A man in a long coat opens both hands, a pill sitting in each palm, and offers a choice. Take the blue one and it all goes quiet, you go back to sleep and keep the life you already had, continuing life in the simulation and living in blissful ignorance to the world that’s been created for us. Take the red one to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, to pull the wool from your eyes and wake up to the realities that create Our World. The power of this scene transcended the fictional world and has taken up space in our collective consciousness and how we choose to interact with politics, people, and the world around us. In the quarter century since, the internet pharmacists have developed a whole new range of pills for us to choose. Seeing the supplement market has grown and likely will double to $300B by 2028, it’s disconcerting that we consider our ideologies fit into a one-size-fits-all mentality.

Looks, it’s a great scene with plenty of staying power. Plenty of good scenes have handed us images that flared for a season and then dissolved into nothing. This one did something stranger. A quarter century on, the movie itself has thinned into a vibe, half-remembered and endlessly parodied, and the word it left behind has outlasted nearly everything around it.

The thing I’ve been sitting with is why that particular image had societal gravity, when any given movie tosses us metaphors by the baker’s dozen and most of them slide right off. My best guess is that it landed in soil that was already prepared. By 1999, swallowing a small thing in order to change yourself was an ordinary habit, the kind of errand you ran on a Tuesday between the bank and the dry cleaner.

Walk into any strip-mall GNC at the turn of the millennium and the promise was racked floor to ceiling. Ginkgo for the memory your doctor obviously undervalued. Echinacea for an immune system The Establishment was too busy to mention. St. John’s wort, ephedra, melatonin, glucosamine, collagen peptides, a whole wall of capsules each one murmuring that the thing you needed had been sitting here the entire time, over the counter, available to anyone willing to look past the people who were paid to know better. Congress had cleared the legal path for all of this in 1994, and the promise that the fix was a pill stack away ballooned.

The Effect of DSHEA

The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 was a landmark framework that reclassified how FDA enforced supplements - seeing them as a subset of food rather than a drug. It put the onus of safety on the manufacturers and the FDA only needs to deem as harmful to pull it from the market. A company no longer had to demonstrate that a product worked, or even that it was safe, before it reached the shelf. This oddly seems like the opposite of what RFK currently is doing by removing the current self-GRAS architecture. Regardless, the agency stopped being the inspector at the door and shifted to only reducing damage after it was already done.

This framework simply changed the back of any bottle in the store. Any statement promoting joint health, or any other proposed benefit, now carries an asterisk: “This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration”. Look, the Agency is busy and it’s expensive to run randomized controlled trials, so I’m not saying that all supplements are snake oil. The burden of experimenting is now on us as consumers and thirty years later, we have people “doing their own research” while actually listening to a podcast ad with an MD or PhD sign-off. As Hydroxide put it, “some people don’t want to hear an idea unless they’re sold to” and what the DSHEA also provided was a framework for distrust.

Hiring a New Food Referee

Pulling the gatekeeper away from the door did not make the question go away. Somebody still has to tell you whether the supp in your hand is good for you, and once the agency stepped back, there was a knowledge vacuum. For a while it belonged to the health catalogs and the back pages of muscle magazines. Then it belonged to forums, then to a man on YouTube with a whiteboard and a grudge, and lately it belongs to an app. The post was always going to be filled somewhere because nature freakin’ abhors a vacuum1.

Bringing it back to the Matrix: the pill was never really about a single belief. It is a way of seeing the people who are supposed to vouch for things. Blue-pilled is putting full trust in the panel on the box and having an inherited sense that somebody, somewhere, made sure this cleared a health bar. Red-pilled is deciding that bar was rigged to begin with, that Big Pharma and Big Food has conspired against the health of everyone. Depending on the day, I probably take one or both pills, truthfully. But on a population basis this binary world puts us in a weird space. Hand the same bag of french fries with sunflower oil2 to two shoppers holding those two lenses and you get two different objects. One is a weeknight snack while the other reads poison.

