Yasmine, I'm told that you have a hot take about cooking pasta.
This is so cancelable.
Oh, I can't wait.
Let's hear it.
You can pressure cook pasta.
And you should pressure cook pasta if you are short on time.
And you know what?
It's pretty good.
There is a setting on Instant Pot under Pressure Cooker.
They gave a huge amount of money to the Trump campaign, by the way.
As a result, they were exempted from certain tariffs that were being levied about four months ago.
Are you being serious?
Yes, absolutely.
And they also released a special edition MAGA commemorative Instant Pot.
Stop.
And I assume the Trump-branded Instant Pot also has a setting for making Big Macs.
This is The Sporkful.
It's not for foodies, it's for eaters.
I'm Dan Pashman.
Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.
And this, my friends, is our salad spinner year in review edition.
We're covering the biggest, strangest, and most surprising food stories from the past year.
From the tariff roller coaster to Gen Z, making bartenders very upset to criminal masterminds stealing truckloads of food.
Ocean's Eleven style.
We'll also cover what we loved and hated in the world of food in 2025, with two very special guests who are both returning to our show.
First up, Helen Rosner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she covers food and writes restaurant reviews.
She also writes the Food Scene newsletter for the magazine.
Welcome back, Helen.
Thanks, Sam.
Hello.
And Yasmin Tayag is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers food, health policy and culture.
She's also the host of their new podcast, How to Age Up.
Welcome back, Yasmin.
Thanks for having me back.
Are you two both buckled up and ready to spin the spinner?
Yasmin, get in there.
Hold it up to the mic so the audio people can hear it too.
We're actually spinning a salad spinner.
Go.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
Look at that.
Spinning fast.
All right.
Some dry greens in there.
Let's get going here.
First up, the food story that has dominated headlines in 2025, tariffs.
Tariffs have affected a range of industries, including the world of food.
First off, let's talk big picture on these tariffs.
Now, before they were all announced, the general conventional wisdom that I was reading from economists was that These are going to make the cost of goods go up for the companies and they're going to pass that cost on to consumers and there will be inflation.
Yasmin, has that happened?
Yeah, it has.
But it didn't happen right away.
I feel like there was a period of time where people were like, oh, it's not actually so bad.
But now it just took a while.
It took a while in part because the retailers are shouldering a lot of the costs.
But it gets to a point where they just can't take on that cost anymore.
And then it starts trickling down to us.
Recently, President Trump reversed course and reduced tariffs on beef tomatoes, bananas and coffee in an effort to bring down prices, especially after the recent elections, which showed that affordability remains a top issue for Americans.
Now, I want to play a game with the two of you.
I'm going to name a food and I want you to tell me how you think the price of this item has changed in the past year.
So let's get started.
A pound of fresh ground beef.
How has, in dollars and cents, how much has one pound of fresh ground beef changed over the past year?
I said it went up $2.
Whoa.
I said $3.
Wow.
Okay.
We got to bring that.
It's only one year.
Okay.
The correct answer is 78 cents.
Whoa.
All right.
How about a dozen eggs?
That's just like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Up and down.
Yeah.
So this is a tough one.
All right, Yasmin, what's your answer?
$1.75.
$1.75.
I'm going to say down a dollar because it was such a big news story.
And I think Trump really campaigned on it.
You're closer, Helen.
It went down four cents.
Four cents?
Yeah.
Wow.
I mean, please feel free to track it.
I don't want to do it anymore.
All right, let's do one more.
One pound of roasted coffee.
Helen?
I'm going to say up three bucks.
I'm going to say up two bucks.
Technically, you went over, Helen, but you were closer.
Up $2.67 in one year for a pound of roasted coffee.
Okay.
I mean, that's a lot.
That's a lot.
That's crazy.
I mean, yeah.
That's especially for like an addictive daily substance.
This just goes to show how I just, I'm so cheap, everything seems so expensive to me.
But isn't that true for everyone?
Yeah.
We're all seeing it.
Now, one specific tariff that made big news recently, podcasting.
Pasta.
We got to talk about this.
The Wall Street Journal piece on this issue had the headline Italian pasta is poised to disappear from American grocery shelves, which I thought was an overly dramatic headline.
And then it got picked up by every Web site.
It's going to disappear.
It's going to disappear.
Well, you didn't use I don't think you use word disappear in your article.
I didn't say I was measured.
Thank you, Yasmin, for being responsible in your journalism, because you wrote a story about this.
Nice enough to interview me, among others.
What's the deal with these pasta tariffs?
So there's a proposed keyword, proposed 92 tariff on not all Italian imported pasta, but 13 manufacturers.
Right.
And there's some like behind the scenes drama where for years now the Commerce Department has been looking into whether these companies have been underpricing their pasta to make it ultra competitive with US pasta.
Yeah.
Right.
Dumping is what it's called.
Yeah.
And they're selling it for less in America than they sell it for in Italy.
