If you went away from Twitter for a few hours over the weekend and then returned (haha, like that would ever happen), you may have been surprised to find that your feed had been entirely taken over by discussions about towels. Abdul Dremali, co-host of the Unreasonable Podcast, posted the seemingly totally reasonable…

Although the climate-friendly diet of veganism is becoming more popular, followers still can find themselves on the receiving end of considerable scorn. For example, The Guardian reports that a British woman recently phoned NatWest bank, looking for a £400 loan so that she could get a nutrition diploma. Somehow this…

Sure, Valentine’s Day may not be the greatest day in the world for a lot of people. Restaurants like Potbelly’s and Hooters tried to make things better for single diners by offering them free cookies and wings. But Uproxx reports that Twitter prankster @baconflavoring, a.k.a. Steven, decided to take advantage of…

It’s like a case right out of CSI or Law & Order, if you are a person who enjoys such long-running television procedurals. Police had been trailing Minnesota businessman Jerry Westrom in January, after some DNA submitted for a genealogy site tied him or a relative to a Minneapolis murder scene in 1993. Westrom went to…

We all have our weird food things, or know people with weird food things. That friend who puts mustard on pizza. The aunt who insists of putting ice in her wine. Your ex-boyfriend who likes his steak so rare, it might still be breathing.

Last week, writer Kevin M. Kruse tweeted the following:

I have a nemesis in my continuing efforts to declutter my household in the Marie Kondo manner. Unfortunately, I happen to be married to that nemesis. My husband loves to spend his weekends at estate sales, usually on the lookout for something to add to our already-packed-to-the-rafters kitchen. He might find a deal on…

Bad news for those who’ve been chugging diet sodas under the belief that they’re healthier than regular sodas. CNN reports that a new study from no less an authority than the American Heart Association says that “Drinking two or more of any kind of artificially sweetened drinks a day is linked to an increased risk of…

Nonalcoholic beverages are on the rise, and alcohol sales are down. No- and low-alcohol lines are up 3.9 percent, The Wall Street Journal reported this week, even as the beer industry flatlines. WSJ concludes that “consumers are prepared to pay the same price, or even a premium, for drinks that have less alcohol.”…

Welcome to The Takeout’s Garlic Week, our Valentine to the world’s loveliest stink.

You would think that restaurants would love Valentine’s Day. Reservations made weeks in advance! All booked tables! Diners ordering to impress! Pricey items like caviar and champagne!

Do you have a favorite food? Whatever it is, do you possibly love it so much that you would craft an entire tourist destination around it? Meet fourth-generation German butcher Claus Boebel, who has created the sausage-themed Boebel Bratwurst Bed And Breakfast in the small village of Rittersbach, near Nuremberg.

It’s a big day, friends. Glad you’re here. You may notice that at The Takeout, we all have certain “beats.” Kate Bernot is our Beer Bureau Chief. Marnie Shure takes candy. And today, I have been designated the Bureau Chief Of Mold.

I know very little about visual art, and subtweets are often too deep for me. So I was unfamiliar with New York performance artist Andres Serrano, known for his work with photographs of corpses and bodily fluids, including Piss Christ, wherein he dipped a crucifix into his own urine.

Valentine’s dinner has such a high degree of potential difficulty: You’d like to wow your beloved, ideally, without spending a fortune and without getting into something too involved and complicated. One year, my husband made lobster thermidor, favorite of Lego Batman. I was appropriately bowled over, and he’s capable…

Fellow fans of New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix will find this Los Angeles Times piece graphically soothing. The newspaper’s food columnist Lucas Kwan Peterson evaluated 19 chain restaurants’ French fries, scoring them based on flavor and texture, then turned those into a scatter-plot graph with four quadrants:…

What are you hoping to get this Valentine’s Day? Home-cooked dinner? Flowers? Real estate? An invention that will enable you to enjoy a beloved food again? Personally, I’m expecting that first item, but can’t help but be impressed by the last one. The Indy Star reports that when Sarah Rubin was diagnosed with a dairy…

If you peruse the online pages of The Takeout regularly, you know that we’re big Costco fans around here. Even in my tiny kitchen, I still find room for multiple boxes of mac-and-cheese and giant two-packs of Skippy and Nutella. So I automatically gravitate toward any headline with Costco in it, especially list-based…

In what appears to be the soup version of a soda with two straws, Panera Bread proudly announces the return of its Double Bread Bowl. Do you and your honey find that your separate crusty containers of broccoli-cheese soup just put you too far apart from each other? Fear not! Instead, snuggle up with this double-bowl…