The Friday Five, Vol. 3

This week: goofs, flubs, and rumors in the food space. Tomato, tomato!

As a Thanksgiving week treat, this edition of The Friday Five is free for all subscribers today.

New York’s newest hype-grocery was caught serving raw chicken

If you haven’t heard of Meadow Lane, count your blessings. Millennial-trust-fund-baby-hype-beast Sammy Nussdorf has been threatening promising the launch of an upscale grocery store ala Erewhon in the heart of Tribeca for quite some time. And, this month, it finally opened. Hours long lines snaked around the block opening weekend, and TikTokers reported they closed by 2:30p.m. on a Saturday, a time that’s usually peak for grocery. Past opening weekend, the shelves have continued to be sparse, and crudely slapped sticky notes note the absence¹.

A lot of people dunked on this out-of-touch billionaire heir creating something nobody asked for—curated, over-branded grocery stores like Happier Grocery and Pop Up Grocer have been dominating the market since 2021. But I will give him this: Tribeca is the “correct” location for a super overpriced and sterilized pop culture food store. Is he still out of touch? Absolutely.

But, closing too early on opening weekend and curating overly expensive food² at a time where many are still going without are not the crimes I came to speak of today. This guy thought it was okay to serve medium-rare chicken. Sorry, let me be more straightforward. Two of the selling point products for Meadow Lane were the chicken salad (ala Round Swamp Farm³) and chicken nuggets. And the chickens were reportedly still clucking for a lot of consumers. Numerous social creators also admitted they suffered food poisoning from the various chicken products sold at Meadow Lane⁴.

Look, I get that the mass influx of hungry consumers left employees in the lurch to churn out more product than they were expecting. BUT! This store has been getting heavy PR for months; people have not stopped talking about it. So, if you’re tapping into NYC food culture at all, as a business owner you’d know people’s propensity for lining up. IDK why people love lines, you can’t get me to wait for a damn thing these days. Maybe it’s the sunk cost fallacy: The longer the line, the better the thing must be.

Well, they were sort of correct, in that the longer they waited in line, the greater the chance of them getting salmonella. Too soon? Anyway, demand got the better of the store, and product quality fell through the cracks. Not a banner opening.

The newest tradwife obsession: Algae cooking oil

Back to the boutique grocery again. If you’re not familiar with Nara Smith, I’ll give you the high-level details (but also, how are you so offline? I’m jealous). She’s a 20-something model (the scale on this varies, with some people saying she claims to be younger than she actually is, for whatever reason), married to another 20-something model. They have a few young kids, and her whole schtick is she makes everything for them from scratch. Like, aggressively from scratch. Coke from scratch. Cereal from scratch. My sanity, from scratch.

Anyway. She has a new product with Algae Cooking Club, an oil company that’s pushing for oil derived from algae to be the new hot oil, because guess what, they think algae is “extremely pure” and creating it doesn’t have to use blended “inferior oils,” like other cooking oils (this is copy ripped from their About page). *taps the sign*

We’re going on a tangent here, because I don’t *hate* a lot of their other marketing points. Algae is sea-based (duh), so the ratio of omega-6 fatty acids is low, which is a balance we don’t see a lot. Many fats have more omega-6s than omega-3s. Like I’ve said before, omega-6s aren’t bad, omega-3s have marginally better benefits. The oil also has a really high smoke point (535°F), the carbon emissions needed to produce it are lower than both olive and avocado oils, and because algae is regenerative⁵, it can be harvested more frequently instead of relying on longer traditional crop seasons. All of these points are beautiful and can stand alone without calling other oils dirty and impure. Also, the sea is aggressively filthy with bacteria⁶, dude. Everything can be claimed as dirty in certain lights. Grow up.

Anyway ANYWAY. The roasted garlic oil is $28 a bottle, which is similarly priced compared to other boutique oils. It also has yuzu, green onion, and miso, which is just a whole lot going on for a cooking oil. Smith’s PR line here is that you don’t want “stinky garlic fingers” but as I wrote about in the Friday Five last time, garlic smell makes you sexy to other people. Take it all with a drop of oil.

Campbell’s Soup makes “sh!t for poor people”

Hoo boy. An executive at Campbell’s was caught on a secret recording⁷ from 2024 saying a LOT of egregious things about the consumer base of the red-labeled canned goods company. Beyond the digs made at the supposed consumer base, including racist remarks about other employees, the VP in question, Martin Bally, said people should be wary of the canned soups, as they contain “bioengineered meat.”

There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s stick with the main point the general populous has fixated upon: He claimed that their canned soup is full of bad stuff, including 3D printed fake chicken. Oh, OKAY. That’s a big claim my dude.

One, the tech for 3D printed food doesn’t exist in large scale consumer markets…yet. Two, if that technology were widely commercially available, it would be SO EXPENSIVE. There are a few companies, like NovaMeat and Redefine Meat that use some of the tech and principles of 3D printing in their production, and are only selling to restaurants at this time. A lot of these products are available only in limited markets oversees—like the UK and Spain—and others, like Open Meals, a business concept prototyping “custom sushi,” won’t even be launched until 2040 (if they ever do).

The best proof of concept are those 3D pizza making machines, and I say the word making loosely, as it’s basically a machine piping sauce. One of the companies of that proprietary pizza tech, BeeHive, also makes machines for custom cookie decorating. Like I said, glorified mechanical piping bags.

