It’s been eight years since Samin Nosrat published her smash-hit cookbook, Salt Fat Acid Heat. She says her whole adult life was on a trajectory toward that book. But in the aftermath of its success, Samin ended up in a dark place, struggling to understand why achieving her goals didn’t fix her problems.

TikTok is the wild west of the food media world. It’s less professionalized than Instagram and YouTube, and it holds the promise of virality from the very first time you post. So we wondered: What actually makes a food TikTok go viral?

In America, the cooking fat you use — lard, butter, shortening, oil — has long been a signifier of health, virtue, and class. What is it about fat that gets us so riled up? Reporter Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong looks at four battles over cooking fats in America over the last 150 years, starting with lard vs. Crisco, all the way to our current panic over seed oils.

This week we’re reheating two call-in episodes from 2015. First: Two Sporkful listeners call in to debate the best way to make enchiladas: flat (lasagna style) or rolled. Can Dan's advice restore peace and save Enchilada Party Night? Next up: Adam and Jonathan in L.A. call in to debate a dystopian future with only one cheese and to explain why cheddar is like Hugh Grant.

How does a traumatic brain injury affect the way you cook and eat? Filmmaker Cheryl Green, who has a brain injury, satirizes her own experiences in the kitchen in a short video called “Cooking With Brain Injury.”

Amy Sedaris offers advice on dealing with family members who are drunk or confrontational at the holidays. Plus, Robert Krulwich (formerly of Radiolab) on the time a turkey fell in love with his wife.

Roy Wood Jr. has long used humor to discuss topical issues and get at deeper truths. As a correspondent for The Daily Show, and now as the host of Have I Got News For You on CNN, he brings his own unique sensibility to political comedy. In his new memoir, The Man Of Many Fathers, he goes deep on his complicated relationship with his father, and the role food played in crucial moments of his childhood.

Today we’re bringing you a conversation Dan had on the new podcast In the Test Kitchen, from America’s Test Kitchen. Hosts Dan Souza and Lisa McManus welcomed Dan into their Boston studio to dive deep into the world of pasta design, exploring what makes a perfect noodle and how texture, sauce-holding power, and mouthfeel come together in the ultimate bite. Plus, the ITTK hosts get into gear testing, and they offer Dan a “Ror-snack” test.

We all know the classic regional pizza styles: New York, Chicago, Detroit. But Colorado? If you haven’t heard of that one, you’re not alone. Paul Karolyi, a reporter and executive producer of City Cast Denver, spent six years trying to uncover the story of how Colorado style pizza was invented, and why more people don’t know about it.

Wherever Phil Rosenthal goes, he wants to eat — which explains the name of his Netflix show, Somebody Feed Phil. He travels the world with wide eyes, an empty stomach, and a bottomless supply of delight at the people and food he encounters. And before Somebody Feed Phil and his new podcast Naked Lunch, Phil created the hit sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, which used food as a key source of tension between the characters.

Tony Shalhoub is an actor whose roles skew towards the quirky and neurotic — and his characters’ quirks often come out through food. In the classic 1996 film Big Night, Tony plays an uncompromising Italian chef whose Jersey Shore restaurant is on the brink of failure. In the TV show Monk, he plays a detective with OCD who has many strong opinions about how he wants his food.

This week we're talking about a number of key candy issues with special guests in time for Halloween. You'll hear from a Colorado-based Eater whose highly comprehensive candy treatise is on our blog and a candy blogger who has a Kit Kat eating technique that is bound to cause sustained widespread controversy or at the very least an significant uptick in chocolate-smeared fingers.

Ask folks in the world of food and cookbooks, “Who writes the best recipes?” and you’ll hear one name more than any other: Dorie Greenspan. "Dorie does rock solid recipes," says Chandra Ram, who judges the prestigious IACP Cookbook Awards. So what's Dorie doing that makes her recipes better than others?

To say that hydration is an invention is only a slight exaggeration. Water bottles have become a crucial accessory — a status symbol. How did that happen?

On The Great British Bake Off, Paul Hollywood is known for his tough but fair judgments, his piercing blue eyes, and his handshake, which he offers to a contestant only when they really impress him. But before he was ever a TV judge, he was a baker. When he first started doing TV appearances, it was nothing more than “icing on the cake” of his baking career.

When Nadiya Hussain competed on The Great British Bake Off in 2015, it seemed like all of Britain — from self-proclaimed #Nadiyators to the prime minister — was rooting for her. Since then, she’s hosted TV shows, written best-selling books, and become a household name in the UK.

Rosie Grant was already obsessed with cemeteries when she came across her first gravestone recipe. The headstone was carved into the shape of an open cookbook with a cookie recipe on it. Rosie made the cookies, posted about it on TikTok, and overnight she became the gravestone recipes lady.

We open the phone lines to settle your most contentious food disputes this week. Eliza wants to wipe her oily hands on her bare legs — is her boyfriend Connor right to object? Then, Natalie thinks she’s entitled to half of what her husband Josh cooks, even though he’s generally hungrier.

Are chicken tenders having a renaissance? Are lit candles in restaurants worth the risk of a few people’s hair catching on fire? And when Taylor Swift designs a signature cocktail…what’s in it?

Ketchup started as a far different product from what’s on the shelves today. A lot of its evolution can be traced to an early government agency and a group there called “The Poison Squad” that tested the safety of different chemicals -- by eating them. We hear that story. Then a linguist explains why the name “rocky road” actually makes the ice cream taste better.