Something like that.
And this is something they've been fighting for about for decades.
There was an issue about this in the 80s.
There was an issue in the 90s.
So it predates Trump.
So there is a new tariff on a bunch of imported goods from Europe that's 15 percent.
So all the pasta imported from Italy has 15 percent.
But these 13 specific companies— could face.
Could face an additional 92 tariff because they've been accused of dumping their pasta too cheaply in America.
Yes.
But the twist here is that it's a proposed 92% tariff.
According to the White House, the reason that the proposed tariff is so high is that the Italian companies were not sending complete data.
They weren't cooperating with the investigation.
And the White House said well, if they had sent more data we would have been able to recalculate and it might have been lower.
But they're not cooperating.
They're crying foul.
So it's 92 percent.
I was reading up on this when it happened in the 80s.
It was called the pasta wars.
Wow.
Because, like a lot of American companies were like basically petitioning the Commerce Department, saying we're getting screwed here.
You got to do something.
And it got very intense.
But, to be clear, one thing I think is important to add that got lost in some of the headlines is that the overwhelming majority of pasta sold in America is made in America.
Even Barilla makes almost all of its pasta sold in America.
In America, except for a couple of products.
Almost all of the private label store brand pastas you know.
Barilla and store brand together make up like 45 of the pasta sold in America.
Store brand is almost all made in America.
All right, should we move on?
Helen, you wanna give this salad spinner a spin?
Oh, sure, yeah.
That's nice.
That is nice.
Next story up, 2025 was a huge year for cargo theft.
Some big ticket items that were stolen include Meta, Ray-Ban sunglasses and Nike sneakers, but the number one target was food and beverages.
In February, 100,000 eggs. were stolen in Pennsylvania.
The next month, 80,000 pounds of beef were stolen in Tennessee.
Even Guy Fieri is not safe.
He had 24,000 bottles of his tequila lifted.
Now, technically that happened last year, but Guy just spoke about it publicly for the first time a few months ago on 60 Minutes.
We have a clip of that.
Well, when the president of your company calls you and says, we have a problem, what's up?
And he goes, you're not going to believe this, but we lost two truckloads of Santo tequila.
I said, well, wait, wait, wait, is this a hijacking?
I said, are the drivers okay?
I said is this a?
Because all my mind goes to is good fellas.
And you know that's what I'm thinking is happening.
My mind is swimming in.
Exactly how do you lose you know that many thousands of bottles of tequila.
I want a movie of this.
There could be a good one.
So, but yeah, so these are my questions too.
How, how do you do this?
So we looked into it.
Now here's how it works.
So cargo and shipping companies are doing more of their work electronically and remotely and they farm out a lot of the work.
So they post on some online clearing house like hey, we need someone to ship this thing from here to there.
And then some company takes that job.
What cargo thieves do is they create a fake trucking business.
They accept one of these shipping gigs.
And once they get the goods... they're gone in a whole other direction.
They never show up at the destination.
They even use fake GPS coordinates.
So companies think they're tracking the truck's progress, going to the right place.
Turns out the truck is in a whole other place.
My next question is what happens to the food then?
A lot of this food is sold in the black market.
It turns out it may even end up on grocery store shelves.
But in the case of the 100000 eggs stolen back in February, a police spokesperson says quote the thieves could sell them or use them for vandalizing purposes.
Now-
I don't know how you egg 100,000 houses without getting caught.
Yeah, also, that's a Halloween activity.
Right, right, right.
Helen and Yasmin, if you could steal a truckload of one food product, what would it be?
Olive oil.
Oh, that's such a good one.
So expensive now.
I was going to say Wegmans chicken bone broth, which is my single favorite grocery item in the history of the world.
And I spend so much money on it and I love it.
It's 12 bucks for a jar of three cups of the most intense, concentrated like mega collagenous chicken broth that tastes like you made it yourself.
And all that's in it is chicken and water.
And it has completely changed my relationship to making stock at home because I just don't know.
I just buy this amazing stuff and I would like all of it.
$12 is expensive for three cups.
$12 is expensive for three cups, but it's about triple or quadruple concentration.
And if you compare it to the aggregate cost of like buying all the chicken over the course of a month or two to make the stock.
Let alone the time.
The time and everything.
Anyway, is it a refrigerated truck and do I get to keep the refrigerated truck to keep the refrigerated items?
Right, like can you just park that truck on the street in Brooklyn?
On the street outside of my apartment building.
Right.
Whose truck is this?
Oh, that's my bone broth truck.
That's just where I keep my stock.
That's my broth truck.
For me, I'd probably go with steaks.
Not ground beef.
I mean, like, nice steaks, like vacuum sealed.
Yeah.
So they'll last a long time.
And then I would get, like, you know, 12 freezers in my basement and just fill them all with steaks.
And like anyone's coming by, hey, here, take some steaks for the road.
We're going to throw some steaks on the grill.
