Need a little mellow for your new week? Nadia Reid, a rising songwriter from New Zealand, dropped an album on Friday that’s delightfully low-key. “Get the Devil Out” is its second single, written about confronting your demons and befriending them, because really, what else are you going to do. Feel free to come at me for this comparison, but the song’s bare-bones guitar-plus-sing-speak occasionally recalls Bob Dylan, though Reid doesn’t linger there too long before oscillating back to a lyrical, one-woman-Overcoats style. Listen if you’re seeking a degree of peace.
It was a beautiful time, that five-second period after butter came back into style and before dairy started being the devil. While we can’t have that time back, here’s what we can have: insect butter. Researchers in Belgium have been isolating larva fat by soaking, blending, then centrifuging soldier fly grubs— for eating! I’d love to tell you the outcome tastes just like butter, but obviously it does not; bakers have only been able to replace a small portion of dairy butter with the insect kind without noticing a funky flavor difference. But, like anything, give it two years.
It seems like oat milk is doing the non-dairy trick for now, at least according to the numbers. Nielsen just published an almost-unbelievable graph of the most-sought-after emergency supplies, and oat milk came out on top, far above both masks and hand sanitizer; the lesson being, if you are what you stockpile, Oatly is still making bank.
Has Chobani been hitting you with ads for their oat milk? If not, let me bring you up to speed: “it’s not milk; it’s almost milk” (at least, according to innumerable NPR podcasts and New York’s digital sidewalk billboards). In the wake of the dairy devil’s diet emergence, they’re going in hard on the alts, and I have to say, they’re not doing a bad job. Last week, they were selling a limited-run oat ganache cookie with Maman bakery in New York, which, if you were paying attention, breaks oat milk out of its coffee condiment silo to become a full-on ingredient. Now, if only they would master butter.