The apps are what happens when you turn the red-pilled lens into a consumer product and bill for it annually. There are at least three of them racing to be the harbinger of truth. Yuka scores the barcode and paints it green or red because we all played Red Light, Green Light in pre-school. No thinking needed! Oasis aims its whole pitch at the government that supposedly failed to protect you, which is a neat trick, since it is selling you the 1994 grievance back as a subscription.

Olive is the newest entrant that flags seed oils by default and gives you no switch to turn it off, which means the app has chosen your camp before you have scanned a single thing, and from then on the scan stops being a question you are asking and becomes a loyalty you are confirming. The app returns a flat verdict, safe or not safe, and points you toward a seed-oil-free restaurant on the drive home. As Hydroxide pointed out in their deep-dive, Olive isn’t really using many nutrition studies, but works with the “Chemical Toxin Working Group, headed by concerned (concerning?) journalist David Steinman. You get his read on Prop 65 for the low price of $14.99 a month

So we did not actually get rid of some mythical gatekeeper in 1994. We dissolved the one we shared, and three decades later we each went out and subscribed to our own. We stopped agreeing on who gets to say what is true in the aisle, and the apps are the most recent proof that we never replaced that agreement with anything except the freedom to pick our own referee.

The Societal Cost

Here is what the sorting costs, and it is easy to miss because it masquerades as empowerment. Good food now means food that agrees with my pill. The grocery store, without anyone deciding this on purpose, became a place you go to confirm a worldview and happen to also pick up dinner. Every aisle has become a referendum on whatever an influencer is at war with that day.

Morpheus offered a pill that took something real from you and never gave it back. You took the red one and you woke up, all the way up, into a world that was colder and worse and impossible to un-see, and the deal was that you could never lower yourself back into the warm bath of ignorant bliss. The app scanners give you the jolt of having seen through the lie, the hidden seed oil, the scary additive you cannot pronounce (THEY’RE PUTTING RIBOFLAVIN IN THE BREAD SAMANTHA!), the contaminant nobody warned you about, and then it lets you keep every ounce of comfort you walked in with. I think the FDA did do a wonderful thing in making supplements more accessible, but it also built an awakening you get to have again and again every time you shop or open Instagram.

And we lost the one thing the old shared gatekeeper, for all its failures, did give us, which was a number we could argue about together. Picture two people in the same aisle, in front of the same box, each scanning it, each reading an opposite verdict off a glowing screen, both certain, neither able to say why the other is wrong, because they are no longer consulting the same instrument. There’s no shared scoreboard anymore or one referee we can argue with.

So the next time you feel yourself reaching for the pill, whatever color it has been this season, it might be worth asking what the reach is really for. Whether what you cannot stand is the institution and its long record of getting things wrong. Or whether what you cannot stand is the older fact underneath it. We are still inside a system with a barcode, a nutrition facts panel and an ingredient declaration, yet we sit in camps of who has the authority to tell us what the health impact is of what we scan.

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On the last episode of…

We arrived at night and the humidity smacked you in the face as soon as you stepped onto the jet bridge. Buenos Aires may have been autumnal, but Rio lost the message that it was time to cool down. The air conditioning units in our Argentine Airbnbs have looked like wall decorations, but I got a sense that they were about to be a lifeline for a good night’s sleep here.

Customs took almost no time, but after talking to the agent, we were officially going to need to tune our ears to hearing Portuguese rather than Spanish. It’s a beautiful language and I wrongly assumed that because it’s surrounded by hispanophone countries, most folks would know both languages. Though, more like the US, many Brazilians are surprised that a language other than their mother tongue existed. Ruh-roh.

Recap

Total Miles: 13,087 mi

Miles Traveled: 7,642 mi

Current City: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Best thing I’ve consumed

Rio has brought me fully into my Fruit Renaissance, after the Dark Ages of meat, potatoes and empanadas. I cannot describe how elated I was to find Bibi Sucos, a juice counter from the 1990’s that has about 40 varieties of juice you can mix and match. Cashew fruit1, soursop, cupuaçu, and passionfruit were all on the table. We were working this whole week and I became a super user of all things juice. While the guy I always ordered from didn’t know English and I was constantly looking up fruit names on my phone, I think we understood each other. I was the weird foreigner, wearing the same rain jacket, shorts and Tevas ordering a double cold maté with lime, ginger and mint. Bibi gave me a new interest in ways to prepare one of my staple caffeine sources and I already have iced mate com limão recipes circling in my mind for Chicago summer.

