Food news antipasto

The Super Bowl is coming up in a couple of weeks, and fans are preparing their A-game for snacks. There is a new product coming out that might be making an appearance at select Super Bowl parties, as General Mills announced a unique mashup between Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal and Totinos Pizza Rolls. This puzzling snack (is it made for breakfast or just munching straight out of the box?) isn’t available in stores, but if you think it sounds appetizing, visit shop.cinnamontoastcrunch.com starting Tuesday, January 28 at 7 p.m. Eastern to score a free box of the limited-edition treat. I think I’ll pass on this one.

Even though it’s nice to have access to produce from all around the world, it’s also fun to cook with ingredients that are native to the region in which you live. However, that can be difficult if you don’t know what foods are local or how to use some of the more obscure items. Here in the upper Midwest, chef Sean Sherman has done a tremendous job elevating native ingredients like wild rice, amaranth, mulberries, and sumac, winning a James Beard Award along the way. If you live in Australia, Gourmet Traveller recently showcased how to use native ingredients like wattleseed, lemon myrtle, and pepperberry.

Have you ever seen the price for a particular product go up at different stores at the same time in the same amount? That’s what happened to Josh Saltzman, the owner of a sports bar in Washington, DC, who found it odd that four different suppliers announced a price hike on potatoes at the same time for the exact same amount. He posted an offhand comment on social media, and long story short, the four companies “now stand accused of operating as a “cartel” and conspiring to hike prices.” This is but one example of how consolidation in the food industry has led to, shall we say creative, methods for companies to keep prices high.

Bon Appétit and Epicurious recently announced a new monthly subscription box that will deliver five new recipes, along with five shelf-stable ingredients, to your door to expand your culinary horizons. You can pay monthly, quarterly, or yearly, but you can’t change the frequency of deliveries. With a cost ranging from $28 to $34 per box depending on the payment plan, it seems like a reasonable value. Included with each subscription is a binder to store the recipe cards, free digital access to BonAppétit.com and Epicurious.com, plus exclusive online content.

I thought the term ‘foodie’ had finally been ‘unalived’, but it just popped up in an article in the Guardian titled How to be a foodie in 2025. This tongue-in-cheek piece discusses trends like hot honey, and pokes fun at the lengths food lovers will go to, like “reading [pasta] packets to find a bronze-die-cut brand for optimum sauce adherence.” There is a reference to cookbooks too: dedicated foodies have “Cerebral cookbooks…displayed not for clout but for easy reference, alongside a sauce-spattered tablet.”