The Sporkful

The Sporkful Family Food Court is back in session. A husband and wife debate when to eat movie popcorn, and a mother and daughter argue over whether eating salad dressing makes you an adult.  This episode originally aired on February 8, 2016, and was produced by Dan Pashman and Anne Saini, and enginnered by Bill O'Neill. The Sporkful team now includes Dan Pashman, Emma Morgenstern, Andres O'Hara,...

French podcaster Samia Basille loves going to the movies. And she enjoys popcorn. But she doesn't think the two should ever be combined. (Many other French people feel the same way.) When Samia spent a few months living in New York, it left her wondering: Why do Americans insist on chowing down on popcorn while watching a movie? This simple question sent her on a quest to understand the history of...

We follow one woman's attempt to recover from an eating disorder and hear what it’s like to wake up each morning and have to fight a battle not only with food, but more importantly, with yourself. It's a rare look inside one person’s struggle. We also hear from her husband and explore her decision, early in recovery, to become a baker. If anything this episode sounds familiar, you can get more inf...

Should you rinse ice before you pour a carbonated drink over it? What’s the best way to store fresh bread? And is there a reason to drink room temp water between bites of ice cream? Daniel Gritzer , editorial director of Serious Eats , and Swetha Sivakumar , who writes a food science Substack , join Dan to answer your food science questions. They also help Grace in Minneapolis, whose fresh bread d...

It’s Elkhart, Indiana, 2001. Two inches of Heather Coleman's turkey club disappear from her office fridge. The thief is nowhere to be found. And Heather’s life will never be the same. In this tribute to the hit podcast Serial , we investigate the shocking true story of an office fridge food theft. This episode originally aired on March 12, 2015 and May 9. 2022. It was produced by Dan Pashman, Anne...

Stanley Tucci nearly broke the internet in 2021 when he made a Negroni on Instagram . But long before that, the award-winning actor built his career around his love of food. He created the iconic food film Big Night , he’s written best-selling cookbooks, and now he eats his way through Italy on the show Tucci In Italy . In 2021 he released a memoir, Taste: My Life Through Food , which includes the...

“So often when we talk about veganism, we don't imagine Black people,” says Bryant Terry , the James Beard Award-winning cookbook author, chef, and educator. But Bryant sees veganism as deeply rooted in Black communities and traditions. And, he points out, veganism is growing faster among Black Americans than among any other group. After publishing another popular vegan cookbook in 2020, Bryant re...

What foods do Sporkful listeners resolve to eat more of in the new year, and why? And what’s Dan’s New Year’s food resolution for 2026? All is revealed in our annual year-end spectacular. We also replay one of the Sporkful crew’s favorite episodes of the year. Scott Wiener, founder of Scott’s Pizza Tours , has made a name for himself as one of the most knowledgeable and passionate pizza experts in...

This episode is chock full of strategies for making your way in one of the world's most barren food wastelands. We cover both the airport and airplane, short domestic flights and long haul international flights, snacks, entrees, and more. We'll tell you how to mix your cocktail, how to use your pretzels to improve your other food, how to get served first, and how to end up with enough beverages to...

From a moisturizer made of beef fat, to bartenders hating on Gen Z, to tariffs, a lot happened this year. (How do you get away with stealing 100,000 eggs and a truckload of Guy Fieri’s tequila?) We cover the biggest and strangest food stories of 2025 in our Salad Spinner Year in Review! Helen Rosner , staff writer at The New Yorker , and Yasmin Tayag , staff writer at The Atlantic , join us to dis...

Patti LaBelle is not just a music icon, she’s also a food icon. She’s written best-selling cookbooks, hosted a food TV show, and even cooked for Elton John, The Rolling Stones, and Prince. She talks with Dan about touring the segregated South in the ‘60s, the viral video that made her sweet potato pie a Walmart sensation, and the one recipe in her cookbook that’s perfect for women going through me...

It’s been eight years since Samin Nosrat published her smash-hit cookbook, Salt Fat Acid Heat . She says her whole adult life was on a trajectory toward that book. But in the aftermath of its success, Samin ended up in a dark place, struggling to understand why achieving her goals didn’t fix her problems. This week she tells us about that time, and how it eventually led her to write her new book,...

TikTok is the wild west of the food media world. It’s less professionalized than Instagram and YouTube, and it holds the promise of virality from the very first time you post. So we wondered: What actually makes a food TikTok go viral? To find out, we consult Bettina Makalintal , a food journalist and culture critic (who also makes her own TikTok videos), and Professor Emily Contois , who studies...

