered a drink as long as it does not exceed one taste per cocktail.

2. A drink is a standard volume drink.

   1. 12 oz (354 mL) beer

   2. 5 oz (150 mL) wine

   3. 1.5 oz (45 mL) shot

3. Drinks that are labeled non-alcoholic do not count as a drink, for example Athletic Brewing.

With policy in hand, I took the leap.

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In the first half of the year, Notre Dame made it to the National Championship, and Mez brought us to the land of Malbecs in South America. Neither of these were ideal environments for keeping a drinking goal in check, but I managed to limit myself to two Quilmes and a taste of red wine, which according to my own rules did not count.

Not long after, we made it out to Expo West in Anaheim, my first time at the show. Southern California was a welcome break from Chicago, and we had a few moments on chilly beaches watching Pacific sunsets. During a dinner with a vendor, we ended up at Downtown Disney, and by then I had gotten into the habit of ordering NA beers. I went with a classic from the growing category, Heineken 0.0.

When the waiter dropped it at the table, he announced it loudly as a “diet beer,” sneering for a cheap laugh. We had no rapport with this person, which would have instantly softened it for me. Instead, it landed heavier than I expected. I got a glimpse of the small, uninvited slights the NA community absorbs in public spaces. It would have made more sense if it were 1994, but given how much drinking habits have shifted, and that this person worked in hospitality, I was surprised. It was the first time I really felt how visible a choice not to drink can become, even when you are not trying to make a statement.

I am not a victim here, but it gave me a peek behind the curtain at how these small moments can add up.

By May, I had started feeling self-conscious about the goal itself. Twenty-one drinks were gone, and we were not even halfway through the year. I felt the love from friends and family who gifted us bottles of champagne, wanted to buy us drinks to celebrate our engagement, and showed care in the ways they always had. Not indulging felt like refusing a shared ritual, one we had been participating in since college, or since whenever we first met and tied one on together. There was guilt in that, both for myself and for them.

That is when it became clear to me that the measurement and the goal were not aligned. The point was never the number. The point was to understand how drinking affected, or colored, how I acted and how I felt I was expected to act in certain situations. There were plenty of events where I did not drink and realized that I could have just as much, if not more, fun without a malt beverage in hand. I kept coming back to how much I loved running or walking on weekend mornings, free of work and finally having a moment of clarity away from the buzz of the world. Why would I want to cloud that with a hangover or poor sleep?

What mattered to me about spending time with people was being present with them. If that was true, then why assume there was only one way to do it, only one acceptable punctuation mark for time spent together?

In some ways, this drink budget made the experiment trickier than going cold turkey. I always felt the sense that someone might be anticipating this hang as one of those “special occasions,” even if that was objectively not true. Swearing it off completely would have closed the door. Leaving it ajar meant constantly negotiating the moment. That tension conflicted with another goal I had for the year: reconnecting with people. When you see an old friend, an early evening bar hang carries a kind of nostalgia that a late afternoon coffee does not always replicate. I have grown to love both, but there are still times when a drink punctuates or commemorates a hang in a way a cortado has not figured out yet.

I did not quit drinking. I also did not learn what I expected. What I learned was how much meaning I can outsource to a glass, and how uncomfortable it can be to ask whether that meaning still fits.