Welcome to Deep Dish, a weekly roundup of food and entertainment news. Last time we discussed the newly rejiggered food pyramid.
I don’t know about you, but I have spent a lot of time in recent years thinking about the spoon-sized amount of microplastics that’s likely inside my brain. What would I eat with said spoon? I’d ponder. Is it a soup spoon or a demitasse? I’d picture the spoon in pieces, floating somewhere near my parietal lobe. I’d blame the spoon when I couldn’t remember the name of a distant acquaintance at a party, when I could feel my attention span shortening while watching TikToks. “The spoon!” I’d exclaim, shaking my fist at the sky.
You can imagine, then, how thrilled I was to learn that microplastics may not, in fact, pose the threat that some of the most extreme headlines have suggested. Could my spoon never have existed? Also this week: We’re embracing alcohol again, corporations are stealing from delivery app drivers (capitalism is the root of all evil, lest we forget), and there’s a lot of buzz about a certain sexually-charged hockey show’s tuna melt.
Society has largely taken for granted that our bodies—and, perhaps most alarmingly, our brains—harbor microplastics. In the years since, Americans vowed to effectively boycott microplastics, hastily tossing plastic spatulas in the garbage. But the very studies that spurred such mass panic have themselves been called into question recently, according to a report in The Guardian, with scientists finding methodology flaws and challenging whether the spoon-sized amount of microplastics said to be in our brains was actually accurate. Needless to say, it’s a net positive in the end if we have fewer microplastics in our bodies than once thought. Still, our collective blind acceptance of the study findings (and subsequent media coverage) as unchecked fact perhaps raises larger questions about the path of information from study to consumer. —Li Goldstein, associate newsletter editor
Since 2020, the media (including this publication, and in fact, this very writer!) has made much of the boom in nonalcoholic drinks. You’ve likely seen the headlines, and what’s more, you’ve probably seen the NA explosion play out on the shelves of your grocery store. But now something feels different. Can you smell it in the air? Booze is back.
GQ’s Dean Stattman declared his 2026 resolution was to start drinking again, and according to Google trends, search interest in “Dry January” is the lowest it’s been in four years as of this writing. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that NA wine is “still terrible,” and, though it’s not in line with actual science, Dr. Oz, who is somehow our current administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, claimed there’s no data supporting the benefits of reducing alcohol consumption. You know what? A drink sounds great, actually. —Sam Stone, staff writer
It was revealed this week that Uber Eats and DoorDash “engineered design tricks,” as a statement from the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protections put it, to make it more difficult for customers to add tips for their delivery drivers. The result? $550 million less in tips for those drivers.
These platforms used to allow customers to tip during checkout, but the change meant customers could only tip after ordering. The NYCDCWP called these new tipping processes “easy-to-miss and more difficult to navigate.” The current average tip, the department says, is $0.76 per delivery. As of January 26th, a new law will require delivery apps to include “user-friendly options to tip,” which is projected to increase earnings by nearly $400 million per year. —S.S.
In the interest of getting it off my chest at the front of this blurb: I haven’t watched Heated Rivalry, despite self-identifying as someone usually up with the TV zeitgeist. I’ll get around to it, I promise! I’m clearly in the minority—not only of our society and culture at large—but my coworkers too. When prompted to come up with a food angle for the show, they volunteered plenty of options, culminating in this list of recipes penned by senior editor of SEO and cooking Joe Sevier. I’m told that tuna melts and ginger ale and burgers are highly significant to the show, in an IYKYK way. I hate not knowing. —L.G.