Hey, it's the mailman.
Have a steak, you know.
Just handing out steaks left and right.
We'd have steak every week.
It'd be awesome.
The dream.
The dream.
All right.
We're going to take a quick break.
When we come back, why bartenders hate Gen Z, new trends in cow-based wellness.
Super.
And we'll announce the winners of the first ever Silver Spork Awards.
That's going to be exciting.
Stick around.
Time to cook up some advertisements.
Welcome back to the Sporkful.
I'm Dan Pashman, and I have three quick but important things to tell you.
Number one.
We have Sporkful live tapings lined up for 2026 in Brooklyn March 19th with my special guest, Kenji Lopez-Alt, and May 1st in Boston guest to be announced.
Tickets and details at sporkful.com slash events.
Can't wait to see you there.
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We'll be setting up three lucky couples, sending you on dates, compliments of The Sporkful and recording the dates for the show.
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Third and final thing, make sure you stay tuned to the end of this show for a segment all about how to make your holiday baking and cooking even more delicious, brought to you by Better Than Bouillon.
All right, let's get back now to our salad spinner year in review.
I'm joined once again by Yasmin Tayag, staff writer at The Atlantic, and Helen Rosner, staff writer at The New Yorker.
Welcome back.
Can I spin the spinner?
Yes.
It's your spinner.
I never spun it myself.
I'm going to spin the spinner.
Here we go.
It's still going.
I'm just going to stop it.
All right.
More and more international restaurant chains are opening up shop in the US, often here in New York.
You've written about this, Helen.
I have.
As you say, there's Juicy Patties, a Jamaican fast food joint that launched several locations this year.
The first American.
Sanku Mayo Tsai I hope I'm saying that correctly a hot pot restaurant from Chengdu that has 4000 international locations, is now here in America.
And Mixu Ice Cream and Tea, a Chinese chain with more stores worldwide than McDonald's.
You focus in your piece on a new Japanese import called I'm Donut question mark.
It's I'm Donut space question mark.
I'm Donut space question mark which, I was informed by the copy editor who worked on my piece, nearly broke the New Yorker's entire editorial operation.
I mean, these are people that still put, what do you call those two?
Diureses, yeah.
Like the second O in the word cooperate.
Absolutely.
I mean, they do not F around in the New Yorker when it comes to punctuation.
And you put a space before a question mark just for the hell of it.
And the D in donut is lowercase as well.
So it's I'm lowercase D donut space question mark.
Which I just, oh, I love it.
It's a chaos energy.
It's extraordinary.
So this is a Japanese donut chain that opened up their first spot in America recently in Times Square.
You went, first off, how are the donuts?
I thought they were terrific.
They're a style of donut called nama, which is Japanese for raw.
The idea is they're so moist inside and so lightweight that it almost feels like you are eating uncooked donut dough.
And I just loved it.
I loved the texture.
I am a big sort of ultra lightweight person.
Krispy Kreme-style donut person, and these are a little bit denser than that, but it really spoke to me and they're just—I love them.
You said there's some surprising ingredient in them?
It was like squash or something?
Yeah, they have kabocha squash.
In the batter of the donut.
Yeah, and if you think about, like—
So it's not like there's pieces of squash.
No, no.
But if you think about, for example, like a potato bun on a burger right, incorporating these starchy root vegetables into a dough can create a really squishy lovely, lightweight texture.
So incorporating kabocha squash, and it also gives the dough in the versions that don't have additional flavorings added, like the cocoa ones or the matcha ones, which are bright green, it gives the dough this amazing sunny yellow color from the squash.
So they just are beautiful to look at, and they look delicious, which helps them taste delicious.
But it's a long line for this place.
Depending on the time of day, yeah.
You know, I went on a weekday morning, and it was pouring rain, and I walked right in.
And then I went on a weekend afternoon on a beautiful sunny day, and I was one of probably 150 tourists.
Oh, my God.
Like in a winding line of stanchions.
Right.
If someone had to wait that long, would you recommend them waiting?
I don't think anyone should wait that long for anything, literally anything.
Yeah, I agree.
Like nothing, like not even like medical care.
Like, no.
No.
You know, if you have a good book that you're reading and you'd otherwise spend that hour and a half just sitting on your butt reading your book, sure spend it waiting in a line.
Or if it's your job.
Or if it's your job, as is my case.
I was paid to stand in the line, so I was happy to do it.
Had you heard of it before it opened?
So I hadn't.
There are only three or four total locations of I'm Donut.
There are three, I think, in Japan, and this is the fourth location here in New York.
It's also very much speaking to a kind of social media influencer-y, tourist-y kind of experiential audience which is different from something like Juicy Patties or Mixway or other international chains like that which are, I think, not really trying to play the social media influencer game, but are just
Speaking to like the comfort nostalgia, sense of home and deliciousness of the sort of their originating culture.
Right.