Staying with the liquid-based consumption, cachaça and caipirinhas are undoubtedly one of the best combinations of all time. Cachaça is a sugarcane spirit, just like rum, but the processing is different and creates a flavor profile that hits my tastebuds in a more perfect way. Rum is typically made from the molasses pressed from sugarcane, while cachaça is made from the fresh sugar cane juice. This freshness carries through into a more green tasting and smelling spirit which pairs seamlessly with the level of fresh fruit juices that normally accompany it.

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Caipirinhas have always sat in my mind as the Brazilian margarita: lime, clear spirits and sugar. But what I realized about Brazilian fruit consumption is that the peel and pith make up as much of the juice experience as the liquid we all squeeze out. Caipirinhas use muddled limes, more similar to a mojito, and are not overly sweet. Our favorite aspect of them is the ability to add passionfruit juice (suco de maracujá) to make it really sing. My boss in Denmark had brought cachaça de jambú home after the holidays and I hadn’t had it since 2018, so when I saw it at Pedra do Sal with cashew juice, I jumped at the chance. Jambú is an Amazonian herb that is soaked in cachaça which gives a numbing, tingling sensation to your whole mouth, much like Szechuan peppercorns. Spilanthol2 and hydroxy-alpha-sanshool3

Finally, everyone expects the beef to be the pinnacle of Brazilian cuisine. There are seafood dishes that are classics like moqueca, a type of seafood stew, and bean and pork dishes like feijoada, but I think there are the quick eats that need more inspection.

Pão de queijo has held a place in my heart since my roommate from Coritiba baked a massive batch in the throes of our collective Thanksgiving hangover in San Sebastián. Brazi Bites are a decent CPG interpretation of them, but I was excited about a different type of cheese: queijo de minas. A fresh cow’s milk cheese with a production process deemed an Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO, it finds its way into a range of dishes, spanning every meal of the day, salty and sweet alike. Minas cheese is Brazil. Brazil is Minas.

It tastes like salty fresh milk and takes on the flavor of anything you pair it with. It has a squeaky texture like halloumi when lightly heated, but will melt into a mozzarella texture under sustained cooking. I was initially turned off by it because it expresses a lot of water, and when it’s sitting on a buffet line looks like the cooking staff put it on ice cubes that had melted hours beforehand. This is a wet ass cheese and I’m about to back that Minas block right into my little garage.

My first recommendation for the peak experience with this cheese starts with the Romeu e Julieta, which is solely guava paste and Minas. You’ll likely be able to find it in bakeries wrapped in a puff pastry, which is a great pairing with a cafézinho. And if you’re peckish after a day at the beach, you’ll need to reach for a misto quente, a simple ham and cheese sandwich that will knock your socks off. I’m clearly biased (but not yet sponsored), but Bibi Sucos has perfected it, and it goes perfectly with a mate com abacaxi e maracujá (cold mate with pineapple and passionfruit). Rio is truly a special place.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve been to Buenos Aires and I’m sure it won’t be the last. I was here in their summer last year, and it’s been a nice experience being here in the fall with Fiona. The city is a little less full and, like times throughout this honeymonth, we were the lone couple on Airbnb Experiences, one of which was getting a private bar crawl with the previous manager of Playboy Argentina. There are few times you get to meet a man who has fully forgotten the one time he partied with Hugh Heffner twenty years ago and this fully took us by surprise.

Tango lessons turned into tango shows with newly-minted Irish friends who were taking a six month sabbatical around the continent. We started working full-time this week again, so we found ourselves in one of the countless cafés, requesting too many cups while zeroing out inboxes. Thankfully, we were a few hours ahead of Chicago and could make the most of our mornings, checking out museums, walking around and getting a solid breakfast before putting our heads down again.

