Justin Theroux has been keeping pretty steady company these days with his dog Kuma, a pit bull he rescued a couple of years ago after Hurricane Harvey. His Instagram is full of pictures of their adventures together, at the beach, on ski vacations, at cafes, at the pool hall. Truly, it looks like the happy montage part…

A few weeks ago I—The Takeout’s Chief Officer of Bad Decisions—was planning to head to Taco Bell to review the brand-new Triplelupa, three miniature Chalupas baked together to become a superlupa. But then everything went sideways and I’ve been sitting at home for five weeks subsisting on a diet of mostly cheese and ice…

I try to avoid food-writer cliches, but it is legitimately hard for me to not talk about my grandmother. It’s been particularly challenging recently, because she lived a life that would have been virtually unchanged by this pandemic. She rarely left the house—due to mobility issues, we hired someone to do her…

The World Health Organization’s broad mission is to advocate for health and healthcare across the world, and a big part of their daily messaging is providing granular tips for healthy living. According to CNN, the WHO’s latest missive is a reminder that alcohol is bad for you, and that you can’t actually kill the…

I haven’t seen Tiger King, the Netflix docuseries that’s been the saving grace of bored isolators nationwide since its debut back in March. But much like those who are disinterested in the Star Wars franchise (extremely me) or the Harry Potter universe (extremely not me), I’ve absorbed the broad strokes of this…

As is clear from the image above, Mia, the Native American woman who has graced Land O’Lakes packaging for nearly a century, has been retired. It’s a great move for two reasons, the most obvious being that the original logo was kinda racist. There are plenty of (white) people who would argue that an illustration of a…

When shelter-in-place orders started springing up around the country a month ago, some of the more optimistic among us suggested that all the extra time we used to spend commuting and sitting in traffic jams and going out to dinner and to bars with our friends could be used on self-improvement projects. We could learn…

For all the virtues evaporated milk possesses, for most people, it’s simply a can that lies in wait in the deepest recesses of your cabinets, waiting for a recipe to come along that demands its inclusion. Likewise, you might assume that there is always a can waiting in the wings, even if you’ve never purchased…

Viral news stories about convenience foods are often about the preservatives in those foods, and how they are capable of, say, keeping a McDonald’s burger unchanged for 25 years. We almost expect this of our food at this point, thanks to apocalypse-centric pop culture that instructs us to hoard things like Twinkies…

A few years ago I spent a magical birthday in the hinterlands of Madison, Wisconsin. Don’t laugh. It was my idea of perfect: an exhausting full-day hike around Devil’s Lake in Baraboo, a cool modern hotel for the night, and a really special dinner at a local restaurant called Forequarter. It was deep in tomato season,…

Who do you think is the best living chef? I don’t know if it’s Gordon Ramsay, but he has to at least enter the conversation. The guy has made an undeniably huge cultural impact. Is his personality greatly exaggerated on TV? Yes. Are his overproduced, over-the-top reality shows an example of a pop culture phenomenon…

If social media is to be believed (and why wouldn’t it be?), it appears that everyone is already over trying their hand at homemade sourdough bread, because they have accidentally murdered their starters. And it also seems that everyone has rebounded rather quickly, forgetting about their dead yeast babies and moving…

I’ve been cooking professionally since I was 22 years old, but I began my life in the kitchen when I was 10. I didn’t know it at the time, but my obsession with the 1972 edition of The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook would blossom into not only a love of cooking, but a love of learning about anything and…

The Lost Apple Project rules. Here’s the gist: David Benscoter and EJ Brandt, a Vietnam veteran and a retired FBI agent, are amateur botanists. They love apples. Specifically, they love old species of apples that are thought to be extinct. The two men traipse around the Pacific Northwest and find decrepit apple trees…