But one thing I think is interesting about that and this larger phenomenon, is that one of these places opens up in America.
I'm sure there's some portion of people who have eaten it in its home country.
And so for them, there's nostalgia.
There's a cultural connection.
But for them to succeed, they have to bring in people beyond that group.
And oftentimes the food that they're known for making is a food that we already have a lot of in America.
And so it's not like we don't have this food, and it's not like we don't even have good versions of it.
And yet, when one of these places, this international places, opens in America, it creates all this buzz and all this excitement, even for people who had never heard of it before.
Maybe they're sort of selling a different type of authenticity.
We tend to think of quote unquote authenticity as being like oh, this is like a really authentic rendition of this cuisine or this dish, or.
But when you're talking like a chain that is hugely popular in its home country, then it sort of feels like you're connecting with those people in the present day.
Yeah.
In a way like, oh, like if I was in China, this is what I would eat.
Yeah.
You know, and it's a different kind of like authentic experience in that sense.
That's exactly right.
I think it really like explodes outward the parameters of what you might think authenticity is.
Because, exactly as you said, I think that authenticity – like the big trap of authenticity is that it almost always exists in the past.
And especially when we're talking about sort of food outside of the scope of like, the white American experience.
It is often – authenticity can be frozen when – the white American gaze turned onto that culture right.
Like the moment that something became known or like was published in a big food magazine or whatever that becomes locked in as like the version of this culture's food.
And that can be really diminishing.
So yeah, it's really cool and awesome.
So I recently published a piece about the rise of the Filipino fast food chain Jollibee here in America.
I love Jollibee.
I'm not just saying this because I'm Filipino.
Like, the fried chicken is so good.
It's been voted, like, best fast-food fried chicken by Eater, all of these, like, big publications.
It's really good.
It's, like, very successful among non-Filipinos in America.
They're, like, rapidly expanding across the country.
It's just different enough.
It's just different enough to a non-Filipino American.
It feels familiar.
It's like, okay, fried chicken, hamburger, sure.
But it has that, like, novelty aspect.
And what I think is so interesting is that the whole reason that Jollibee exists is because America shoved its food culture onto the Philippines when it colonized the Philippines.
And the people there were just like cool, we'll take this, this and this part, but then we're going to like add our very extreme palate onto it.
And so then you get like sweet spaghetti and like insanely like umami fried chicken.
And I traveled to the Philippines to the commissary where all of the sauce is made.
And I saw it bubbling in these like vats as big as hot tubs.
And you can smell, there's bell peppers in there.
There's a lot of onions.
Do they make that sauce in the Philippines and ship it to the American locations, or do they make it in America?
No, they make it in America.
But there is one Jollibee product that they do only make in the Philippines, and it's the peach mango pies.
They make them at that one commissary that I visited because they insist on using Philippine mangoes.
And then they ship those like all over the world.
They make like 100,000 a day.
This is going to be our cargo theft.
We're going to intercept one of those ships.
We all seem to work together on this.
Let's put together a heist crew.
What are each of your specialties?
I'm the explosives guy.
I'm the smooth talking.
Yes.
I'm George Clooney.
You're on George Clooney.
I want to be the, I want to be like the tech person who hacks into the mainframe.
Says, I'm in.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Spectacular.
We're going to do this.
We're going to divert that ship.
That's right.
Full of peach mango.
Oh, man.
Now, this movie would be good.
And then I don't know what we're going to do with the pies, but we'll have them.
We're going to eat them, Helen.
We'll throw them at people's houses instead of eggs.
Vandalism.
All right.
Let's spin the spinner again.
Okay.
All right, Yasmin, your turn.
Spin the spinner.
Okay.
It's time now for the lightning round.
Sal, it's been a lightning round.
We're going to tick through some notable stories of 2025.
You ready?
Yeah.
First up, dynamic pricing may be coming for food.
Dynamic pricing, of course, is where the cost of a good changes over time.
We all see this with airfare, hotels, you know, busy times, it's more expensive.
Now restaurants may be interested according to food and wine.
Some restaurants are exploring the idea of bringing dynamic pricing into restaurant reservations.
So you would pay more for a reservation at an optimal time, or maybe even pay more for your ideal table.
Within the restaurant, they're also considering doing this with menu prices.
Aaron Bludorn, executive chef and partner of several Houston restaurants, including Bludorn and Navy Blue, envisions a day when restaurants use market data and AI generated research to give chefs and restaurant owners up to the minute data on where the competition's pricing is, so the place knows what the market can withstand.
Thoughts? this already kind of exists.
Lots of restaurants charge different prices for lunch than they do for dinner.
True.
And this is a very, very deep cut, but I remember when TOC, the reservation platform, was launched, maybe 15 years ago, by Nick Kakonis, who at the time was the financial side of the Alinea Group.
The whole premise of that platform was that restaurants would be able to charge full ticket prices.
You'd pay up front for your meal when you buy it, and it was sort of modeled on theater pricing.
