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Sumo Cola, Walmart’s semi-live Bio-Animélectronic Ninja Brand Assassin, secured a few stray hairs that had come undone from his topknot.  He wanted nothing to interfere with his drone’s-eye view of the Kennedy compound, a white splash of hotel-sized wooden structures dispersed along the grass and dunes of Hyannis. What, Sumo wondered, was the Unique Sales...

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Here is how it begins.  An older couple - not elderly as yet, but old enough for their kids to worry that they’re losing it - are walking up the road from a cul de sac in a lovely suburban street at twilight. The half-ring of houses in the cul de sac are topped by...

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If gluten-free is a rock, and dairy-free is a hard place, you can see where that puts us cooks. "Sure. In Asia," you might say, and you would be right.  If you can avoid the dim sum, and care less about the bits of wheat they sneak into soy sauce, you could dine throughout Asia...

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Love may be blind, but it has an amazing sense of smell.  This is why it's so easy to fall in love in a foreign country. People are the same everywhere -  we all just keep meeting the same bunch of jerks we got to know in high school.  But new smells hit a part...

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Food Trend Physicists define three Laws of Nutritional Transformation.  The first and most important is the Law of Granola, which states that everything healthy will accumulate sugar and fat until it becomes a cookie.  The other two laws are the Law of Kale, which is that all trendy vegetables shall turn into potato chips; and...

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I first unveiled these giant pickled beans to my admiring extended family two Christmas / Hanukkah / Winter Solstices ago, as a curiosity and appetizer. "Where in hell did you get those enormous fucking beans?" my brother-in-law's brother wanted to know. "Well, I belong to this bean club," I explained.  There, was a long, considering...

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Are you always on the lookout for certain things?  I'm always looking for epazote, black hand soap, Stewed Monkey Heads, an inexpensive throwing ax, and fuzzy socks.  I don't want to buy any of these online, especially the socks; I want to be led to them by fate.  Ideally, Marie Kondo will be standing at...

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My poor, dear, dead dad.  Each of his three marriages was worse than the one before.  His final wife never even bothered to move in - she couldn't handle the constant mess that his art projects made of the big table in the breakfast nook.  He would visit her, instead, at her sunny, museum-like house...

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There's a particular craft fair I like to go to at a nature preserve in Wells, Maine, every year.  They make up for their overstock of earthy stoneware and lobster imagery by offering excellent bake sale cupcakes, dollar hot dogs cooked by the fire department, local draft beer and a tent full of food vendors....

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For a few months when I was student teaching, I had a roommate who was a fruitarian.  This means that, like some species of bats, he only ate fruit.  He was tall, oracular, and skeletally thin.  He explained to me that fruits were the only food that truly wanted to be eaten.  Vegetables defend themselves...

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