Here’s what you might have missed

This is actually why chocolate is so bad now: New York’s Rachel Handler has one of those names like Caity Weaver: You see it, you read. (Perhaps you recall her piece about The Great Bucatini Shortage of 2020?) The magazine published Handler’s latest as its new cover story: a lengthy but completely worthwhile investigation of why Reese’s Cups and so many other chocolate candies just don’t taste as good anymore. (Even the grandson of the Reese’s inventor agrees: He made headlines for saying as such earlier this year.) Handler’s story is nominally about chocolate and the corporations that make it, but it’s really about enshittification, the “molten belly of our crumbling world,” and why everything feels worse now. (A small boon: At least the Trader Joe’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups are still pretty good.)
The wildest read of the week requires a content warning for gnarly discussions of animal guts: For the New York Times, Sophie Haigney explored the world of “dark nutrition,” a term she uses to refer to the growing group of Americans rejecting “everything they’ve been taught about food.” Raw milk is just the tip of the iceberg, with its comparatively normie MAHA adherents; Haigney embeds with extremists eating raw buffalo brains and roadkill who simultaneously deem cooked vegetables toxic, often in an attempt to take control of chronic pain or other illnesses, while growing increasingly skeptical of mainstream medical and scientific establishments. Watch the linked Instagram videos at your own risk!
Men have taken over the household cooking, claims Slate: According to writer Luke Winkie, “...I would argue that most of the millennial men I know — urban-dwelling, enmeshed in a long-term relationship, in possession of a cushy email job — handle the bulk of the cooking labor in their personal lives. It’s one of the great societal inversions of the 21st century. At long last, the kitchen is the husband’s domain.” While the study cited found that the number of men who were home cooks jumped from 36 percent to 52 percent from 2003 to 2023, Winkie’s conclusion seems to mostly be based on vibes (i.e., talking to his friends).
The James Beard Foundation announced a new category recognizing video creators: This year’s media awards, whose winners will be revealed in June, will now consider video creators in a category called “Food Culture (Short-Form).” Videos featuring recommendations, reviews, dining experiences or trends will be eligible. It’s a major step in recognizing the changing nexus of power in food media, with more and more people encountering information about food via video versus written formats. In 2022, the foundation first added a category recognizing social media accounts.
The Michelin Guide announced its newest selections for the American South: Hot on the heels of allegations that it used AI to write parts of its Texas guide, Michelin published its new selections for the South on Wednesday. Notably, Atlanta’s So Fox, which recently received a very positive review from the NYT’s Tejal Rao, earned one star, despite having just opened in July. The acclaimed Dakar NOLA in New Orleans (a 2023 Eater Best New Restaurant) also earned one star, as did Uberto in Gay, Georgia.
Can Keith McNally’s son run a good restaurant? The main thing I’ve heard about George McNally’s New York City restaurant Faux is that it’s sceney (as is to be expected) but also sloppy, though in a way that some people seem to find endearing. The New Yorker’s Helen Rosner published her review of it on Sunday and leaned mostly in the latter direction. “The effect is of a restaurant trying, with golden-retriever eagerness, to be a really good, maybe all-time restaurant, and I can hardly bring myself to care that it doesn’t remotely pull it off,” she writes. Paired with that Ligaya Mishan review of Bistrot Ha, it’s another interesting take on how critics weigh ambition versus execution.
Alison Roman’s jarred tomato sauce is no longer “Very Good”: The cookbook author’s sauce line, A Very Good Tomato Sauce, has been renamed Roman’s, partially in an attempt to make it seem more like a “real-deal company,” she wrote. Expect to see a lot more of it: The sauce is now available through Faire, the wholesale platform that provides prospective shoppy-shop owners with what’s essentially a starter pack of “cool” brands. That being said, the sauce came in 11 out of 12 in Wirecutter’s recent blind taste-test of tomato sauces.
This farmers market cooperative in Canada banned generative AI: It prohibits AI-generated signage as well as prints, cards, and stickers, in order to preserve the group’s general “make it, bake it, or grow it” policy.