The Sporkful

On Halloween night in 1974, an eight-year-old boy in the Houston suburbs got Pixy Stix laced with cyanide. He wasn’t the only one. So did four other kids who were trick-or-treating that night.

Is a wedge salad worth the effort of using a knife to eat it? Should you take home the unopened beer you brought to a dinner party? And does your produce really need to be washed?

The craft brewery used to be a place for self-proclaimed beer nerds to sample the hot new IPA. Now, young kids, toddlers, and even infants take up as much space as beer-drinking adults. So how did this happen?

In 1973, Madhur Jaffrey penned An Invitation to Indian Cooking and introduced many Americans to Indian cuisine. More than 50 years later, Priya Krishna (author of Indian-ish and Priya’s Kitchen Adventures) argues that Indian food is just as American as any other immigrant cuisine. But among many non-South Asians in the US, Indian food still carries the perception that it’s “foreign.”

The fat acceptance movement has spent decades fighting weight stigma and calling for equal rights for fat people in all areas of life. As the movement moved online, the idea of body positivity emerged.

If someone asked you to name the country that dominates American yogurt aisles, you would undoubtedly say Greece. Thick Greek yogurt makes up more than half of all US yogurt sales. But shaking its fist from the shadows is another country that’s even more obsessed with yogurt: Bulgaria.

Thirty years into her career as a chef and cookbook author, Carla Lalli is releasing a book many people told her she shouldn’t write. It’s called Food Is A Feeling, and it’s a lot more personal than her others.

Mandy Naglich is an award-winning home brewer who also writes and teaches about beer. Now she wants to become a Master Cicerone — basically the beer equivalent of a master sommelier.