And They were charging different amounts for like dinner on a Tuesday versus dinner on a Saturday.
So on one level, I feel like this is not new.
And I think that's still true for some of these super high end places where you're like you're paying in advance per head.
It's like buying a ticket.
And the price does change depending on the day of the week.
The second thought that I have about this is that is morally reprehensible.
And I hope that you get eaten by a lion.
Like that sucks and it's shitty and it's bad for everybody.
We'll keep it moving in the lightning round here.
Next up.
Gen Z is behaving badly at bars.
According to the San Francisco Standard, they're going in, sitting down, and not ordering anything.
Says one bartender, you have to go up and explain that they have to buy something.
It's embarrassing.
Or as my daughters would say, embarrassing.
Sometimes these Gen Z people are getting one drink to share.
No.
One more complaint from bartenders about Gen Z is they don't open tabs.
They pay for every round and they always use a credit card.
So that, first off, slows down bartenders because they got to run these cards constantly.
It's also not great for the bars, because the place gets hit with more charges every time a credit card is run.
Yasmin, thoughts on Gen Z and drinking?
As someone who is an elder millennial, who has tried to get my Gen Z coworkers to go drinking with me and felt like an alcoholic because they only have one drink, I like understand why this is happening.
I remember reading in one of these stories about you know Gen Z's bad bar behavior that no one taught them how to be a barfly.
I think that's real.
I think that, like, that barfly culture that, you know, I'm looping you in with me.
Yeah, no, I'm totally with you.
And it's just nonexistent.
And I understand the reasons why.
Like, drinking feels bad.
Now that I'm almost 40, I too am buying one drink and closing my tab in an effort to drink less.
Drinks are expensive.
So I understand it now.
It makes me sad that they won't experience the joys that come with opening a bar tab and keeping it open for the end of the night.
I think, though, going to a bar and not ordering anything, that's the thing.
That's just crazy.
Like I am—I was—like my hackles were raised at this idea of like, condemning an entire generation right.
I was like we're not going to make—like it's so fun to like crap on Gen Z, Like what have they ever done?
Like, they didn't ask to be born.
But, like—
But then when you said they just sit in a bar and they don't order drinks, or like they share one, like that's.
And I'm not talking about one of these giant coconuts with four straws in it.
No, no.
Like that I think is, you should know that you are like minor villain behavior if you're doing that.
I would just say that I'm with you Helen, in the sense that I don't want to condemn all of Gen Z.
I actually will always stand up for younger generations because I feel like older generations complaining about younger generations is just the most tired, trite thing.
And by the way, I'm with them on not opening a tab.
I quit opening tabs at bars a long time ago because 75% of the time I forget my credit card there.
I go home and I got to go back the next day.
So for that reason, I pay for each round.
But yes, you need to order something.
All right, next up in the lightning round.
In an era where everyone seems to be mainlining protein, dairy is making a huge comeback.
People are drinking more milk because it's high in protein and not processed like protein powder.
And listen to this.
Cows are in demand in other ways.
Rendered beef fat, a.k.a. beef tallow, has come back into fashion.
That's partly because of the same movement away from processed foods, partly because of maha suspicions of seed oils.
But now there's a new development.
There's a growing trend of people on TikTok promoting beef tallow moisturizer.
Yasmin, you covered this.
What's the deal?
Yeah, I mean it's all kind of tied up with the push to like more natural products, more natural foods.
And you know the same line of thinking that suggests that beef tallow French fries are healthier than seed oil French fries, because beef tallow is natural right.
Also suggests that as is seed oil.
I get very high up about this.
It drives me nuts.
Same thinking.
Why put chemical moisturizer on your face when you could just put rendered cow fat, which is not made of chemicals at all?
Did you try this, Yasmin, for your story?
Yeah.
I did not.
The skin can't.
You have amazing skin.
I know.
I don't need the view.
But I did smell a beef tallow moisturizer.
And you know what?
They say, oh, it doesn't smell like beef.
It smells like a steak.
It really does.
It smells like a steak with like some lavender on it.
Oh, man.
If my wife put that on before bed, she'd wake up missing a finger.
So I've used beef towel moisturizer.
Oh, my God.
I have, like, incredibly dry skin and will try anything that promises to fix it.
And for about a week I slept with beef towel moisturizer on my hands under gloves, because I didn't want to get beef fat all over my bedsheets.
And it was fine.
It was a fine moisturizer.
I did not think it was especially better than many of the other ones that I've used.
Did it make you hungry?
Yes, but I'm always hungry.
All right, last item in the lightning round. dinosaur time.
Have you heard about this?
We all know, of course, leafy greens like kale and spinach are good for us, but they can be a tough sell on the deliciousness front, let's face it, which is probably why only one in 10 Americans gets the recommended daily serving of veggies, which is two to four cups per day.
Now people on TikTok have developed a new way to get all your veggies, and it's called dinosaur time.
