Food news antipasto

With 2020 in the rearview mirror, we can take a look back at the year and find the few bright spots. For many people, those happy moments involved food. The Guardian asked its readers to tell them which new ingredient discoveries they made in 2020, and the results are fascinating, ranging from the comforting to the exotic.

Croissant dough keeps moving into new territory – a few years ago it was Dominique Ansel’s cronut that paired the flaky pastry with doughnuts – but the innovation hasn’t stopped there. The latest combination involves pizza, but it isn’t from a fancy chef. Instead, supermarket pizza producer Digiorno has added croissant dough to its line of frozen pizza. If anyone tries this, please report the results!

Now that the calendar has ticked over to January, healthy eating is surging to the forefront. For some people this means trying out vegetarian or vegan eating, as organizers of the movement known as Veganuary recognized when they set the first month as a ‘tryout’ period for veganism. In 2021, the organizers of Veganuary say they expect it to be the biggest year ever. After a record-breaking 400,000 people signed a pledge to eat no meat or animal products in 2020, this year has already broken that record with over 440,000 participants already, and more expected.

We’ll end this week’s recap with some strange events that transpired last year. Food & Wine takes a look at the strangest food crimes of 2020, which were weird indeed. The list of hijinks includes thieves impersonating a delivery service to steal $300,000 worth of pistachios, and tons of chickpeas that went missing (enough to make many bowls of hummus, like the ones pictured above from Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi).