Welcome to Deep Dish, a weekly roundup of food and entertainment news. Last time we discussed Costco’s lawsuit against the Trump administration
Since he took up his post in President Trump’s cabinet as secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been waging a war on the status quo of American diets, arguing they lack sufficient protein and lean too heavily on processed foods. His latest endeavor in his “war on saturated fats” (his words, really) is perhaps his magnum opus: an upside-down food pyramid formally recommending his vision for healthy eating to the American populace.
Also this week, grocery chain Wegmans is collecting your biometric data and 2010s cupcake darling Sprinkles is closing, as is famed (or perhaps more accurately, notorious) LA restaurant Horses.
RFK Jr. Really Wants You to Eat More Meat
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took his pro-protein agenda to new heights this week, resurrecting and inverting the food pyramid (which had been made obsolete by the Obama administration in favor of a plate graphic) to foreground red meat and whole dairy products. Where previous guidance cautioned against overconsuming red meat for its high saturated fat content and link to heart disease, RFK Jr.’s new visualization puts it at the top. This is troubling to some health professionals: Stanford nutrition expert Christopher Gardner told NPR that he was “very disappointed” in the new guidance, which he says “[goes] against decades and decades of evidence and research.” While any one individual has the discretion to subscribe or not to the guidelines, public schools and federal food programs like SNAP enjoy much less leeway. —Li Goldstein, associate newsletter editor
Big Brother is Watching you Shop for Groceries
Earlier this month, the same unusual sign began popping up at several Wegmans locations around New York. “Biometric identifier information collected at this location,” they proclaimed. That, as it turns out, is a complicated way of saying that Wegmans will collect and store information on your face, your voiceprint, and your eye scans. Why is a supermarket chain capturing and keeping so much of your private information? To keep you safe, obviously.
In a statement to Gothamist, which reported on the story, a Wegmans spokesperson said: “Like many retailers, we use cameras to help identify individuals who pose a risk to our people, customers, or operation. In a small fraction of our stores that exhibit an elevated risk, we have deployed cameras equipped with facial recognition technology.” Privacy advocate Will Owen, at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told Gothamist that storing this kind of sensitive information might leave shoppers at risk to hacks and leaks.
“It’s really chilling that immigrant New Yorkers going into Wegmans and other grocery stores have to worry about their highly sensitive biometric data potentially getting into the hands of ICE,” he said. —Sam Stone, staff writer
The Dream of Sprinkles Cupcakes is Officially Dead
The Obama-era-hopecore-cupcake years are officially dead—Sprinkles Cupcakes has closed all its locations as of December 31 2025. Candace Nelson, who started the company in 2005 and sold it to a private equity firm in 2012, took to TikTok to mourn the loss of her beloved cupcake legacy.
She didn’t garner much sympathy from commenters, who pointed out that selling her company to a private equity firm wasn’t a great way to ensure its longevity. “If you wanted a legacy, private equity was a bad choice,” reads one comment with more than 117,000 likes. Sprinkles now joins a long list of companies ultimately taken down by private equity. —S.S.
