Midnight Delights

Desire, delight, consumption and control, this week we talk about how Ozempic's changing how we view food, midnight snacks, dry and damp Januarys and midnight bakeries!

Hello!

Welcome back and Happy New Year!

Hope you all had a good Christmas and the beginning of 2024. Kate and I spent it wondering if it was midnight at 6PM with a belly full of a seafood tower and oysters.

Before New Year’s Eve I rewatched When Harry Met Sally with this iconic NYE scene. We all know that the golden age of romcoms has passed (Julia Roberts, I’ll still watch anything you do). I saw a tweet saying that rom-coms nowadays are missing the ‘rom’ part, specifically referencing When Harry Met Sally and how everyone quotes “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible” rather than any of the funny lines such as “I’ll have what she’s having”.

I also finally saw the film everyone’s talking about, Saltburn! Crazy, fun, silly, and a little bit intense. I loved these Letterbox reviews (Ayo Edebiri’s is my fav) which capture the mood.

If you’re interested someone’s also created a ‘Jacob Elordi Bathtub Cocktail’

- 2 oz light rum
- 2 oz pineapple juice
- 1.5 oz cream of coconut
- splash of lime juice

Combine all ingredients with ice into a cocktail shaker and shake vigorously. Rim your glass with cream of coconut and pour. If you’re familiar with a piña colada, this may feel like an overly sweet copycat of that.

We’ve also got the Golden Globes coming up, Rachel Weiz said it best:

Let’s get into the newsletter!

This week:

• How Ozempic is changing how we see food

• Midnight Snacks

• My type of party, Late Night Bakeries

• For the Culture: Celebrating Black Women and Femmes in Food and Wine

• Drink less, live more

• Dry, damp, or doused

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How Ozempic is changing how we see food:

It’s no doubt 2023 was the year of Ozempic (possibly only topped by Bows and Taylor Swift). Ozempic is prescribed for type 2 diabetes, it is also the “magical” weight loss drug sweeping Hollywood.

Bon Appetite wrote the other week “Jimmy Kimmel opened the 95th Oscars by looking out at the tony crowd and asking, “I can’t help but wonder, ‘Is Ozempic right for me?’” Sharon Osbourne recently shared she’s coming off of Ozempic after claiming she’d lost more weight than she had intended. Oprah announced she’s been taking an Ozempic-like drug and that she’s “done with the shaming.”

“What does it mean, though, for a culture rooted so deeply in consumption to be avidly peddling a drug that claims to control it?”

“2023 was another year of outrageous, indulgent, or downright absurd food trends. It encouraged us to eat, drink, shop, vape—to consume—without thought, an imperative most succinctly captured by the phenomenon of the endlessly multiplying brand collab multiverse, from food x fashion (McDonald’s and Crocs, Erewhon and Balenciaga, Burger King and Fila) to food x celeb (Ice Spice Munchkins at Dunkin, Cardi B and McDonald’s, Snoop Dogg and Jack in the Box) to food x food (Cheez-It Puffs, Kit Kat Churros, Oreo Cakesters, Lucky Charms S’mores). And this is to say nothing of restaurant hype culture.”

Our society promotes a paradox of a culture that is deeply rooted in consumption while simultaneously telling (and shaming) us to control our desire to consume.

So where does Ozempic fit into all of this? Ozempic tells us we “can have both” with can consume without consequence (at least in regards to weight). Perpetuating harmful body standards, fatphobia, and diet culture.

Janet Chazan a nutritional anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of Anxious Eaters: Why We Fall For Fad Diets.says “It sounds to me that what people are doing, culturally and psychologically,” she says, “is imagining [being overweight] as a chronic disease that then requires chronic treatment for the rest of their lives.”

Similarly, food historian Nadia Bernstein proposes “For generations, we have participated in diet culture, substituting our desire for real chocolate cake with chocolate-flavoured yoghurt, and that did not work – now we just want to be freed from desire”.

The long-term effects of Ozempic are not known, particularly for people without diabetes. Further, people often gain back any weight lost while on the Ozempic as soon as they stop taking it, creating an endless cycle and consumer of the drug.

The new demand for the drug also skyrockets the price and reduces its availability for people who medically need it. Meanwhile, I’ve personally had so many friends find a ton of success where they couldn’t before in feeling better in their skin. So where does this leave us? For me, I see both sides, and I’m interested in reading more on the subject.

Midnight Snacks:

Speaking of cravings, I read this great substack piece in Snack Stack about the history of midnight snacks.

Midnight is a time of transitions and uncertainties, a time when things go slightly sideways. It’s witches and closing times and Cinderella rushing away from the ball. It’s one day doggedly pushing into the next, a standoff between morning and night.

The topsy-turviness of it all also applies to the food we eat at that hour. Late-night breakfast is the preferred meal of many a diner patron, but sliders from White Castle are equally valid and appreciated, as Harold and Kumar knew, and as long as refrigerators have existed, humans have been raiding them in a sleepy daze when they felt a bit peckish long after dark. Societal norms about three square meals do not apply at midnight. Eat whatever the hell you want.

Doug Mack started searching the archives and found this from 1965 (the start of a long essay in the Montreal Gazette by a writer named John Belanger). Belanger suggests waking up your partner to share the midnight delights (or perhaps a Taylor-esq dance moment) not so sure about this one, it’d have to be something really good.

