Food for thought #132

A weekly roundup for hungry readers📚

Jul 12, 2026

Reading

• The joy, or not, of cooking

• From TV Dinners To Kale: The Most Iconic Food Trends In American History

• Why food businesses should ditch AI slop

• The Disappearing Las Vegas Buffets Hold a Mirror to the American Soul

• Food defined social hierarchy in 1776. Here’s what was on the table

Scrolling

• You’ve probably seen the Hungry Planet photo series before, but it’s always fascinating every time I come across it again

• Bean soup, or: how it feels to be online some days

• Handwritten food types have always been cool, but the explosion of logos and menus made with ChatGPT makes us appreciate them even more now

• When your dessert is worthy of a museum

• Japanese artist @miwaito.official turns molten glass into forbidden treats

• Life would be considerably less tedious if we just added more disco balls

• Leave me and my cheese alone you horror

• In 1922, a blind Swedish physicist invented a cooker that never switches off. By the 1990s, owning one had become such a precise marker of English rural life that critics named a literary genre after it: the Aga saga

Cooking the books

• Frozen Club Orange gin fizz

• Dive into a good cookbook this summer – we’re having a sale at Nine Bean Rows and Blasta Books, get 20% off!

Word of the week

Art of the week

I’m Kristin Jensen, the founder, publisher and editor at Blasta Books and Nine Bean Rows. Before I started my publishing house, I was a freelance editor and food writer for over 20 years and I’ve co-authored three books. I pretty much eat, sleep and breathe books and food. You can also find me on Instagram @edibleireland.📚