Petco’s dog treats are edible to humans. They’re combinations of food-safe ingredients! You’ll be fine.

Some of them even taste pretty good. Their off-brand Oreos Duplex Sandwich Creme Cookies are indistinguishable from human snacks. I put a tray out at a party¹ this weekend and no one questioned whether they were human food: in fact, they were nearly finished by the end of the night, while boxes of Chicken McNuggets went uneaten.² I wouldn’t say the off-brand Oreos Duplex Sandwich Creme Cookies are strictly better than Oreos—the wafers were softer than I wanted—but the cookies were less cloyingly sweet than a Double Stuf.³

Next, a Chicago restaurant founded by star chef Grant Achatz, has some red flags.

I don’t mean that only figuratively. It is literally decorated with red flags. Next has a rotating conceit, changing every few months, and during my visit last week it was “World’s Fair.” (Past themes include “Ancient Rome,” “Alinea: 2005–2010,” and “Childhood.”) Dozens of world flags were hanging from the ceiling—South Korea, Hungary, the UAE, and so on—but midway through the meal, I noticed that several among them were just red. Not Vietnam’s red with a yellow star: plain red.

I was baffled. What were they thinking?, I wondered, for neither the first nor last time that night.

Outside The Spheres, an Amazon.com rainforest in downtown Seattle, sits one of Amazon’s Community Banana Stands.¹ An Airstream trailer decorated with yellow stripes, banana-print curtains, and an Atomic-Age-style sign overhead, the Amazon Banana Stand has free bananas for anyone who wants one. When I visited, a bearded Amazon bananista² was perched on a stool behind the counter, idle and on his phone. The bananas were laid out for the taking, so I didn’t need to talk to him to get one—it appears he was just there to make sure things didn’t get too bananas, uh, out of hand.

content warning: crypto and NFTs.

If you didn’t know that a burger shack themed after the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection opened in Long Beach one month ago, then consider yourself lucky: you have a healthier distance from Crypto Twitter than I do. But I do not have a healthy distance. While on a road trip that passed through LA, I felt obligated to stop by Bored and Hungry to check it out.

Dining out together is for connecting over food, not staring at screens. That’s why I find QR code menus toxic: they start the meal off on the wrong foot by forcing diners to pull out their phones.

But for all the widespread adoption that QR code menus have had in the past two years, very few of them take advantage of being in a web browser.¹ Many are simply PDFs of the old menu, designed to be printed on 8.5” by 11” paper but hard to read on a 5.75” by 3.75” screen. A proper HTML page is a step up. Better yet are menus with links to each subsection (“appetizers,” “burgers,” etc.) for easier navigation. And until my meal at Ivan Ramen, I thought that was as far as it got.