The earliest mention of a midnight snack Mack could find in the newspapers was from 1875, in the Louisville Courier-Journal. I’m also impartial to a midnight cake snack when writing.

Mack also tries to capture the cultural shifts and attitudes about midnight snacking, “by the 1980s, midnight snacking was well-understood as a glorious fact of life.”

If you’re interested in learning more about the history of the midnight snack read the full piece here.

I know I wrote about this in a previous newsletter, but if you want to midnight snack vicariously, I suggest the Japanese Netflix show Midnight Diner about a tiny restaurant in Japan and its late-night customers.

Finally, this quote from John Belanger’s 1965 essay about the joys of midnight snacks is probably sage advice in a culture hooked on consumption and control.

My type of party, Late Night Bakeries:

Let’s move from midnight fridge scavenging and greasy drunken kebabs to the more sophisticated Late Night Bakeries in Rome. I read this article in Eater mag that taught me about the magic people are queuing at Il Maritozzaro in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood. At all times of the night, people queue up for a maritozzo, a big, round brioche-type bun bursting with fresh cream. Il Maritozzaro is open 24/7 and it’s not alone, “a similar scene is playing out at dozens of nighttime bakeries across the city. They’re open late into the night, serving up Nutella-filled croissants and bombas, doughnuts oozing with custard; often, each bakery will specialize in one specific treat.”

“This story played out in real time at Pasticceria Lambiase, across town from Il Maritozzaro and Il Cornettone. The business began as a standard daytime bakery, but when the kitchen fired up the ovens in the early morning, partygoers on the way home from nearby student bars would bang desperately on the doors of the laboratorio, lured by the sweet smell of the pastries. When the 4 a.m. queues became so long that neighbors started to complain and the police came inquiring, owner Antonio Lambiase, a charming Neapolitan who has been working in pastry his whole life, gave in and turned Pasticceria Lambiase into a full-fledged nighttime bakery in order to better handle demand.”

I love it, this sounds like the perfect treat on your way home from a night out. Next time I’m in Rome I’ll be sure to hit up these bakeries:

• Il Maritozzaro

• Il Cornettone

• Pasticceria Lambiase

• Dolce Maniera

For the Culture: Celebrating Black Women and Femmes in Food and Wine

Klancy Miller, a pastry chef, recipe developer, author, and founder of For the Culture. magazine has written another cookbook!

Her magazine “For the Culture” is a biannual printed food magazine that celebrates Black women and femmes in food and wine. The stories in For the Culture are about Black women throughout the diaspora, written by Black women and photographed and illustrated by Black women. It is the first magazine of its kind.

Black women are the architects of cuisines and kitchens in the U.S. and in so many countries throughout the world and our stories about our expertise, experience, and relationships to food do not get enough attention or coverage. For the Culture aims to change that by capturing the moment and highlighting what Black women and femmes are doing in food and beverages now, as well as honoring the women on whose shoulders we stand.”

Such an important project, Klancy’s cookbook titled ‘For the Culture: Phenomenal Black Women and Femmes in Food: Interviews, Inspiration, and Recipes’ is a narrative-led cookbook exploring food and wine culture through recipes, essays, records, and stories written by and about Black women. She explores topics like the erased history of Black and Queer women who paved the way in hospitality, Afro-Indigenous farming systems, activism in the industry, food systems and equality, women making change in the industry, and up-and-coming tastemakers.

“In this gorgeous volume these luminaries and more share the vision that drives them, the mistakes they made along the way, advice for the next generation, and treasured recipes—all accompanied by stunning original illustrated portraits and vibrant food photography.”

Drink less, live more:

This holiday season there was a lot of media surrounding reducing our alcohol consumption and opting for non-alcoholic alternatives. These articles were interesting doing the rounds before Christmas, not just the usual ‘Dry January’ advertising. Drinking has been in decline for many years now becoming increasingly normalized and decreasingly scrutinized.

While traditionally, December is a time of the year characterized by drinking and indulgence, this year it felt like the tides were well and truly changing.

GQ even published an article in December titled ‘The Year We Realised Alcohol Is Bad For You’.

Back in March last year I wrote about the new research that had come to light by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction, stating the new safest/advised amount of alcohol to drink is… none. Despite long-held beliefs that moderate alcohol consumption is good for you, the new research debunks that.

Reflecting on the year, this article in the Washington Post seemed to shift things for me.

“Drink Less, Live More” is the conclusion.

Also interestingly, there is new post-pandemic research that reveals our drinking habits are evolving reveal in the US when we drink, we’re drinking at home. No doubt reflective of the current economic climate and also the generational shifts surrounding drinking attitudes.

Dry, damp, or doused:

Dry January is no new phenomenon, and as the research tells us, we should all be drinking less. We also all know someone (or maybe ourselves) who claimed to start Dry January but ends up drinking for events, birthdays, special occasions etc. The drinking equivalent of a “flexitarian”.

Now this practice has a new name; Damp January. Horrendous name I know. You also might argue, isn’t this healthy drinking? Drinking in moderation? Should this really be a trend?

But ultimately, as Jaya Saxena wrote for Eater “if the idea of participating in a socially sanctioned activity inspires some people to cut back or rethink their drinking, good for them. There’s no harm in the practice.”

Regardless, I’d suggest you all avoid a Doused January though (please excuse the equally terrible title for the sake of alliteration).

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That’s all for this week folks! Hope you enjoyed reading! Hope you start off the new year with lots of joy, or as Kramer said:

Carlie xx