For over a century, commercial food packaging has trained us to rely on an reliable mental rule: If it comes sealed inside a metal can, you can store it in the pantry or cupboard. Metal cans are supposed to be culinary time capsules. Except around the holidays, an alarming number of home cooks run into … Read more
When you’re on a budget, there’s no mistaking the pull of the lower six inches of the cereal aisle. Above, at eye level, beautiful boxes of Lucky Charms, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Honey Nut Cheerios stand neatly aligned like hardcovers in a library, commanding six or seven dollars for just twelve ounces. But look down … Read more
The real origin of blue raspberry is the subject of a lot of misinformation. Every kid who grew up eating sour blue raspberry candies or drinking Blue Raspberry Slurpees eventually hit the same wall of childhood skepticism. “Wait a minute, raspberries aren’t blue.” It’s one of the few culinary fictions that almost everyone notices, yet … Read more
Almost everyone remembers the grocery store speech, even if families disagreed on how to give it. Depending on where and how you grew up, consumer frugality took on different forms. In genuinely poor rural households, store brands were often viewed with deep suspicion. When every dollar counted, buying an unproven off-brand was an unacceptable gamble. … Read more
There has long been a sense of humiliation baked into how most of us remember buying Little Debbie snack cakes. Instead of finding them in the primary bakery aisle next to the rows of Wonder Bread and Entenmann’s, they’re often marooned on the grocery store perimeter. They sit stacked in freestanding corrugated cardboard shippers, crammed … Read more
If you have driven the turnpikes of the Northeast or Midwest, you’ve probably repeated the same routine many times. You pull off the highway into a big service plaza, fill your tank, grab a burger from a fast-food court, pick up a coffee, and merge back onto the road without ever crossing an intersection or … Read more