With a Super Bowl ad, a massive Starbucks deal, and a public offering on the way, Oatly is suddenly everywhere. Just don’t call it milk. — Gastro-nomics is a column about the intersection of food, business, and culture. My initiation to Oatly, the Swedish alternative-milk darling, came in the storybook way that chief marketing officers dream about. The barista at my precious south Brooklyn neighborhood coffee shop recommended it back in 2018 as a way to…

This post is from my newsletter The Crunchwrap. (Subscribe here. It’s free!) Last week, for Marker, I wrote about how Taco Bell has slowly but surely amassed a fan base that now includes vegans, vegetarians, and Gen-Z flexitarians — in addition to its core audience of potheads with nothing to…

In just a few short years, the chain behind the Beefy 5-Layer Burrito has managed to become an obsession of vegans and vegetarians — Earlier this month, like Simba returning from exile, Taco Bell’s potatoes were officially restored to the company’s menu board — Spicy Potato Soft Taco and all. …

This post is from my newsletter The Crunchwrap. (Subscribe here. It’s free!) Last February, in that weird interregnum after coronavirus had become a hazy, abstract worry and before the first cases broke in the U.S., my father died. It had been long expected and, to the extent that anybody can…

From the McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish to the new Popeyes Cajun Flounder, the battle of the fish has become a spring tradition — Gastro-nomics is a new column about the intersection of food, business, and culture. Around this time each year, drugstores lay their pastel eggs, Peeps appear in bins for impulse buys, and enormous hams take center stage in deli cases across America. If Easter-themed products are a neon-colored commercial iceberg, there’s…

This post is from my newsletter The Crunchwrap. (Subscribe here. It’s free!) Because I have fully transformed into suburban Dad mode over the course of the past year, I’m reading Ron Chernow’s biography of George Washington. I also came to it in the most embarrassing of ways: It was one…

Inside the brave new world of data-driven, search-optimized virtual restaurants that exist only on DoorDash and GrubHub — For a small town of 4,000 people in New York’s Hudson Valley, Highland Falls punches well above its cultural weight. In more normal years, tens of thousands of tourists would descend upon the town to tour the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and nearby Revolutionary War sites. Billy Joel…

This post is from my newsletter The Crunchwrap. (Subscribe here. It’s free.) There’s a lot of news out there and a new fried chicken sandwich to deconstruct society by, but I’m stuck on last week’s disaster. …

The home of the Slurpee is now being supercharged by the pandemic — Let’s get something out of the way: You probably do not have the most positive memories of 7-Eleven. The weary-looking hot dogs and taquitos on mechanical rollers, the trauma of Slurpee brain freezes and parking lot heartbreaks past, the strange prominence of its stores in local crime stories. …