Food Notes: 10/8
Cakes, old food, smelly food, and more.
A Fan Favorite Cake Gets A Pink Slip
The Whole Foods Berry Chantilly Cake had the kind of cult following most eateries would only dream of. Then some cost-cutting executive applied a shrinkflation ray gun to save money. Oops. You actually won’t guess what happens next.
All The Dirty Restaurants
New York City has a health inspector shortage. With too few staff, restaurant inspections are fewer and farther between. Restaurants with bad grades might have made improvements, but instead of having a timely followup visit, are forced to wait months. Newly hired inspectors may not be as thorough. There’s probably a joke to be made here about Eric Adams taking bribes for restaurant inspections, but then again, it’s probably not a joke.
All The Old Food
History Facts takes a look at the foods people ate in the 19th century. It’s easy to think that today’s iconic foods somehow existed for time immemorial, but the reality is lots of things that were once popular no longer are, like squab, Succotash, and brown bread.
Alicia Kennedy Asks How People Eat
If you read Kennedy’s newsletter, you’ll see she started a column “How Do You Eat?” where food writers talk about how they actually eat in real life — or at least, admit to eating in an online food column. In the latest issue, she collects stories from Istanbul, Taiwan, and Phoenix — with this latter one by our friend Devin Kate Pope.
Smelly Food
Andrew Coletti at Atlas Obscura takes a look at how food scents help sell chain foods like pretzels and cinnamon buns. Chains go out of the way for you to smell the food, creating consistent brand experience and upselling consumers. And sometimes it doesn’t work as planned, as was the case with Starbucks’s breakfast sandwiches.
Shirley Temple in a Bottle
Twelve-year-old me would have been all over this new 7UP flavor — Shirley Temple. It was always a treat to order a mixed drink as a kid. My personal favorite when it came to low-cost mocktail recipes of the 1980s was 7UP and Orange Juice.