Recap

Total Miles: 13,087 mi

Miles Traveled: 6,403 mi

Current City: Buenos Aires, Argentina

My favorite moments of BA:

Buenos Aires is the home of “just-a-little-snack culture,” since it’s been codified throughout Argentina as their fourth meal: merienda. Around eight at night, the world breaks for a pre-dinner snack of maté or coffee, with a little sweet treat. You can’t go to dinner with an empty stomach right?

We necessarily didn’t break from our regularly scheduled programming of an earlier American dinner, but we did take full advantage of empanadas de carne cortada de cuchillo (knife-cut beef rather than ground beef), anything dulce de leche and ice cream shops. Rapanui was an ice cream chain that punched above its weight for not being overly sweet, but indulgent with some our favorites. Sambayón1, a marsala wine helado, and triple tentación (triple temptation), a dulce de leche (DDL, for those in the biz) ice cream with added DDL globs and Italian merengue.

Fiona booked us a night on the town through Airbnb, which was a good way to get us (read: Bob) out of the house and do something memorable after the grind of the week. In our finest hiking gear, we Ubered from Palermo to Recoleta and met up with the group around 8pm. Marcelo met us in the lobby of a building where we were to ascend to the rooftop bar. He was expressive and excited to see us and let us know that this would be a private night out. Frankly, Fiona and I were looking forward to meeting folks and diffusing the focus on us, but we had no idea what was in store for us.

We chatted in a mixture of English and Spanish and we learned he had a fondness for Chicago, since his sister had lived there for many years. Fiona found a new favorite drink, a Fitzgerald, and we generally froze in the cold, windy outdoor bar downtown. Marcelo had dinner on the mind and wanted to drive us to the Costanera to eat at one of his favorite places.

His Harley-Davidson customized, ’97 PT Cruiser2 was waiting for us right out front, illegally parked on a street sitting at an angle fit for San Francisco streets. He told us the value of the accumulated tickets was worth more than the value of the car at this point as we sped off to Costa 7070. He talked to us about his love for motorcycles, the Rolling Stones and his time meeting Mick Jagger at the Playboy Mansion. Between this and literally every employee greeting him at every establishment, we were in good hands to see bars we wouldn’t have otherwise found. He parked illegally everywhere went, bumped us to the front the line in exclusive speakeasies with a quick handshake with the bouncer. Milei may run the country by day, but Marcelo certainly is the manager on the night shift.

I’m grateful for Fi’s consistent and persistent seeking out of Airbnb experiences everywhere we go. There are so many interesting characters that are looking for the second or third act in this life, and want to give you a slice of their world. Life seems more full when you are in novel, one-time events because you stop to focus on them a bit more. Despite this being my second time in Buenos Aires, it feels like seeing it for the first time.

The flight from Lima to Santiago, Chile is not for the faint of heart, we legitimately thought we were going to be the next Uruguayan Rugby Team at about two in the morning. I have always hated roller coasters and we were certainly along for a bumpy ride.

It turns out that the flight path we were taking has consistently been ranked as one of the most turbulent routes in the world. The tallest stretch of the Andes is between Santiago and Mendoza, Argentina which makes for a very unique wind effect that we were feeling the full brunt of: Viento Zonda. Essentially, the Zonda is a wind that screams down the Andes’ eastern slope into Mendoza and northern Argentina, reaching up to 150 mph. It starts in the afternoon most days between May and November (perfect timing on our part), lasts anywhere from an hour to three days depending on how much the weather gods hate you, and moves in because polar maritime air gets compressed and heated as it crosses the Andes crest at 20,000 feet.

Thankfully, it was less intense on the leg from Santiago to Mendoza, but we were basically paid to test our pilot’s ability to white-knuckle the yoke while we held strangers’ hands in the back rows.

We got yellow fever vaccines for Brazil while we were in Lima. We’d highly recommend looking at travel vaccinations in the location you’ll arrive at because we spent almost $800 less than we would have for the same care in the USA. Despite this, I had pretty awful body aches from the live vaccine (Fiona was fine!), but I decided to be a real trooper and do the spa and vineyard tours though. When called upon, I will serve.

