This Week on Heated with Mark Bittman
What you may have missed
- The hilarious and charming Samantha Irby gifts us with her version of What I Eat:
The last thing I need to feel while sprinkling crushed Bugles over a room-temperature Lean Cuisine and reading a fancy-food article online is worse; the carcinogens in my gas-station corn dog are making me feel bad enough.
2. Don’t miss this tribute to the Queen of Cake, an early advocate of procrastibaking, who died on Thursday. Here’s a slice of her wit:
I heard a doctor talking on television about the dangers of stress. It can kill you. It can cause a heart attack or a stroke. The doctor listed ways of coping with stress. Exercise. Diet. Yoga. Take a walk.
I yelled, “Bake cookies.”
3. Should you find yourself at the grocery store this week, as Rebecca Flint Marx has pointed out, the bulk aisle is the section that can get a little weird.
“And as anyone who frequents the bulk aisle knows, it operates on its own terms. People do things in bulk that they don’t or can’t do in other parts of the grocery store, whether it’s shoveling psyllium husk into biodegradable bags or picking through bins of granola with their bare fingers.”
4. Way better food delivered the office — and better pay for the folks making it? Sign us up.
Launched in 2016, Hungry connects local chefs to big office orders. Initially limited to just the D.C. metro area, the company expanded to Philadelphia in August and last month added Atlanta to the line-up; it will debut in Boston over the summer. In addition to the investments from Usher and Jay-Z, Tom Colicchio, Ming Tsai, and former Whole Foods CEO, Walter Robb, have chipped in to help the company raise a total of $12.5 million in financing since it started.
5. Mark is super committed this season when it comes to growing his own food, which has compelled him to deal with himself, he says, for better or worse.
When I’m gardening, I’m more aware that I can be obsessive, creative, disorganized, lazy, indifferent, and sometimes mindful — which I, in turn, love or loathe about myself. When I feel laziness is diminishing my accomplishments, I’m self-deprecating; when a laid-back attitude allows me to enjoy gardening without becoming a maniac, I’m glad about that.
6. Toronto writer Corey Mintz writes an homage to Toronto’s Kensington Market, a neighborhood teeming with food options and scenes that “are too whimsical, even for rom-com standards.” Because of development, it’s also changing fast.
Over the last 20 years, the retail food component of Kensington has both dwindled and upscaled. Just fifteen years ago there were five fishmongers on Baldwin Street; now there are three. There was once a dozen butcher shops, each catering to specific, cultural expectations; now there are two. Residential real estate, facing the same pressures, has been devastated in recent years by home-sharing platforms like Airbnb, which have incentivized the transformation of student housing (the University of Toronto is a five-minute walk) into ghost hotels.
That’s all for now and thanks for reading. See you here next week and drop us a line of what you’d like to see more of from us at heatedbybittman@gmail.com.
