"Boo Berry Is the Only Breakfast Cereal Mascot with Nipple Rings"

"For 50 years, these spooky cereals have haunted your breakfast aisle, creating a fanbase unlike any other. This is the story of where they came from, how they took off and what they meant to the world"

Brian VanHooker at Mel presents "An Oral History of Monster Cereals."

"If You're Going to Do Anything About It, You Have to Take on the Food Industry, Which No One Wants to Do"

"There is no national strategy. There is no systemswide approach, even as researchers increasingly recognize that obesity is a disease that is driven not by lack of willpower, but a modern society and food system that's almost perfectly designed to encourage the overeating of empty calories, along with more stress, less sleep and less daily exercise, setting millions on a path to poor health outcomes that is extremely difficult to break from."

Helena Bottemiller Evich at Politico writes that "[i]n Washington, there has been no such wake-up call about the link between diet-related diseases and the pandemic."

"Hyperprocessed, Convenient Food Products Can Be as Addictive as Cigarettes, Alcohol and Drugs"

"Regaining control of our eating habits is tough business. But given how effectively the processed-food industry has learned to manipulate our desires and habits, we have to find ways to defend ourselves against unhealthful eating, which drives much of the chronic illnesses that plague nearly half of all Americans." 

Michael Moss at the Los Angeles Times writes "much of what’s being sold at the grocery store and fast-food restaurants is more seductive than we knew."

"From Abolitionist Roots"

"O save the Black man from the curse of drink: he has become an integral part of our civilization. In saving him we shall save ourselves,' Frederick Douglass thundered in his temperance addresses from the 1870s. 'Whisky arms the hand of violence. It stifles in the white race all ennobling sentiments of justice, kindness and good will,' he wrote later in 1887. 'Few things could do more for the elevation and happiness, or for the welfare of the colored people than the banishment of intoxicating liquors.'"

Mark Lawrence Schrad at Politico discusses "The Forgotten History of Black Prohibitionism."

"Not Simply a Cuisine, but a Lifestyle"

"I think it's maybe less in dude food itself than in the way marketers use the idea of the dude to combat gender contamination. You see how these brands are trying to construct ideas about masculinity, and that shows you so much about how they actually think about femininity and women. It's that idea of 'Diet Coke' versus 'Coke Zero,' women's weight loss and women's consumption versus men's. And it's so binary and so hierarchical in a way that is bad for both men and women." 

Rachel Sugar at Vox interviews Emily Contois, author of Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture.

"Gender Dynamics Had Always Been Part of It"

"And Americans today are likely to recognize the names of the most famous temperance activists not from that work but from their efforts for women's suffrage—not that those two weren't connected. In 1853, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the Women's State Temperance Society in upstate New York. Stanton would even refer to alcohol as 'the unclean thing.' It became clear to them that giving women the right to vote was only way they could ban alcohol. As Anthony put it in 1899, 'the only hope' for Prohibition was 'putting the ballot into the hands of women.'"

Olivia B. Waxman at Time explains that "Prohibition and women's suffrage went hand in hand."

"'Coffee Cultivation Merely Extends The System Of Colonial Oppression,' Recite Nation's 180,000 Radicalized Starbucks Employees After 3-Hour Anti-Bias Training"

"'Don't feel pressured to buy anything, though. You're welcome to just sit at a table or use the bathroom to wash the blood of the working class off your hands.'"

From The Onion.

Rise of the "Lifestyle Vinters"

"Most refer to themselves with straight faces as 'farmers,' even as 'environmentalists,' while more trees are cut on surrounding mountainsides for yet more vineyards. They loudly praise the valley's exemplary past and glorious future while exploiting its present. For instance, a prominent computer-boom beneficiary named Mike Davis has spent more millions on his sprawling new winery than will likely ever be recovered through wine sales. Since the Napa Valley floor is all planted, only the hillsides are available for new vineyards. And Davis is bent on scraping out a vineyard high on Howell Mountain that would adversely affect a precious wildlife preserve, one of the state's most biologically rich remnants."

James Conaway at The Atlantic argues that "Rich People Are Ruining Wine."