Recap

Total Miles: 13,087 mi

Miles Traveled: 5,798 mi

Current City: Mendoza, Argentina

Best thing I’ve consumed

Mendoza is essentially the Sonoma Valley of Argentina, known for producing some of the best wine in the world. So naturally, the best thing we consumed was wine.

We learned how only in the last 30 years this had been the case. Prior to the 1990s, Argentine wine was mostly a domestic affair. The country consumed large volumes of inexpensive local table wine, which meant producers didn’t have to concentrate on quality production. Around 90% of the wine produced in Argentina was consumed locally, and when poverty increased in the late 1980s and early 1990s, people could no longer buy wine.

The story of the Malbec grape itself mirrors this collapse and revival. A plague attacked the vineyards of Cahors starting in 1877 and wreaked havoc, destroying the 40,000 hectares that had been cultivated up to that point within a few years. The Malbec clones introduced to Argentina in 1853 were different from other French clones and didn’t prosper in France, so they were never chosen to propagate new planting material. They likely would have become extinct worldwide if it had not been for their immigration to Argentina. Meanwhile in France, the long and rich winemaking history in Cahors disappeared along with their plantings of Malbec, and Bordeaux experienced the same blight plus a frost that destroyed much of their Malbec acreage.

The pivot in Argentina happened during the 1990s. By the mid-90s, Argentina had a handful of international flying winemakers advising its wineries, and this influx of foreign knowledge led to investments in new technology like stainless steel tanks and French oak barrels, plus a different approach to viticulture favoring concentration and maturity of grapes over yield. Malbec, which had been dismissed as a “poor man’s grape” and unknown to most of the world, turned out to be perfectly suited to Mendoza’s high elevation and parasite-free environment.

We visited Zuccardi which was voted best vineyard in the world for three successive years. Neither of us have a ton of knowledge behind wine and our tour guide gave us such a great run down. Elevation, changes in temperature, how rocky or silty your soil is, and the amount of soil studies they do is insane. The final two Malbecs we tried were from their Piedra Infinita (Infinite Rocks) vineyard we had walked through earlier in the day. They were Malbec grapes picked from only a few meters from one another, but couldn’t be more different. One grew on incredibly rocky soil and took more time to come to harvest, while the other was in a more typical soil. We had a ton of fun drinking wine at 9:30 in the morning.

Our wonderful chofer for the day, Coty (who was also our Airbnb’s step-daugther) then drove us to visit at Salentein (currently #12 in the world) for lunch and a tour. The wine was more traditional, using a lot of oak barrels to impart flavor and allow for high rates of oxidation to fight tannic creep. The wine was delicious and their “Cathedral of Wine” was stunning. The back drop of the Andes was sick, the food was lovely, though we mainly chose this spot because they have an art gallery.

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Your niece is at her big summer birthday party on the lake. After running around chasing the dog, she grabs what she thinks is a Coke off the top of the cooler and takes a sip. She stops and winces because there’s a burn she doesn’t recognize, a rounded warmth at the back of her throat, a complexity her ten-year-old palate has no frame for. She asks her dad what’s wrong with her drink. He looks at the can and tells her she grabbed a zero-proof Cuba Libre, formulated with dihydrochalcones.

She actually kind of likes it. On the way home, she works out that the easiest way to get that taste back is with alcohol. While kids have always been sneaking alcohol for as long as it’s been sneakable, a recently filed patent1 could train a young palate to seek out that sensation with compounds that are food-safe and easily commercializable.

what’s in the can

Enter dihydrochalcones. They are a small class of flavonoid compounds that activate the same three nerve channels alcohol does:

• TRPV1 registers the warmth. Capsaicin works on the same channel; it’s what makes whiskey feel hot in your throat.

• TRPA1 senses pungency and the slight ongoing irritation that makes a spirit linger.

• TRPM8 is the cold receptor, the one menthol activates. Alcohol actually blocks activation, which is why a strong drink feels paradoxically warmer the longer you hold it in your mouth.