We have a clip.
Dinosaur time.
So I thought I'd take this opportunity and answer some frequently asked questions.
This woman just took a softball-sized ball of spinach and shoved it into her face.
I both love this and think it's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Like, simultaneously, I want to do it, and I hate it.
And I love it.
Is the objective just to eat your spinach?
It's to get as many vegetables in your body.
But rather than having to try to cook it or season it or make it palatable, you're just going to like.
Crush it up into a ball and shove it in your face.
And that way in 45 seconds, you just got your day's worth of vegetables.
I literally want to... I want to go home.
I want to put on the Jurassic Park soundtrack.
And I want to shove spinach in my mouth.
You should cover yourself in beef tallow moisturizer first.
God, then the predators will really want me.
When you said dinosaur time, I thought it was going to be about like eating raw meat.
Right.
I thought it was going to be about dinosaur kale.
Delicious.
Yasmin, thoughts on this trend?
I hate this idea that vegetables are hard to make palatable.
Yeah.
It's like...
Olive oil, salt, a little lemon.
Most vegetables, that's going to be delicious.
It's not hard.
Why do that?
Right.
Why?
It's like...
Not fun or tasty or much easier to eat.
Adding things like oil to things like spinach and kale make them easier to digest.
That's true.
Like eating these things.
If you're going to eat them raw, which you don't have to do, it helps you absorb the nutrients a lot better.
And in cruciferous vegetables like kale, it can actually give you like a lot of gassiness and bloating and digestive distress if you eat them raw without neutralizing some of these enzymes.
And olive oil helps do that.
So like there are reasons we cook food.
All right.
I'll take the liberty of spinning the spinner one more time.
Now we're getting to the grand finale of our year in review, and this is big.
This is brand new debut.
I'm so excited that two of you are here for this.
It is the first ever Silver Spork Awards.
And just like real silver, these awards may tarnish some people's reputations.
That's right.
We're coming in hot.
The first category in the Silver Spork Awards, Most Annoying Food Trend of 2025.
We each get to give out an award in each category.
Yasmin, who are you going to give your trophy for Most Annoying Food Trend of 2025 to?
I'm giving it to a what?
And it is Ube in everything.
Ube, for those who don't know, like the purple yam.
I'm Filipino.
That is where ube comes from.
Most of the ube you see at Trader Joe's, like they sell cookies, they sell pancakes.
It's like all over.
You get ube lattes.
Ice cream.
It's not real.
That's extract and food coloring.
It does not taste like real ube.
It is overplayed and it is giving a bad name to the true ube.
So either do it right or don't do it at all.
I love that.
I like that.
That's a good silver spork.
Helen?
I would like to give this award to the act of scraping a knife against a cooked food to show how crispy it is.
That's a good one.
Which I think needs to be shot into the sun.
That's so good.
I hate that so much.
Are you an ASMR fan in general?
It does nothing for me.
I get it as a thing, but I don't have the brain crawlies that some people get from that.
I don't even mind nails on a chalkboard.
I don't want to say it's like nails on a chalkboard for me, because that's not an annoying sound to me.
This.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
It just makes me—it makes me dislike you.
It makes me dislike the person doing it.
The food looks great.
I love how crispy it is.
You die.
I'm going to give my Silver Spork Award to protein in this category.
Come on.
I mean, we touched on this a little bit earlier, but like—
It's just ridiculous.
Like any food that's high in protein, everybody wants.
People are just like injecting protein into their veins.
They're eating powders.
It's like there's no amount of protein.
Like yes, I understand that protein is good for you and it's good to get a certain amount of protein.
And maybe some people need a little more.
But just this idea that there's no such thing as too much, essentially like.
Every one of these diet fads that takes something to such an extreme always ends up crashing and burning.
There's a secret part of me, that kind of hopes.
They discover that if you have like 10 times the recommended daily allowance of protein, that like something bad happens to you, maybe like your balls shrink.
Can I share a protein story?
Please.
This happened to me yesterday.
I was at the grocery store.
My family eats a lot of oatmeal and we usually buy Bob's Red Mill brand oatmeal for arbitrary reasons.
We love Bob's Red Mill.
Yeah.
And next to my usual oatmeal on the shelf was protein oatmeal by Bob's Red Mill.
And I was looking at it and do you know what the ingredients were in the Bob's Red Mill protein oatmeal?
Oatmeal plus protein powder?
Oatmeal.
It is one ingredient.
The one ingredient is whole grain oatmeal.
Is it like a special kind?
It's the same thing.
Did you compare the protein content to the other Bob's Red Mill oatmeal?
It is the same product.
It just says the word protein on it because oatmeal has a lot of protein.
Well, that makes me extra glad that I'm giving my Silver Spork Award to protein.
That's a good one.
Next category, favorite social media or online food person of 2025.
Helen.
Oh, my gosh.
My all-time favorite social media food person is Black Forager, Alexis Nicole Nelson.