"Both the Product and the Tool of Empire"

"Over the next 200 years, tea would become inextricably bound up with British national identity. As collectively the British tipped more and more tea down their throats, the 'cuppa' would come to symbolise temperance, domesticity, purity and industriousness. Tea got us up in the morning, kept us going through the working day, took pride of place on the dinner table and helped win two world wars. When George Orwell defined Englishness in 1941, he pinpointed the football match, the pub and a 'nice cup of tea'.
"Yet, this homely notion of tea as patriotic and wholesome was carefully manipulated in order to promote the interests of the British Empire."

Wendy Moore at History Today reviews Erika Rappaport's A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World and Angela McCarthy and T.M. Devine's Tea & Empire: James Taylor in Victorian Ceylon.

"The Victorian Ethos Is Not Dead, Not By a Long Shot"

"This seeps over into everyday activities as well. Trader Joe's and Whole Foods are filled with people dressed in workout gear with no sweat in sight. This clothing marks its wearers as the type of people who care for their bodies, even when they aren't exercising. Yoga pants and running shoes display virtue just as clearly as the nineteenth-century wives' corseted dresses did.
"Being fit now indexes class, saturating both fitness and food culture. As calories have become cheaper, obesity has changed from being a sign of wealth to a sign of moral failure. Today, being unhealthy functions as a hallmark of the poor's cupidity the same way working-class sexual mores were viewed in the nineteenth century.
"Both lines of thinking assert that the lower classes cannot control themselves, so they deserve exactly what they have and nothing more. No need, then, for higher wages or subsidized health care. After all, the poor will just waste it on cigarettes and cheeseburgers."

Jason Tebbe at Jacobin notes that "nineteenth-century bourgeoisie used morality to assert class dominance--something elites still do today."

"Birkenstocked Burkeans"

"All I can tell you is that the crunchy-granola lefties are often right about little things that make life richer. Take food, for example. After we married, Julie and I had to teach ourselves how to cook. We quickly discovered how much better food tastes if it hasn’t been processed. We'd go to farmers' markets in the city to buy produce, and before we knew it, we were making and canning our own apple butter. Not only did the stuff taste dramatically better than what was on offer in the supermarket, but there was a real sense of pride in knowing how to do these things for ourselves, like our grandmothers did. We realized one day that pretty much the only young to middle-aged people we knew who cared about these things were … lefties."

National Review hosts Rod Dreher's 2002 article on "Granola Conservatives."

"Liberals Have Supplanted Conservatives as Moralizing Busybodies"

"Social norms against overt expressions of racism have been an important driver of improved social relations in the past 60 years. Sometimes it's a fine political and moral strategy to make people feel guilty—if what they're doing is bad enough, and if there's a strong enough consensus that it is bad.
"The problem with the liberal busybodying is not that it passes any judgments on individual behavior, but that the judgments have become too numerous, too specific, and too frequently changing. Following all the rules has become exhausting."

Josh Barro at Business Insider tells liberals that they "can win again if they stop being so annoying."

Steven W Thrasher at The Guardian calls Democrats "pathetic."

Emmet Penney at Paste warns against liberal "lectureporn."

Thomas Frank at The Guardian says that journalists are "utterly oblivious to how they appear to the rest of America."

Bryce Covert at The New Republic reacts to the Democrats' "A Better Deal" campaign.

And Lee Drutman in The New York Times writes that he has found "one area of notable discord between Clinton and Sanders supporters—their degree of disaffection with political institutions."

"The Future of Dining Out Might Look a Lot Like Eating In"

"We are living through a golden age in food—if you can pay the bill.

"Today's restaurant renaissance is an expression of the long-term growth of leisure spending in the U.S. But there's nothing leisurely about the restaurant business today. The superabundance of quality and variety among restaurateurs has created cut-throat competition, particularly in the fast casual sector. The price gap between grocery bills and restaurant checks has never been higher. The rise of takeout has forced restaurants to serve more diners who don't step foot on their property."

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic discusses trends relating to restaurants and food.

"Buried in the Mythos of Manhattan"

"'Carnegie became well known because it was near Broadway, because it was near the great centers of screenwriting and comedy and production and late night,' Sax says. 'This was pre-Letterman. Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner and the golden age, that's when Carnegie really grew in prominence. And so, all the photos that line the walls, the connection with Woody Allen, that was the pin that set the genesis of modern American comedy. That restaurant and Stage [Deli] were tied to it. It associated the Jewish deli with that in the popular imagination.'"