Anyone who’s sipped a no- and low-ABV drink knows that there is a bit missing. Product developers are keen, and learned that capsaicin and/or menthol can bring an element of this back, but with a different character than the ethanol (booze) it’s meant to replace. Chasing the burn with capsaicin only hits the first channel, where menthol has the opposite sensation on the third channel. At best, the result is drops into an uncanny valley2, tasting more like a minty hot sauce than a spirit. Dihydrochalcones, at 25 to 75 parts per million, fire all three channels in a coordinated pattern to light up your trigeminal nerve the same way it would for bourbon.

This class of compounds does exist in nature: one called phloridzin is in apple peel, neohesperidin is in citrus pith. Their natural concentrations are low, locked in fiber, and surrounded by everything else the fruit contains, so you wouldn’t pick up on them initially in those settings. The thing is, DSM-Firmenich is patenting engineered variants, delivered at concentrations well above what you’d encounter eating an apple skin, in a liquid that hits the trigeminal nerve in seconds. While the class of compounds called “dihydrochalcones” are naturally-occurring, it would be a stretch to find these engineered ones in the wild.

think of the kids

So, are we sure dihydrochalcones in a children’s beverage would pass FDA review tomorrow? Sure, the compounds are food-safe and the dose is genuinely small, but how could this theoretical CPG drink condition a developing palate to associate the chemesthetic signature of alcohol with reward, ten or fifteen years before the legal drinking age? We should consider what the intended outcome of the patent is and look at regulating it similarly. Your niece doesn’t know what she discovered, but the product team that formulated her “weird-tasting soda” does.

Marty Makary (who bestowed us with the new food pyramid) recently resigned, in part, after being forced to approve fruit-flavored nicotine vapes. This is a public spat that I think everyone can understand because tying sweet flavors to an addictive substance can positively reinforce trial. In a way, it’s how kids get interested in alcohol in the first place: by spiking their favorite sodas to mask the taste. The argument nobody is making about dihydrochalcones is that they give a sensory hook without the addictive substance. This inverse argument is easier to brush off: “well there’s nothing in there to get them in trouble” but kids that played with candy cigarettes were twice as likely to become smokers later in life3 and somehow those are still legal in the US4.

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think of the recovering alcoholics

For people in recovery, there is plenty of research looking into what shape relapse can take. Cue reactivity research suggests that the sensory profile of a substance can reactivate craving pathways even when the addictive substance (ethanol in this case) is absent. That cue can be visual, like the label on a bottle; olfactory, like the smell of beer; or trigeminal, like the burn of a sip in the back of the throat. A zero-proof bourbon that fires the exact nerve channels of real bourbon is a sensory and motor cue that could push someone toward relapse.

Human psychology is fascinating though because these same kinds of cues can also help people stay sober, which is part of why Liquid Death cans look like beer cans. The sensory cue of a cold tallboy in your hand is, for some people, exactly what they need to not be holding a beer. Whether firing the same nerves as alcohol gives someone in recovery a seat at the table or pushes them toward relapse is the question. As far as I can find, nobody is funding the research.

what problem are these molecules even solving?

The patent claims that dihydrochalcone is solving a real consumer problem. People want to drink less alcohol for health reasons, but low- and zero-alcohol versions are missing that “oomph” compared to the real thing. Breweries and spirit makers have traditionally padded these beverages with extra sugars and carbs to compensate for what alcohol brings, which defeats the health purpose. These compounds offer a workaround: add a pinch of the right dihydrochalcone and the drinker gets the sensory experience of alcohol without the calories, sugar, or intoxication.

I am sold by the coolness factor and having these types of sensory modulators in my tool box. When I limited my drinking last year, I certainly noticed this lack of sensory feedback that I enjoyed as a consumer. Being able to target specific nerve receptors is incredibly powerful as a food scientist, and not an option we always have at our disposal. We also have a call to make in deciding who the intended consumer is if we decide to use these compounds. It’s fascinating that we can decouple the sensation of alcohol from its effects in this way. The negative ways this tool could be used fill me with discomfort.

