Summer is officially here, and you know what that means? It's time to chow down on a hot dog at a 4th of July barbeque. Every American city has a very different idea of what a hot dog should be. I'm mostly talking about New York and Chicago because those cities will let you know when you're eating a hot dog wrong. Chicago citizens, particularly, hate it when you put ketchup on your hot dog. They see it as an insult to their city, culture, and way of life. There is a terrifying statue of a menac…

Cooking is a unique beast. For some people, knowing how to cook various meals is the top indicator that you can actually take care of yourself. Sometimes cooking is not utilitarian but rather an act of love or compassion. Other people do not care whether their food is cooked in their kitchen or not and see cooking and eating as merely a mechanism for survival. We attach many meanings to food and cooking, making it a very complicated and unexpectedly personal topic. At this point in my life, I c…

Don't take that shot!

Om nom nom

It's eating time

Delicious!

Crunchy

Why eat broccoli when you could have dinosaur trees?

On Christmas Day, customers usually have enough shame to not show up at a fast food place. They ask insecure questions about when the company lets the employees go home. When you deliver the sad news that you're working until closing, they retreat to their table to eat their McChicken with embarrassed expressions. Unfortunately, during Thanksgiving, customers have a lot less shame. They find it incredibly quirky to go to Popeyes for Thanksgiving instead of cooking a homemade meal. Working in fa…

Children have incredibly creative minds and use this creativity in numerous ways. At my elementary school, the innocents used their childlike wonder to create the grossest monstrosity of food ever concocted. This activity was usually limited to kids who bought lunch at the cafeteria. It's much more complicated to play with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and carrot sticks than it is to mix school milk with a fruit cocktail. Chicken strip day was always the grossest. People would pour strawbe…

Do y'all remember when the concept of bacon was the biggest meme in the world? 2012 was truly a time to be alive: A time when memes were so simple that a popular food could dominate the landscape of popular memes for over a year. Now don't get me wrong, I like bacon. It's the only meat that I would miss if I followed the dietary restrictions put forth by the Old Testament. That being said, even as a meme-obsessed teen, I found the bacon thing to be a bit much. The bacon meme extended far beyond…

I love eating and drinking

Sugar on sugar

Food, Glorious Food!

Taking things literally

Fad foods come and go, and once they go, they leave you wondering why they came in the first place. I experienced this very phenomenon during my Junior year of high school when a popsicle shop opened in my town. We were fresh off the heels of the frozen yogurt boom , so this seemed like it was the next big non-ice cream dessert shop, at least in my town. That spring, everyone in town was going to the popsicle shop and taking aesthetic Instagram pictures with their popsicles. I will admit they w…