What makes a great Grub Street Diet? Even after 18-plus years, there’s no one formula, and every year brings new departures. In 2024, we followed Jeff VanderMeer as he escaped a natural disaster and Tony Tulathimutte as he consumed an alarming number of foods “as a joke.” We spent a few days in Milwaukee with Dan Kois and another couple of days in Amsterdam with Michelle Collins. Emily Nussbaum worked out some inherited female food pathologies, while Asher Perlman offered a split-screen glimpse into his week with COVID alongside what he would have eaten otherwise. Here — in what we promise is purely chronological order — are 20 moments from the year’s diets that made us laugh, wince, smile, and, more than once, really crave a glass of milk.
20. Moshe Kasher revealed his history with B&H Dairy.
“My dad, a former beatnik and an Abstract Impressionist painter who once rented an entire co-op building in the East Village for $200 a month, packed his paints into storage, left Manhattan, and moved to the ‘shtetl.’ When I’d visit in the summer, fresh off the plane from my entirely secular life with my mom in Oakland, California, he’d throw slacks and a velvet yarmulke on me and then take me on guided tours of the old neighborhood, driving through Little Italy with the window rolled down. He’d point at Italian restaurateurs and say, way too loud, ‘MAFIA. THAT GUY. HE’S IN THE MAFIA.’ I’d cringe and hide and hope the fact that he had the voice of a deaf man would prevent them from understanding him and tommy-gunning us down on the spot. The end of the tour would always be B&H. He’d order blintzes or, as they are called in France, ‘Jew crêpes.’”
19. Vinson Cunningham came to terms with his “greedbucket” past.
“I have an abundance mind-set. (This is my self-elevating way of admitting that I am greedy. When I was a kid, my father used to admiringly watch me eat, then call me, with all the affection in the world, a ‘greedbucket.’ I often wonder what he would’ve said if he’d survived to see me drink.) Earlier this year, I decided I probably drink too much, and I’m hoping to figure out what that should mean: some recourse to rules — only on weekends, only when out with friends, etc. — or teetotaling altogether, which, like all demanding adventures, sounds sort of fun but also insane. By nature, I eat and drink to celebrate, to mourn, to reward myself, and sometimes, sure, to ward off unwanted thoughts.”
18. Joanna Goddard’s son orchestrated an unforgivable prank.
“He and his babysitter make cake pops and they are all excited. While I’m at the bank, they’re texting me, ‘We made cake pops!’ with a cute little picture. And then we get home and they are so excited to give them to me, and I bite into it. Hmmm … it’s weird. My inner monologue is on high alert, but I have to be like, ‘Yum!’ Then I look down and see it’s a Brussels sprout covered in chocolate. The texture was so layered. My dad took a bite of one, too, and he didn’t mind the taste.”
17. Ruby Redstone let us in on her secret single behavior.
“My husband is out at a concert, so I’m on my own for dinner. I hate cooking for just me, not because I find it depressing but because it gets in the way of things I like to do when Gabriel’s not home, like watching Below Deck and embroidering hearts on everything we own. I make the same thing almost every time he’s out: whatever beef-stew thing we happen to have in the freezer (we made a big stash before the baby was born) warmed up with a heaping scoop of Xi’an Famous Foods chile oil and a few cracks of Sichuan pepper. I add noodles, scallions, and cilantro, then douse the whole thing in black vinegar. It’s sort of a simple approximation of the Xi’an Famous Foods cumin-lamb noodles. Every time I eat it, I think of the Sex and the City episode about ‘secret single behavior,’ because I suppose this would be mine. Spicy beef stew, yacht-based reality TV, arts and crafts.”
16. Rita Bullwinkel said what all the true dairy heads know to be true.
“I wake up at 8 a.m. and drink coffee with half-and-half. I would honestly drink coffee with whipping cream if I had any in the house. Sometimes at cafés, I am forced to drink coffee with whole milk. I find the scanty fat content disgusting. Whole milk tastes like water to me.”
15. Christina Chaey turned her fridge cleanout into aspirational eating.
“I haven’t gone grocery shopping for the week yet, and I’m still on my clean-out-the-fridge-and-freezer campaign, so I make a lunch I can only describe as ‘deranged but good’ a skillet of canned chickpeas cooked with garlic, onion, harissa, berbere, freezer pancetta, and most of a jar of leftover Rao’s marinara; microwaved frozen cauliflower; a shredded cabbage and carrot salad with lemon, honey, olive oil, and dill; the last of a bag of frozen onion rings; and a single frozen mozzarella stick.”
4. Flynn Berry gave us a great idea for a Yankee Swap gift.
“You can order military ready-meals online. Actual rations, unopened, still edible, from as far back as the First World War. So far I’ve resisted the temptation to spend all my money bidding on Norwegian Arctic Field Rations and French Parachute Regiment Ration Packs.”
13. Josh Johnson accepted defeat.
“’Eat your vegetables if you want to be big and strong’ is something I can still hear my grandmother saying clearly in the back of my head whenever I sit down to have a meal without any greens. But I did eat my vegetables, and I am neither a big man nor a strong one. I’ve returned many jars of pickles to the grocery store rather than admit that I just couldn’t open them.”