I just love her.
And I feel like whenever I watch her content, I learn so much about acorns.
I now know so much about acorns.
I can be in a horrible mood and one of her TikToks will show up on my phone and I feel in love with the world again.
She's so joyful.
She's so joyful, and she's so funny.
And the way that she relates to food and the way that— that she lives with food as a person who forages, is just incredible to me.
I love it.
Yasmin, who are you giving your Silver Spork Award for favorite social media or online food person of 2025 to?
I'm a little biased.
This is someone I know.
She goes by CrispyEgg420.
She's the best.
Bettina.
Bettina Makalinta.
We've had her on the show.
I mean, I love her writing.
She's great.
She's so good.
And her Instagram is like.
I think her tagline is no recipes, just vibes, which is what I want as a food media consumer.
Like, I already know how to cook.
I don't really want this.
And also, like, who's cooking 99.9% of these videos?
And also, what she cooks is perfect.
It's perfect.
It's like...
Elevated, normal person food.
Just like many variations on beans and greens and toast, but so beautiful.
Like, throw some miso on there.
She single-handedly got me into tofu.
I'm now obsessed with tofu.
She's very good at tofu.
I spent 40 years of life not understanding tofu.
And then Bettina She can make it crispy and she doesn't do the knife thing.
Yeah.
Right.
I love both of those.
I'm going to give my award to Carolina Gellin who, I will be honest, when she first came on the scene and I started seeing some of her videos, I didn't want to like her.
Because at first blush, she seemed like...
A lot of food recipe influencer types, like the videos are very fast cut.
She may occasionally scrape a knife against something.
You see all the all the ingredients going into the bowl super fast.
It always looks incredible.
There's a lot of sunlight.
And I just it was like sort of gut reaction, like oh, she's another one of 100 million people doing this.
But.
Eventually, I started following her because some of the things caught my eye.
And I think she's really creative.
I think a lot of her recipes are interesting and different.
And actually, she is contributing something.
That's my biggest problem with a lot of these food influencers is that they're all style and no substance.
Their recipes are totally trite.
Half of them are getting by on being conventionally attractive.
Like all these bros were like shirtless and they're wearing an apron and they're shirtless.
I was too quick. to assume that Carolina belonged in that category.
And I have since come around to that.
I think she does have, unlike a lot of those people, she has her own style.
She has her own voice.
There are things that I feel like this is distinctly the kind of thing that she would do.
And I always respect that by anybody in any creative pursuit.
So Carolina Gellin.
Final category for the Silver Sporks.
Food trend you want to see in 2026.
Yasmin.
I want the whole seed oil obsession to go away.
Not likely, but great.
Yeah.
It's gone too far.
When Sweetgreen adopted the no seed oil policy, I was like, come on.
Yeah.
Come on.
It turns me off a restaurant.
Oh, 100%.
So much.
I don't want to eat at Sweetgreen anymore.
Like, I love a beef tallow french fry.
Like, I love it.
Sure.
But I don't want you to give that to me because of some pseudoscience about the health properties of
I want it because it tastes good.
Yeah.
Helen, who gets your award?
I would like to see more dinner-only restaurants having daytime, particularly breakfast pop-ups that are sort of sustained.
Right.
This is a trend.
I love this.
Because, like places that only are open for dinner, like they're paying for the rent for that space.
Yeah.
24-7.
The kitchen is there.
The space is there.
They're only making money a few hours a day.
So they started bringing in other chefs, other creative people, to do like a limited lunch thing in the same space.
It's so wonderful.
There's a restaurant that I really love in Brooklyn called Strange Delight.
Hey, Hamel Whaley's place.
And it's wonderful.
It's like, spectacular New Orleans inspired food.
And they have started bringing in.
They brought in for like a limited run and they've just extended it, which is thrilling to me.
The chef, Amanda Perdomo, who works at other restaurants and is also a brilliant person, has a cafe within the restaurant called Amanda's Rise and Shine.
That is a breakfast and lunch cafe.
And it's just genius.
I just it feels so community minded and neighborhood creating and such a way of like sharing the wealth and helping solve some of the overhead issues that can arise for like, young cooks who are starting out or people who are trying to really get their footing with their brand building and things like that.
I love it.
It almost serves some of the same purpose that, like food trucks, have served in the past, of like being a better, like a lower barrier to entry.
And also, like you said, like if it can help restaurants to keep their heads above water, then great.
My food trend that I want to see in 2026, early bird specials.
Oh, hell yeah.
Bring those back.
This is like the dynamic pricing we were talking about.
This is what dynamic pricing should be.
Right, exactly.
I like to eat early.
I don't like going to bed full.
If they didn't frame dynamic pricing, as we're going to raise the prices during certain times, and instead framed it as we're going to give you a discount.
If you come at the off hours, it would sound so much more positive and I would love it.
