This is the web version of a list we publish twice-weekly in our newsletter. It comprises the most noteworthy food stories of the moment, selected by our editors. Get it first here.
Hey there. That’s a nice box of pet food, chicken nuggets, and Cheerios you got delivered to your doorstep. It sure would be a shame if next time there would be no one available to drive it over. Like everything else, online shopping runs on trucking, and in 10 years, the industry will be short as much as 160,000 drivers, according to a new study commissioned by the American Trucking Associations. Raising wages alone won’t do it, according to Bloomberg, so the trade group is trying to lower the interstate trucking age to 18. Get ‘em while they’re young.
No reservations. OpenTable—an app meant to help you dine out—is now partnering with services to help you order in instead. In the face of stagnating restaurant visits, the company this week began allowing eaters to select a delivery option. Those who opt for it are redirected to a restaurant’s delivery app of choice. Sounds like a perfect workaround at times when popular joints are all booked up. Click. The Associated Press has the details.
Born to bee wild. A growing body of research shows that wild bees may actually out-perform traditional honeybees as pollinators, Rowan Jacobsen writes for the Huffington Post. At the same time, wild bee populations are dropping like—sorry—flies. In response, farmers are creating bee-friendly habitats by planting wildflowers and grassy margins. “It’s messy, but it may be the future of farming,” Jacobsen writes. Also, check out our coverage of how most academic research tends to focus on honeybees, while ignoring more than 4,000 other bee species.
The 5-day rule. We saw a random tweet this week, posing the question: “Would you eat an intact In & Out burger if you found it on the street in Queens?” Seemed like a hypothetical values proposition, designed to make everybody give clever quips on Twitter. But no! It was a true riddle, based on a really weird situation reported in The New York Post. Somebody indeed found an intact In & Out cheeseburger in the wild, thousands of miles from its natural habitat (and not sitting under a box propped up with a stick reading “Free Burger.”) Should we spoil the ending of this magical tale? Nah, read it at VICE.
Tip tip hooray. After days of backlash, DoorDash is making a notable change to its business model: Going forward, all tips will be paid out to workers. Groundbreaking, right? This change follows a period of intense scrutiny for the company after a widely shared New York Times story chronicled a few days in the life of a food delivery worker. The report noted (not for the first time) that tips made via the delivery app were actually subsidizing the company’s payout to workers, rather than increasing their total earnings. The change appears to be a positive development, though some workers have expressed concern that DoorDash might reduce its base pay to make up for its own lost revenue. The Times has the story.