12. Emily Nussbaum turned a joke order into a go-to.
“While grooving to the band, I drank a Stella Artois, a beer I began ordering as a running joke with Clive after David Brooks mocked it as ‘the beer of the Belgian working class’ in a bizarre 2003 column about hipster chic. Maybe this is a goofy way to make drink choices, but that’s the way it goes, at least in my experience.”
11. Will Butler dabbled in bulk buying.
“We’ve switched to getting our groceries delivered from Costco via Instacart, using Jenny’s mom’s Costco card (she lives in St. Louis). We’ve only been doing this a couple months, and I haven’t totally adapted; opening the fridge has the uncanny feeling of opening a neighbor’s fridge when you’re a kid: How do they live this way? There’s a three-pound tub of Philadelphia cream cheese; a giant bag of zucchini; three half-gallon cartons of Kirkland-brand one percent milk (I would slightly prefer two percent milk, but online you can only get it by the gallon, and the Costco gallons are the modern squat cube-shaped gallons, which feel weirdly inhuman to me).”
10. John Ganz made it clear that omakase is no friend of his.
“There used to be many Japanese restaurants downtown that were not terribly expensive but were quite good and cozy. They’ve seemingly been replaced by ever-proliferating omakase ‘experiences,’ some of which are elegant and unaffordable while others are extremely tacky and loud. Since the city is empty, we find a table at Tomoe on Thompson Street, which often has a line outside. This means I’ve never actually been, but I suppose there must be a reason why. I like that the décor seems unchanged from its opening and is unpretentious. The service is a little gruff. Promising!”
9. Bryan Safi had some tension with a certain health food emblem.
“I know I said I don’t cook, but I do make oatmeal. My favorite is the Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free rolled oats, except I sub almond milk in for water, and I’m telling you: It is luxurious. Bob of Bob’s Red Mill does make me nervous, though — not because I know him but because I’ve created a backstory for him that I don’t like to think about.”
8. Asher Perlman drank a liter of milk. Every morning.
“Breakfast is eggs Benedict with homemade hollandaise, a bananas Foster Belgian waffle cooked to golden perfection, and raspberry pain au chocolat overnight delivered from my favorite Parisian pâtisserie, Boulangerie Utopie. Just kidding — it’s milk.”
7. Dan Kois faced the consequences of his actions.
“Fourteen years ago, then-VP Joe Biden got into it with a manager at Kopp’s — my old manager, in fact, a guy who yelled at me a lot. I was sure he didn’t remember me, but I remembered him, so I wrote a snarky post and thought, Well, I got him. The next time I was in Milwaukee, I stopped by Kopp’s, as always, and ordered a cheeseburger, as always. When my number was called, there was Scott, holding out my bag. ‘I read that thing you wrote,’ he said. ‘That’s not how I remember things.’ I learned a valuable lesson: never blog.”
6. Isle McElroy laid out some rigorous beverage criteria.
“I can’t teach without drinking at least two different liquids. Today I rotate between coffee, smoothie, and a massive jar of ice water — I prefer to drink water out of enormous jars. Standard glasses are not big enough. At restaurants, I am constantly refilling the petite glassware set before me.”
5. Michelle Collins returned to New York… and one hyper-local chain.
“Here I am, in a city of endless culinary adventures, options, cuisines … so I text my friend Aly to meet me at the Smith for dinner, a chain restaurant I can best describe as ‘What would happen if Mumford & Sons opened a Cheesecake Factory?’ (Complimentary.) Say what you will about the Smith, but I dare you to find me a more delicious Steak Caesar salad in New York. I dream of it! Creamy, garlicky, the perfect amount of dressing covered in crispy Parm chips: perfection. I accompany my salad with a glass of rosé from the famous ‘Long Island’ region of France, which they serve to me in a child’s juice glass.”
4. Nigel Slater set the record straight on overnight oats.
“My early-morning eating often follows an almost unshakable ritual. A single piece of fruit on a wavy, rectangular green Japanese plate. A shallow bowl of berries and another of Bircher muesli, which has lately been rebranded as ‘overnight oats’ — a move I feel is possibly a little disrespectful to its inventor, the Swiss physician Maximilian Bircher-Benner.”
3. Jeff Vandermeer fled a fucking hurricane!
“I order my standard on-the-road hypercharged coffee: black with two shots of espresso. I get further settled in the hotel room with my poor, confused cat and check the latest hurricane updates (180-mile winds headed right for Tallahassee). I scribble scene fragments as I finish drinking the coffee, and I sit there for a moment, staring at Neo, as if I’ve forgotten why I’m here. To hunker down. To escape. To, by chance, write about my food choices.”
2. Tony Tulathimutte rolled the dice on some expired hummus.
“When the fridge gets full, I dispose of any food on the verge or slightly beyond the verge of expiring by eating it. I started doing this as a ‘joke,’ but it’s now more of a housekeeping errand. So lunch is leftover roasted chicken and potatoes from three days ago (unheated), the last two bites of yesterday’s burrito, and a sentient glob of hummus from antiquity, so old that the label might as well be in cuneiform.”
1. Aria Aber came out as anti-hydration.
“I still haven’t had water but am drinking my fourth can of LaCroix. I suddenly remember my late mentor Louise Glück, who also preferred sparkling drinks out of a can and hated hydration. ‘Water tastes like sickness and hospitals,’ I said to her once. She just looked at me. ‘No,’ she said with an earnest face. ‘It tastes much worse than that.’”