Overall, chicken is not really in the 3D printed food convo; it’s mostly red meats. Beyond all of this, GMOs and “bioengineered” foods get labeled as scary and unsafe, truly some foods are created to help with crop blight⁸, decrease the need for pesticides, and decrease environmental impact. Though they’re not perfect, they’re not evil by any means.

So, to confirm, Campbell’s soup isn’t made with 3D printed food, 3D printed food has many many years before it comes to fruition, and canned goods are a great option for anyone at any time for so many reasons.

Campbell’s reported Tuesday that Bally had since been let go⁹ from the company.

There’s a dine-and-dash influencer loose in Brooklyn

This is the kind of stuff that makes me think, maybe we all put our phones away for a while. 34 year old “influencer” Pei Chung has gained notoriety for going to expensive New York restaurants, ordering food, asking it to be packed up to go, and then ditching before the bill comes. Oh, and then getting on TikTok and bragging about her costly spread.

The price? Thousands owed to various restaurants around NYC, like Peter Luger Steakhouse. And, she’s been arrested for this crime five different times¹⁰, but for some reason keeps getting set free.

It gets so much weirder. Apparently, her lease on her Williamsburg apartment—owned by former governor Eliot Spitzer (yeah, remember that fool?)—ended in August 2024, but she’s been squatting there ever since. Spitzer claims she owes upwards of $40K in back rent, and is theoretically set to be evicted¹¹ this week.

What’s the conclusion here? Don’t do this. It’s terrible dining etiquette and in some establishments it’s common that your server takes the hit if you take off without paying and they don’t catch you. It’s trashy.

And, a few bite-sized ‘fives’

A beloved knife brand is walking back their lifetime guarantee

Stans of the well-loved (until now, I guess) knife company Misen are taking to Reddit¹² to bemoan the company tanking their mail-in sharpening guarantee. Before, customers were promised free lifetime sharpening; all they had to do was pay for shipping. Now, Misen’s website proudly states sharpening “starts at $11 per knife,”¹³ with some users saying customer service for the company has said that price doesn’t include the $14+ shipping fees. Apparently, this cost goes for all knives purchased, not just newly-purchased knives, even if they’ve sharpened them for free before.

Turns out you don’t need that crazy membership to get an Erewhon smoothie in NYC

This is the most I’ll talk about Erewhon, ever, probably. Speaking of, their famed overpriced smoothies—like the viral $20 Hailey Bieber Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie, whose name was quietly removed from the collab recently—landed in New York City earlier this year. Huge problem for smoothie bar aficionados though, the outpost is buried inside Kith Ivy, a members-only club known for its $36,000 membership fee. Well, $36,020 if you want the smoothie. Ouch.

No fear, UberEats announced a new promotion where you can order the smoothies for delivery¹⁴ via the app. Hooray? They’re still $20+.

A food media brand is selling a $1K toothpick

Damn, The Onion is really going to run out of material soon. Yes, I worked for Food52 previously, but that does not negate my ability to look at them critically (aka dunk on them). This week, the brand announced a partnership with Jennifer Fisher—self proclaimed queen of hoops—to sell a… novelty metal-plated toothpick for almost a thousand dollars. Okay, the silver one clocks in at only $450¹⁵, I apologize.

Hey remember last time when I said just because a product doesn’t exist yet doesn’t mean we have to make it? This very much applies. Beyond the risk of bodily damage from a silver or 14-karat gold-plated toothpick, who has the resources, monetarily or brain space-wise, to buy into an item that is so frivolous and can be easily lost with one wrong flick? Make it make sense. I’ve had my qualms about the way food media is shifting into the luxury fashion space, in a way that squashes a lot of things that make food human, but this really takes the uh, cake.

Unrelated, the company also announced this week that it’s up for sale¹⁶.

Tyra Banks’ “hot ice cream” company had a meltdown this week

If you weren’t aware (some of us aren’t so lucky), Tyra Banks owns a chain of shops in Australia called SMiZE & DREAM (I know), that sell, ready? Hot ice cream¹⁷. Yeah, beats me. I guess their freezers had some issues recently¹⁸ and Banks is very upset about it. Don’t know why a place that doesn’t actually serve frozen treats needs freezers, but okay.

1. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTrNFbYeF/

2. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTrNUEpeK/

3. https://popcrush.com/bethenny-frankel-round-swamp-chicken-salad-recipe/

4. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTrNr2Sgn/

5. https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/article/pii/S2633540924006182

6. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/diseases-watch-out-beach-180952346/

7. https://www.newsweek.com/campbells-soup-vp-mocks-poor-people-food-secret-recording-11097497

8. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9586588/

9. https://apnews.com/article/campbells-lawsuit-chicken-fired-poor-people-bioengineered-f3822ce2d7e8ac4e5c832e6f98ba459d

10. https://www.aol.com/news/serial-brooklyn-dine-dash-influencer-195255555.html

11. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15318673/Influencer-dine-dash-Pei-Lu-Chang-eviction.html

12. https://www.reddit.com/r/cookware/s/zg37SskO6x

13. https://misen.com/products/mail-in-knife-sharpening

14. https://people.com/erewhon-comes-to-new-york-city-with-delivery-only-smoothies-11851888

15. https://food52.com/story/jennifer-fisher-food52-toothpick

16. https://www.adweek.com/media/food52-explores-sale-tcg/

17. https://www.today.com/food/trends/tyra-banks-smize-and-dream-hot-ice-cream-coming-to-usa-nyc-rcna236640

18. https://www.facebook.com/reel/1220613906619623