Updated: January 30, 2026
I built SF to be a megaphone for the stuff people complain about in private but rarely confront in public—how Big Food operates, how regulators and elected officials talk a big game while moving at a crawl, and how the average consumer keeps paying more for less without ever being shown the full picture. We also tried to engage you with the lighter side of all things food - great recipes, food trends, cool kitchen hacks - and that may actually be where our bread is truly buttered. Read on.
I’m not claiming the work was wasted. The reporting, the analysis, the letters, the receipts—those are real. But I am saying this: effort without engagement becomes a dead-end. I can’t carry a watchdog mission on my back while the crowd scrolls past it like background noise.
To those of you who shared my content on social media - my deepest thanks.If you ever wondered why Big Food keeps winning, part of the answer is painfully simple: people are exhausted, distracted, and trained to move on. That’s not a moral lecture—it’s a fact about shrinking attention spans in 2026.
For now, I’m redirecting my time into projects that are more sustainable and more rewarding. SF may return in a different form—lighter, more focused, or backed by actual support.
If you want SF back, the path is simple: show up—share the work, send it to people who can move needles, and support it. Why? Because I'm doing this for all of us. I'm doing it because we matter.
Au revoir for now.
-Jack Lauber, Editor & Founder
There’s a particular kind of light that doesn’t just brighten a room — it signals a life. You see it from the sidewalk on a winter morning: one house on the block with the kitchen lamp on, the rest of the street still dark and sleeping. Something in you relaxes, almost involuntarily, for that glow means the world hasn’t gone completely cold. Someone is awake and alive in there, if only the light.
Great food doesn’t come from secrets—it comes from time, patience, and presence. It comes from connection. I want these words to be a meditation, something you can revert back to and draw from as you take back control. We all know what’s happening with price gouging by Big Food. It’s time to take back the real power.
What ultimately separates Brianno’s from the Minnesota-style pizza herd isn’t just the clean execution—it’s the absence of performance. This isn’t an ordinary pizza place; it’s a full-blown market of Italy’s best, with taupe-stamped concrete from floor to ceiling that feels like you walked in off a piazza in Turin.
On December 1, 2025, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) elevated a major cheese recall From Great Lakes Cheese Company, which supplies Walmart and Target to name but a few retailers. The recall was elevated to a Class II designation, which means ingestion of the contaminated cheese could cause “temporary or medically reversible adverse health consequences.”
Remember the movie Soylent Green?
We may not be eating people disguised as crackers anytime soon, but make no mistake, our government and governments around the world are in a power and money grab the likes we’ve never seen before. Why is everything (not just food) so expensive these days? You’re about to find out.
You stroll away after all the goodbye hugs and handshakes, down a snowy driveway or street, smiling. Your spirit is light and your palate utterly enthralled by variety, sated by spice, by sweet, by richness…and by the warmth of shared food. Your stomach? Comfortable. Content. Ready to enjoy the memories of the party on the drive or the walk home, instead of surviving the aftermath.
Tomorrow, in America, if we’re lucky, we meet around groaning tables heavy with food and light with the spirit of loved ones and friends. Today, though…when the sun goes down, another ritual kicks in. Long before anyone named it, the night before Thanksgiving was already Drinksgiving.
It’s not just grocery chains and food manufacturers squeezing households. When a big bank quietly rewrites the rules on accessing your own cash, the shock waves hit the dinner table too. For many families, that “something else” is grocery shopping, meal prep and the already–tight food budget. But there are alternatives, ways to stick it back to Big Bank.
We’re about a week out from the big day, which means you’ve still got time. The pros of deep frying are hard to ignore. A blistered, insanely crispy skin. THE moistest white meat that actually tastes like something; dark meat that stays silky instead of stringy and a wide-open oven for everything else — stuffing, pies, rolls, casseroles. And don’t forget the spectacle out in the yard! It’s an instant crowd magnet.
One of the nation’s five largest food distributors is now quietly pulling back from the massive wholesale margin increases that helped drive the grocery inflation wave since 2021 — including the notorious “auto-padding” markup that insiders say added up to 30% to thousands of products. Is the dam finally cracking? And what does that mean for consumers?
If you want the New Normal to end, stop shouting into the void and start shoving this data into the agencies that are supposed to protect you. Send this story — and the Mona Lisa Graph — to three places: the FTC’s Consumer Protection Bureau, your State Attorney General, and your U.S. Representative’s office. Tell them exactly what you now know: diesel prices collapsed, Big Food’s costs didn’t rise, and the CPI never came back down.
This afternoon on Drive Time with DeRusha, University of Minnesota beef specialist Eric Mousel offered his explanation for why beef prices keep climbing. His reasons sounded neat, academic, and familiar: drought, aging ranchers, and the “two-year cow life cycle.”
There’s just one problem: none of these explain the price levels consumers are actually paying today.
On October 30th, Jason DeRusha — a longtime Twin Cities food personality and well-known WCCO Radio host — posted a nostalgic shout-out to a beloved Saint Dinette burger on his Facebook page.
The issue isn’t the post.
The issue is what he said next, after SpokenFood questioned the sanity behind why a burger and fries now costs $24 in Minnesota.
President Trump on Friday ordered the DOJ to investigate the meatpacking industry, including JBS, the largest meatpacker in the world.
“Action must be taken immediately to protect Consumers, combat Illegal Monopolies, and ensure these Corporations are not criminally profiting at the expense of the American People,” Trump said.
It began as a lighthearted holiday — a once-a-year nudge for men to put down the remote, pick up a spatula, and prove they could manage more than the grill. But National Men Make Dinner Day, first cooked up in the early 2000s, lands a little differently depending on who you ask. For plenty of men, it’s not a novelty — it’s just Thursday, and a reminder that the kitchen has no gender, only heart.
Pre-packed, Farm-raised Atlantic Salmon, Certified by Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP).
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I’ve had my Braun Coffee Grinder for nearly 20 years! Great for coffee and spices.
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The Softer Side of SpokenFood
Tea is the rare daily ritual that still feels earned. It isn’t loud, it isn’t trendy—it's simply a pause you can brew. Long before “wellness” became a billboard word, tea was already doing the work: warming hands, steadying nerves, bringing people to the same table for five quiet minutes of being human.
Tea’s story starts in ancient China, where leaves from Camellia sinensis were steeped as medicine and pleasure. From there it traveled—across trade routes, ports, empires—until it became a daily habit from Tokyo to London to the American kitchen. Different cultures built different rituals, but the core stayed the same: hot water, leaf, patience.
Tea isn’t a drink so much as a permission slip: slow down, even if only briefly.
Tip: If a tea tastes “thin,” you usually need either more leaf or better tea—not more steep time.
If you want tea to become part of your life—not a once-a-week mood—make it predictable:
Tea won’t solve your life. But it can give you a daily, dependable moment where nothing is demanded of you except heat, breath, and a little time.
SpokenFood.com® is the official website of Properly Seasoned Media, founded by journalist and novelist John Louis Lauber.