So like maybe in South Florida early bird specials never went anywhere, but I haven't seen many around where I live and I want early bird specials.
Happy hour for dinner.
Yes.
Yes.
The other thing I love about early bird specials, which I would also love to see more of, is I love set menus.
Not like you have no choice, but menus where the price includes everything.
One thing that's great to me about an early bird special in Florida, which I used to partake of a lot with my grandparents when I was a kid, is that it would be a cup of soup.
Your choice of entree.
It came with a side salad and then a little cup of ice cream and a cup of coffee.
And I was like, I want more of that.
I love it when a restaurant is just all in.
It's like you pick your entree, however much it is, and it comes with the rest of the meal.
Yeah.
All right.
Last thing here, as we move towards the end of 2025, I have asked both of you to bring me your New Year's food resolutions.
Now, every year around this time, I ask our listeners for their New Year's food resolutions.
This is also a great opportunity for me to remind listeners that the deadline is approaching for you to send in your New Year's food resolutions for our year-end spectacular episode, when I will also be revealing my New Year's food resolutions.
So listen up, folks.
Record a voice memo with your first name and location and tell me what food do you resolve to eat more of in the new year and why?
Send it to me at hello at sporkfulcom by December 16th and you might hear yourself right here on our year-end spectacular.
And ahead of that, Yasmin and Helen, I'm asking each of you what food do you resolve to eat more of in the new year, and why?
Me first.
I'm resolving to eat more salad.
And I don't mean this in a like health kick, new year, new you kind of way.
I love conceptually the concept of salad.
I love crunchy things in dressing.
But I think that salad actually is a quite labor-intensive food to make.
To like do a great salad, you have to have a lot of components at the ready, which means –
You know, if you want to have roasted beets in your salad, you have to have roasted beets a couple days ago and have it in your fridge.
And by committing to salad in 2026, I think I'm committing to an entire process that I'm really excited about, about shopping a little differently, prepping a little differently, having things ready to go in my fridge nut mixes, roasted veggies, interesting things herbs, potato chips, dressings and like thinking like a salad.
I love that.
Yasmin, year-end food resolution for the next year.
This will not sound like a health thing, but it is a health thing.
I'm going to eat more MSG.
Yes.
Okay.
I have high blood pressure and I've been told to eat less salt.
MSG, for those of you who don't know, not bad for you.
Nothing about it is making you sick.
We've covered this in this program 100%.
This is a safe space for MSG.
Yes.
I love MSG.
You know, I can take out half my salt, put MSG instead.
It'll still be flavorful and hopefully my blood pressure will go down.
Hopefully.
Just the other day I made, I got an email from the New York Times saying this coconut curry chickpea recipe is like one of our most popular amazing recipes of all time.
So I said, well, I guess I got to try it.
So I cooked it up.
And frankly, it was kind of bland.
I've made that.
It's kind of bland.
Yeah.
So I added a lot more salt than it called for.
It was still kind of bland.
So I pulled out my MSG.
Hit it with the MSG.
Came out delicious.
It's the best.
It's right there next to my salt and pepper and olive oil.
I've made it a main content.
I'm going to a cookie swap tonight, and I put a little bit in my cookie.
Ooh.
Interesting.
Yep.
Well, you want to hear my New Year's food resolution?
Yes.
Then you'll have to tune in next week to the Spork Bowl.
Oh, Dan.
Oh, yeah.
And listeners, remember, send me your New Year's food resolutions to hello at sporkful.com.
Get them in by December 16th.
You may hear yourself on the show.
Helen Rosner, thank you so much.
Staff writer at The New Yorker.
Sign up for her newsletter, The Food Scene.
We'll put a link in the show description.
Thank you, Helen.
Thanks for having me.
And Yasmin Tayag, staff writer at The Atlantic.
Make sure to check out her podcast, How to Age Up.
Thanks, Yasmin.
Thanks for having me.
And Happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
Next week on the show, as I said, it's our big New Year's food resolution show.
What food will I resolve to eat more of in the new year?
I think I know what it is.
I'll tell you next week.
While you're waiting for that one, check out last week's show.
I talked with Samin Nastrat, who's released her second cookbook, Good Things.
Her first book, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, was a smash hit.
But even though she got the success she'd been working so hard to achieve, there was still a lot more she had to face.
We talk about how dealing with that led her to her new cookbook, in which she does something she swore she'd never do.
Give us recipes.
That episode's up now.
Check it out.
And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app?
Yes, the SiriusXM app.
It has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage.
Does your podcasting app have that?
And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more.
It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one.
And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to SiriusXMcom slash Sporkful.
This episode was produced by me, along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres O'Hara.
It was edited by Camille Stanley.
Our engineer is Jared O'Connell.
Our interns are Morgan Johnson and Jasmine Sutherland.
Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of SiriusXM Podcasts.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
I'm Jamie Edelman from Las Vegas Nevada, reminding you to eat more, eat better and eat more better.
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