The Week's Saturday Wrap
Decorative refrigerators, robot servers, and eating on camera

 
FOOD & DRINK

2024 food trends: Our ever-evolving cravings

Fridgescaping 
Forget trying to find the cheekiest magnet to display on the door of your refrigerator, said Audrey Morgan in Food & Wine. The latest fridge-decor trend is “all about what’s on the inside.” On Instagram and TikTok, #fridgescaping videos show off the mini wonderlands homemakers are creating by combining curated selections of distinctive containers, fresh produce, cut flowers, and sometimes even framed photos. Orderliness matters, of course, but fridgescaping doesn’t prioritize practicality. “Every time we open the refrigerator–and we do that several times a day—it needs to be pretty, too,” says design consultant Kathy Perdue, who coined the term. 

A new king of beers 
When Bill Shufelt founded Athletic Brewing, “his idea was to create a new kind of nonalcoholic beer: one that people would actually drink,” said Ben Cohen in The Wall Street Journal. Seven years later, it’s looking like mission accomplished for the Milford, Conn.–based startup. At a time when overall beer sales are flat but NA beer consumption is growing, Athletic has passed Heineken’s and Budweiser’s offerings to become the top-selling non-alcoholic beer in U.S. grocery stores. At Whole Foods outlets, it even outsells all traditional beers. 

A bad year for cold cuts 
In July, deli meat purveyor Boar’s Head recalled a staggering 7 million pounds of meat after a listeria outbreak traced to one of the company’s Virginia processing plants led to 10 deaths and dozens of hospitalizations. Stories circulated about foul sanitary conditions in the industry and the known risks of cancer and heart disease linked to the consumption of processed cold cuts. “But never bet against lunch meat,” said Kim Severson in The New York Times. Nationwide sales of all brands briefly dipped by 8 percent, yet sales soon began to pick up. Our decades-old hunger for deli meats endures, because they answer our need for fast, convenient meals. 

Robots’ slow advance 
Food-industry robots are succeeding at some tasks, failing at others. In June, McDonald’s pulled the plug on a test run of AI-powered order takers because the mistake rate on orders was simply too high. But 2024 also saw the founder of Chipotle launching Kernel, a vegan fast-food restaurant where plant-based burger patties are grilled by a robotic arm, and the salad chain Sweetgreen reported increased sales and reduced turnover at locations testing machines that shoot salad fixings into the bowls. Denny’s continues slowly rolling out robots that look like shelf units and deliver food to tables. The robot at a Denny’s in Laurel, Md., seems to be getting along fine with humans on the staff. “Sometimes, Sunny gets confused when maneuvering around something and turns from side to side repeatedly,” the manager told The Laurel Independent. “It makes us laugh. We call it the Sunny Dance.” 

Reservations for traditionalists 
When Tina Vaughn opened Eulalie in downtown Manhattan late last year, she made sure to hook up a landline. In an era when online reservations are the standard and are often vacuumed up by reservation bots and table scalpers, Eulalie’s phone-only reservation system makes it an outlier, said Andrea Strong in Eater. But other fine restaurants in town, like Cafe Carmellini and Polo Bar, are moving in the same direction, transferring online reservations to handwritten entries in custom-made leather-bound books kept at the greeter’s station. “Isn’t it worth losing a little efficiency to make things more personable?” says Balthazar owner Keith McNally. “It’s a bloody restaurant, after all!” 

Eating for views 
“Even if you don’t know the term mukbang, you’ve definitely seen one by now,” said Kyndall Cunningham in Vox. In Korea, the word simply means “eating broadcast,” and in its U.S. iteration, the online video genre “combines two things we Americans define as guilty pleasures: reality television and food.” The art of the mukbang keeps evolving, but in its most popular form, online personalities such as Nikocado Avocado and Jelly Bean Sweets let the camera run while they conquer feats of gluttony that may include eating every offering on a fast-food menu. Participants say they’re sharing a pleasurable experience, but nutritionists worry that mukbangs are promoting disordered eating. 

Caviar jumps the shark 
These days, you almost can’t find a menu where caviar isn’t offered as a flourish, whether to zhuzh up fried chicken or a slice of everything-bagel pizza, said Tammie Teclemariam in NYMag.com. Caviar “used to feel special.” In 2024, it’s become “just another upsell.”