In America, the cooking fat you use — lard, butter, shortening, oil — has long been a signifier of health, virtue, and class. What is it about fat that gets us so riled up? Reporter Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong looks at four battles over cooking fats in America over the last 150 years, starting with lard vs. Crisco, all the way to our current panic over seed oils. What do these battles tell us about food...

This week we’re reheating two call-in episodes from 2015. First: Two Sporkful listeners call in to debate the best way to make enchiladas: flat (lasagna style) or rolled. Can Dan's advice restore peace and save Enchilada Party Night? Next up: Adam and Jonathan in L.A. call in to debate a dystopian future with only one cheese and to explain why cheddar is like Hugh Grant. Then Erica in Illinois pon...

How does a traumatic brain injury affect the way you cook and eat? Filmmaker Cheryl Green, who has a brain injury, satirizes her own experiences in the kitchen in a short video called “Cooking With Brain Injury.” This week Dan talks with Cheryl about what it means to live with an invisible disability, how it affects her cooking, and why asking for help can be a beautiful thing. Plus, Cheryl record...

Amy Sedaris offers advice on dealing with family members who are drunk or confrontational at the holidays. Plus, Robert Krulwich (formerly of Radiolab ) on the time a turkey fell in love with his wife. This episode originally aired on November 21, 2014, and was produced by Dan Pashman, Kristen Meinzer, and Anne Saini. The Sporkful team now includes Dan Pashman, Emma Morgenstern, Andres O'Hara, Kam...

Roy Wood Jr . has long used humor to discuss topical issues and get at deeper truths. As a correspondent for The Daily Show , and now as the host of Have I Got News For You on CNN, he brings his own unique sensibility to political comedy. In his new memoir, The Man Of Many Fathers , he goes deep on his complicated relationship with his father, and the role food played in crucial moments of his chi...

Today we’re bringing you a conversation Dan had on the new podcast In the Test Kitchen , from America’s Test Kitchen . Hosts Dan Souza and Lisa McManus welcomed Dan into their Boston studio to dive deep into the world of pasta design, exploring what makes a perfect noodle and how texture, sauce-holding power, and mouthfeel come together in the ultimate bite. Plus, the ITTK hosts get into gear test...

We all know the classic regional pizza styles: New York, Chicago, Detroit. But Colorado? If you haven’t heard of that one, you’re not alone. Paul Karolyi, a reporter and executive producer of City Cast Denver , spent six years trying to uncover the story of how Colorado style pizza was invented, and why more people don’t know about it. This week we hear the tale of his epic quest, and enlist pizza...

Wherever Phil Rosenthal goes, he wants to eat — which explains the name of his Netflix show, Somebody Feed Phil . He travels the world with wide eyes, an empty stomach, and a bottomless supply of delight at the people and food he encounters. And before Somebody Feed Phil and his new podcast Naked Lunch , Phil created the hit sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond , which used food as a key source of tensi...

Tony Shalhoub is an actor whose roles skew towards the quirky and neurotic — and his characters’ quirks often come out through food. In the classic 1996 film Big Night , Tony plays an uncompromising Italian chef whose Jersey Shore restaurant is on the brink of failure. In the TV show Monk , he plays a detective with OCD who has many strong opinions about how he wants his food. In The Marvelous Mrs...

This week we're talking about a number of key candy issues with special guests in time for Halloween. You'll hear from a Colorado-based Eater whose highly comprehensive candy treatise is on our blog and a candy blogger who has a Kit Kat eating technique that is bound to cause sustained widespread controversy or at the very least an significant uptick in chocolate-smeared fingers. This episode orig...

Ask folks in the world of food and cookbooks, “Who writes the best recipes?” and you’ll hear one name more than any other: Dorie Greenspan. "Dorie does rock solid recipes," says Chandra Ram, who judges the prestigious IACP Cookbook Awards. So what's Dorie doing that makes her recipes better than others? This week, we travel to her home in Connecticut to find out. We watch her test a recipe, and ge...

To say that hydration is an invention is only a slight exaggeration. Water bottles have become a crucial accessory — a status symbol. How did that happen? This week we bring you an episode from our friends at the Slate podcast Decoder Ring . They investigate how bottled water transformed itself from a small, European luxury item to the single largest beverage category in America. It took savvy mar...