We’ll never be in the room with the teams who decided to pour millions of dollars in the pursuit of finding these compounds, so we won’t know what their complete intentions were here. The reality of the market is that the share of US adults who drink alcohol just hit 54%, a ninety-year low, with the sharpest declines in the past two years. More than 100 countries now tax sugar-sweetened beverages. So do these large breweries now have a way to retain that margin in the long haul by targeting vulnerable groups?

Coke has been buying into alcohol for years. They own Topo Chico Hard Seltzer5, and that business is watching the same ninety-year low in US drinking rates as everyone else in the category. A conglomerate sitting on both a declining alcohol portfolio and a soda brand with the cultural machinery to license Bluey, K-Pop Demon Hunters, or whoever your niece is currently obsessed with has every commercial reason to connect those assets through a limited release using DSM-Firmenich’s compound. Nobody will fund the research that would tell you what it means for her palate. We’ll find out sometime around 2040, in a Gallup poll, when the number is already the number.

State paternalism as a reflex doesn’t interest me. What I want is the conversation that happens before the product launches. The fruit-flavored vape fight is happening in public, loudly, and, unfortunately, after the fact. This one hasn’t left the station yet and there’s still time to make sure the right passengers are on board.

We were in a very different spot of the city than the typical tourist destinations of Barranco and Miraflores. The streets were quieter, well-lit, and a little less interesting. Homes were architecturally beautiful, but the lack of corner stores and the presence of bougie (boujie?) grocery outlets is out of the ordinary. I did find this interesting tuber called a mashua (Tropaeolum tuberosum) that I would have loved to buy, but had no way of preparing in such a short period of time. Apparently it has a sharp, licorice flavor. A root vegetable that tastes like anis is pretty much my dream scenario, but alas, for another Andean adventure.

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Recap

Total Miles: 13,087 mi

Miles Traveled: 4,151 mi

Current City: Lima, Peru

Best thing I’ve consumed

Around 200 years ago, slavery was abolished in Peru, and the coastal haciendas needed new labor. Successive waves of indentured Chinese and Japanese workers arrived under contract conditions that weren’t very different from the rewritten laws.

By the second generation, families were opening small eateries. By the fourth, those eateries had become a defining pillar of Peruvian food culture. Chifa (from chi fan or “eat rice”), Cantonese cooking adapted to Pacific Coast ingredients is now ubiquitous and local. Nikkei cuisine followed a similar arc: Japanese met ceviche culture and used the ingredients endemic to the limeño coast. It’s a pretty stellar combination of flavors and cuisines interacting that we wanted to try while in town. The Spanish spoken also borrows many words from these generations of immigrants. Kion, borrowed from Japanese, is simply the word for ginger.

FAN is a fourth-generation Nikkei restaurant that tries to articulate all of this explicitly. We weren’t blown away, but it was worth the visit for seeing this expression through the years: a trout nigiri that a salty umami bomb, and a Hotate maki with grana padano and tempura was interesting, if nothing else. The clash of Japanese form, Italian dairy, Peruvian fish was a decent snapshot of what Nikkei cooking can do when it’s curious rather than cautious. I very much enjoyed their cocktails like the ume pisco sour and sake negroni.

KION was a stellar meal. We got the pork char siu and a Hainanese-inspired chicken with three different types of ají, the typical Peruvian spicy pepper. After burning so many calories on the hike, this hit the spot. Their riff on chicha morada, Peru’s purple corn drink, brought in lycee instead of pineapple, which went a long way in our book.

Final Notes on Peru

We ended our trip going to the Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion (LUM) that outlined the guerilla terrorism during the 1980-1992 and the atrocities that happened throughout the Andes. We’ve been reading Death in the Andes and Conversations in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa who played a part in investigating the killing of journalists during this time period. During our time with Uber drivers, tour guides, and other warm Peruvians we’ve met along the way showed us how much this still impacts society to this day. It’s been a stark reminder that the past doesn’t always repeat itself, but it can rhyme, and it’s up to us all to stay vigilant in keeping everyone in our communities included, protected, and educated in all aspects of daily life.

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.