 
 
REVIEW OF REVIEWS: BOOKS

Critics’ choice: The year’s best novels

1. James by Percival Everett (Doubleday, $28) 
Percival Everett’s brilliant latest novel “tears down and rebuilds a cultural landmark,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. A bold reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, it largely retains the outline of the original, except that perspective has shifted. Here we see Huck’s raft trip down the Mississippi through the eyes of his enslaved adult companion, who prefers “James” to “Jim,” secretly reads widely, and consciously speaks in an unschooled patois to prevent white people from seeing him as a threat. But Everett is not taking on Twain to score easy points. This “thrilling” and “soulful” novel is “a tangled and subversive homage” that sharply illuminates what the American experiment truly looked like circa 1861. “To call James a retelling would be an injustice,” said Tyler Austin Harper in The Atlantic. Everett has repurposed Huck Finn, and in the process has engineered “a systematic dismantling” of a tired narrative staple: “the Black man or woman who exists to morally enlighten a fallen but basically redeemable white protagonist.” In James, Black oppression is poisonous to its victims, not sanctifying. 

2. All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead, $29) 
“Was Miranda July’s sensational tale of a midlife turned upside down occasionally a little too arch?” asked Dan Kois in Slate. Of course it was. What’s more, few of its secondary characters seemed like fully sketched human beings. But when its unnamed narrator, a 45-year-old semi-famous artist, checks out of her home life with a husband and child, settles in at a hotel an hour away, and begins a fevered affair, All Fours proved so “intellectually and physically attuned to the vicissitudes of its narrator’s questionable decisions” that it set readers abuzz. In 2024, “there was no book that was more fun to talk about.” Once I picked it up, said Emily Gould in NYMag.com, “I neglected my life until the last page, and then I started begging every woman I know to read it.” We’re used to seeing infidelity in literature followed by a comeuppance, and “I expected some similar punishment to befall the narrator.” It never arrived. The narrator’s new life isn’t perfect, but her story leaves intact the “comforting fantasy” that a woman can create a refuge where she can be fully herself. 

3. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Vintage, $18) 
“Martyr! is the serious fiction lover’s favorite kind of book, offering plenty to think about, all of it a pleasure to read,” said Wendy Smith in The Boston Globe. Its protagonist, an Iranian-American poet in his late 20s, is fighting off a sense of purposelessness by collecting stories about martyrs when he decides to travel to Brooklyn to talk to a dying artist who’s spending her final days answering museum visitors’ questions about her imminent end. Cyrus’ own conversations with this unlikely sage “form the philosophical and emotional heart of the novel,” but the book is also “stuffed with gorgeous images and a surprising amount of humor.” Perhaps because Cyrus becomes so desperate in his search for meaning, said Katy Waldman in The New Yorker, author Kaveh Akbar ends Martyr! by unleashing the apocalypse, “replete with wild horses, smoke, and flowers raining from the sky.” It makes for “an appropriately gonzo finale” to a book that can’t tell us what it’d like to: that art can save the world. 

4. Colored Television by Danzy Senna (Riverhead, $29) 
“For Danzy Senna, identity politics is as much a playground as a battleground,” said Stephen Kearse in The New Republic. In Senna’s latest novel, a biracial academic is already living beyond her means with her husband and children when her agent rejects her 400-year history of fellow “mulattos” and she turns to television in a bid to get rich quick. As she pitches a half-baked concept for a sitcom about a mulatto family, “her desperation is funny and cutting,” and after a producer buys in, “Colored Television slowly dilates into a fever dream as expansive as the Los Angeles metropolis.” Senna, who is married to Percival Everett, has been satirizing America’s anxiety about racial ambiguity since her 1998 debut, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. This book, while focusing on the challenges of being an artist of color, has “a surprising amount of fun” along the way. “Indeed, the way Senna keeps this wry story aloft may be the closest paper can come to levitation.” 

5. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Scribner, $30) 
“Rachel Kushner is a dazzling chronicler of end times,” said Maureen Corrigan in NPR.org. In her latest novel, the author of The Flamethrowers applies her singular sensibility to a new genre, following an attractive, hard-drinking American spy who is going by the alias Sadie Smith when she infiltrates a rural French commune suspected of sabotage. Though Sadie longs to escape the lonely life she’s fallen into, “you don’t read Kushner for the relatability of her characters. Instead, she draws readers in with her dead-on language and the threat-alert atmosphere of the worlds she imagines.” As every good spy novel does, “Creation Lake begins with sex and romance and leads to violence,” said Lauren LeBlanc in the Los Angeles Times. After seducing her way into the radicals’ circle, Sadie is seduced in turn by the writings of the group’s reclusive mentor, who is obsessed with the evolution of human behavior. Step by step, Kushner’s novel “demands we question what any of us are,” especially when we lose faith in the mission in front of us. 

How the books were chosen 
Our top-5 lists were created by tallying and weighting end-of-year recommendations published by 21 print and online sources, including The Atlantic, BookPage, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR.org, NYMag. com, Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.The best-selling minister who forecast end times

 
 

Image credits, from top: Orion Pictures / Amazon; Peacock; Marissa Bettencourt