Pop Culture

Britney's Rice, What Fieri Wears to Work, & More (Unexpected) Places We Found Food This Week

October  7, 2016

As of late, I’ve become obsessive in my quest to “find the food angle” everywhere I look. The good news: I found a lot of food where I least expected it. Every Friday, I will present each week’s findings. Here were last week's.

Chance the Rapper's music: Let's "take a bite" into this week with Chance the Rapper's mellifluous take on the Kit-Kat bar jingle, above. Normally, I would bristle at tinkering with a song that's proven to be rather easy on the ears and hasn't called for remixing. But Chance—the boy has done it! This is an unimpeachably sweet take on a song I have heard many times. I'd like nothing more than to see Chance's face, animated and disembodied, singing to me next time I pick up that scrumptious wafered chocolate bar produced by Hershey's.

The Nobel Prize for Physics: I dropped out of AP Physics three days into my senior year, so I empathize with the Nobel Prize committee member who needed to have the newly-minted winners of this year's Nobel Prize for Physics explained through the use of bagels, cinnamon buns, and soft pretzels. The three food items in question have different numbers of holes—the cinnamon bun has zero, the bagel has one, the pretzel has two, if you need me to guide you through this. These distinctions are called "topological invariants" in the field of "topology." I am so confused reading this Telegraph article, which rather conveniently does not seem to have been copy-edited, that I would rather eat one of the items in question than try to wrap my small mind around the concept of topology. Hm...I'll choose the soft pretzel. Onward.

Waking up bright and early with a cup of joe courtesy of #LukesDiner ☕️ #GilmoreGirls

A photo posted by Access Hollywood (@accesshollywood) on

200 Luke's Diner locations across America: I have already covered this. Please read about my extremely important trip to the day-long Gilmore Girls pop-up, fashioned in the likeness of the elder Lorelai's love interest's coffee-and-bagel outpost. Even I, neither a fan nor a "hater" of Gilmore Girls, found much to appreciate in this purposeful and careful exercise that asked Americans to dredge up memories of the aughts, by all means a terrible decade for America.

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One man's ploy to be employed in Silicon Valley: On the topic of Lukes, let's meet Lukas Yla, a Lithuanian man with a plan. A native of Vilnius, Yla was determined to permeate San Francisco's notoriously impermeable tech and ad markets when he arrived in the city this summer. Yla, who is but 25 and thus young and brazen enough to think this is a good idea, wanted to make sure hiring managers noticed him. So he donned the costume of a delivery courier for Postmates and arrived at each office he sent a resume to—roughly 40—with boxes of donuts for them. Inside these boxes, as Adweek reports, "were notes with a bit.ly leading to his LinkedIn page and a message addressed to the CEO, CMO, and/or marketing VP: Most resumes end up in trash. Mine—in your belly." He delivered forty boxes in total, and he's landed ten interviews. Uh, oh my God? Who does this? Are there people in the world who interpreted this as a sweet gesture, or normal human behavior? I refuse to believe this man is real.

Ollie, delivering food for your pets: Let's stay in the Bay and mosey on over to the newfound valuation of Ollie, "the Sprig of dog food" according to some breathless coverage from TechCrunch, has just raise a $4.4 million round! This money, Ollie's three founders hope, will allow them to fulfill their mission of delivering "customized, healthy and natural meals to dog owners across the country." Get this: The food they're looking to produce also intends to be edible for humans, too. Ollie's mission sounds noble and just, considering the dearth of healthy pet food that's around. Yet food startups, as this barnstorm of a Blue Apron investigation from BuzzFeed revealed just days ago, tend to encounter growing pains when chasing scale, pains that include "workplace law violations" and "human rights abuses." Hm. Ollie, promise me you won't do this. Thank you.

Bloomberg Businessweek's 'What to Wear': What do you make of Guy Fieri? I'm not so sure what to make of him myself; I have remained neutral as I've seen the backlash, and the backlash to the backlash, and more passionately-mounted defenses and assassinations of his character. I will simply tell you that he was the subject of Bloomberg Businessweek's "What I Wear to Work" column. In this photo, the spiky-haired specimen is donning a "Knuckle Sandwich" black tee and some shiny, distressed blue-grey jeans, explaining why these sartorial choices are conducive to him working well. What would happen if you wore this to work? Please let me know!

The Australian justice system: Let's make like a kangaroo and "hop" over to Sydney, Australia, where a lawyer from Sydney has finally won an uphill battle he's been fighting since April 2015 to get refunded for a Domino's order he never received. Yes, you read that right. April 2015, when Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 was released. As The Daily Telegraph reported, the owner of the Domino's that Driscoll ordered pizza from promised him a refund, only to never issue it! Driscoll has shown rather dogged persistence in chasing down his $37.35. On the eve of the one-year anniversary of Domino's craven shirking of responsibility, Driscoll sued Domino's for breach of contract. This Wednesday, an Australian court ordered Domino's to pay $1,203.27 in legal fees along with the promised, once-elusive $37.35. Domino's gave some apologetic lip-service to Driscoll, but he wasn't buying it, and neither do I. How embarrassing for Driscoll, truly, to promise his friends pizza whilst entertaining them at a gathering, only to have a (seemingly) trusted pizza source fail to "deliver" on their promise. I have not gotten pizza from Domino's in six years, and this stiffens my resolve to never do so again.

Gotta love rice 😂 #TheJRShow

A video posted by Britney Spears (@britneyspears) on

This Britney Spears interview on The Jonathan Ross Show: Earlier this week, British talk show host Jonathan Ross asked Spears if she likes to cook or order out, and she responded nervously but charmingly. "I cook! I c—I um, I like...I like...I like a lot of different rices. I like rice, and, um jambalaya...Don't laugh! Oh my God!" The crowd roars at her admission! Oh my God is right—isn't this woman the sweetest? "I like rice! I do!" she confesses, sheepishly. This is the cutest thing I've seen all week. Britney—(you drive me) crazy!

What did I miss? Is there food in this "doxxing" of Elena Ferrante? Let me know in the comments!

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Mayukh Sen is a James Beard Award-winning food and culture writer in New York. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Bon Appetit, and elsewhere. He won a 2018 James Beard Award in Journalism for his profile of Princess Pamela published on Food52.

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