Adam Chandler at The Atlantic says goodbye to the New York's original Carnegie Deli.

"Immersed for a Decade Among Those He Portrayed"

"There are no illusions in these portraits. But there is a lot of warmth and the intimation of rapport, or at least the softening of suspicion brought on by a couple of rounds of bottom-shelf booze. In the end, though, the camera captures some alarming dissolutions.

"'You see how beat they are,' Sheldon Nadelman said of the patrons who managed to hike themselves up on the red and green bar stools, 'so you can imagine the ones that can't make it anymore.'

"Like the Greek, who drank Budweiser. Until he disappeared.

"'You're going to see all these people disappear from the street,' Mr. Nadelman says as the film opens. 'The street eats them alive.'"

In a 2014 New York Times article, David W. Dunlap discusses Sheldon Nadelman's 1970s street photography.

"The Death of Flair"

"By the mid-1990s, casual theme dining was becoming the butt of jokes. On a 1995 episode of 'The Simpsons,' saloonkeeper Moe opens a restaurant called Uncle Moe's Family Feedbag, specializing in deep-fried food. Moe wears a barbershop quartet costume with candy-striped shirt, bow-tie, suspenders, and a sleeve garter. In a commercial, Moe says, 'If I'm not smiling when your check comes, your meal's on me.'
"His décor includes ferns, a vintage gas pump, stained-glass windows, several taxidermy trophies including an alligator head wearing sunglasses and a cowboy hat, license plates, a '50s jukebox, and a 'Yield' traffic sign. 'Street signs! Indoors? Hmm, whatever!' Marge exclaims."

Lisa Hix at Collector's Weekly traces the rise and fall of antiques-stuffed casual restaurants.

"But You Have Heard of His Protege"

"Daniel was celebrated for founding his own distillery, in 1866, at the mouth of a cave spring in Lynchburg, Tenn.—the master stroke that separated his whiskey from the stiff competition of the time. But before he found fame, Daniel was orphaned at age 15, according to the history 'Dead Distillers,' recently published by the Brooklyn-based bourbon distillers Colin Spoelman and David Haskell. Homeless, Daniel was taken in by the Call family, who owned a small distillery. The man Call put in charge of the whiskey production was none other than Uncle Nearis."

Ben Guarino in The Washington Post writes about Nearis Green, the enslaved distiller who taught Jack Daniel.

"Los Angeles Is Hard to Get Right"

"Incorporating clips from a 1972 BBC documentary, 'City of Gold' likens its protagonist to the late English historian and critic Reyner Banham, a famously optimistic admirer of car-centric sprawl who referred to the freeway 'Autotopia' as one of the 'four ecologies' that make Los Angeles so unique.
"'City of Gold,' whose protagonist describes his understanding of the taco as 'overly romantic,' offers an almost utopian vision of urban life in which good food can temporarily transcend borders of race, class and gender."

Akiva Gottlieb in the Los Angeles Times talks with Laura Gabbert and Jerry Henry about their new documentary on food writer Jonathan Gold.

"Drunken, Costumed Debauchery May Be a Truer Celebration of Christmas Than Peaceful Family Gatherings"

"In Moore's telling, the social inversion long associated with the holidays remained, but instead of the rich providing gifts to poor, adults now gave gifts to kids. This helped solidify a new way to celebrate Christmas: neither a noisy party on the street nor a dignified visit to friends but rather a family holiday, overseen by the good-natured spirit of Santa Claus. The transformation did not happen overnight, but once introduced, this new version of Christmas spread fast. Merchants eagerly promoted it, seeing the obvious profit to be made in this peaceful, present-filled approach. The domestic celebration became the 'real Christmas' in newspaper reports, while the drunken street carousing was soon rebranded as 'crime.'"

Alex Palmer in Slate connects SantaCon to traditional Christmas observances.

"Report: Red Meat Linked To Contentedly Patting Belly"

"The report further revealed that the consumption of processed meats, such as bacon and sausage, was linked to a 100 percent chance of seconds."

From The Onion.