Author: Jawdah Hannad Basara

A woman packing her basket with tomatoes, a bunch of flat-leaf parsley, a bottle of olive oil, and perhaps some dried lentils is an ordinary sight when you walk into a grocery store on a Tuesday afternoon in Athens or coastal Sicily. No powdered protein. There are no low-fat alternatives with ingredient lists longer than your arm. She is practically mindlessly adhering to the diet that nutritionists have been attempting to explain to the rest of the world for decades. Because it doesn’t require you to track anything, the Mediterranean diet is fundamentally a beginner-friendly eating style. No calorie spreadsheets,…

In New York City, there are more than 400 Indian eateries. From the steam-fogged windows of Jackson Heights curry houses to the candlelit dining rooms of Midtown, that number alone should give you an idea of how deeply South Asian cuisine has ingrained itself into this city’s culinary culture. Nevertheless, only one of those more than four hundred eateries has a Michelin star. One. If you’ve passed Semma on a Tuesday night without a reservation, you already know that the door isn’t opening for you. Semma is located at 60 Greenwich Avenue in the West Village. Semma has persuaded the…

Reaching into the freezer for a dairy-free treat and briefly wondering if there might be a rock inside is incredibly unsettling. This week, Danone USA voluntarily recalled its So Delicious Dairy Free® Salted Caramel Cluster Non-Dairy Frozen Dessert pints, putting thousands of American consumers in that predicament. The explanation is that the cashew pieces may be contaminated with tiny stones and other hard foreign objects. It’s not precisely what you would anticipate crunching into on a Tuesday night. The fact that this recall isn’t the first time makes it especially noticeable and, to be honest, a little difficult to ignore.…

There might still be a wedge of Cabricharme in a cheese drawer somewhere in a kitchen in New Jersey, California, or Rhode Island, wrapped in the kind of seemingly unremarkable plastic and scale-label packaging. A best-by date of early October is indicated on the label. It makes no mention of eggs. The FDA and Whole Foods Market claim that this is the issue. Fromagerie Coop de Mean Cabri charmer cheese, which was sold at 18 stores in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island, was the subject of a recall notice published by the Food and…

Finding a Wonka chocolate bar at Morrisons between the Kit Kats and the Dairy Milk has a subtle surreal quality. Not because the chocolate is made up—it has never been totally made up—but rather because most adults over thirty have specific memories of Wonka, such as a golden ticket, a glass elevator, or a man in a velvet coat describing something that tasted like a three-course meal. When that name is applied to real chocolate, it seems like it is taken from a dream. And yet, here it is. The Wonka brand has been relaunched in the UK by Ferrero,…

Burger King has introduced what could be the most surprising accessory of the fall season, somewhere between a fashion stunt and a true cultural moment. Le Nugguette is the name of it. It’s a small purse in the shape of a chicken nugget. It is the same price as a four-piece nugget order, at $3.99. It’s also possible that no one at Burger King really anticipated how much people would want one, given the speed at which the internet responded. The chain discreetly reformulated its chicken nuggets earlier this month, changing the batter and marinade and introducing four dipping sauces,…

Finding out that there isn’t any mackerel in your tin of mackerel is almost comically British. Not even a hint. Not even a distant relative from the same family of fish. When you open it, you find what is known as Chilean jack mackerel, a species from a completely different taxonomic order that was taken from the waters off South America. And yet there it is, on the grocery store shelf, simply marked “mackerel,” with a price that is essentially unchanged. Though not particularly enigmatic, the account of how this occurred is instructive. Last year, Princes, a major partner of…

The NFL season began on September 7th, when the McDonald’s Buffalo Bills Meal—now known as the CollectiBILLS Meal—arrived. Within days, fans were searching the Capital Region for bobbleheads like it was a fast-food Easter egg hunt. Word quickly spread. Some stores quickly ran out of inventory. The setup is fairly simple: a collectible Buffalo Bills bobblehead is included with each of the four meal configurations. Alongside the figure, you can see a hash brown, a drink, and a sausage egg McMuffin for breakfast. Lunch and dinner take it a step further: a Big Mac, a 10-piece Chicken McNuggets, or a…

Tiny, vividly colored plastic bottles with a ball applicator on top that rolls out a sour liquid when you tilt the bottle and press the ball to your tongue. Children adore them. They are inexpensive, shareable, and available in watermelon and blue raspberry flavors. They have been a pantry mainstay for many families since 2023. The Ricky Joy Company is recalling about 2.3 million of its Sour Crush Rolling Liquid Candy Bottles, according to a September 10, 2026, announcement from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. The specific mechanical cause is that the bottle’s plastic rolling ball may come loose…

You’ll notice something that would have seemed improbable five years ago if you walk into practically any pharmacy in the US or the UK today. There’s a new resident in the refrigerated area. The tiny, stylish injector devices that have emerged as one of the most talked-about medical products of this decade sit alongside insulin pens and allergy shots. Wegovy. Mounjaro. Ozempic. The names have become commonplace abbreviations for a specific type of promise: the notion that a weekly injection can accomplish what years of dieting were unable to. And it really does work for a lot of people. The…