Food carts are a staple of New York City dining, dispensing everything from dosa and doner kebabs to dogs and dim sum in short order. But no matter how enticing the aroma of a cart's food, the smelly gas generators that keep the lights on threaten to put customers off their meals. Cart owners and customers may not have to suck on fumes much longer. A Brooklyn-based startup is testing the use of its e-bike batteries to power food carts, starting with La Chona Mexican on the corner of 30th and Broadway in Manhattan. 'This really started out as a lark last summer,' David Hammer, co-founder and CEO of PopWheels, told TechCrunch. 'I'm an ex-Googler from the early days, and this felt like a classic, old-school 20% project.' PopWheels currently operates 30 charging cabinets around Manhattan, which serve gig workers riding e-bikes, most of whom use either Arrow or Whizz models. That's resulted in a 'de facto decentralized fleet,' Hammer said, allowing the company to stock just a few different types of batteries to serve hundreds of customers....
The Save gas station on the west side of Gary, Indiana, wants customers to know that they can pay for their groceries with food stamps. When I pulled into the parking lot last week, the first thing I saw was a blinking neon sign that read EBT for electronic benefits transfer, the prepaid cards used by food-stamp recipients. Inside, I spotted coolers packed with drinks, and shelves and shelves of snacks. But a black-and-white sign on the cashier window had a warning: As of January 1, soda and candy can no longer be purchased with food stamps. Indiana is one of five states'along with Iowa, Nebraska, Utah, and West Virginia'that has begun banning the purchase of certain unhealthy treats with food stamps, which is formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. They have all been spurred into action by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has made these bans a priority of his tenure as health secretary. 'There's no nutrition in these products,' Kennedy said in June, celebrating the policy at an event with Indiana's governor. 'We shouldn't be paying for them with taxpayer money.' Later this year, 13 more states will start implementing similar changes to their food-stamp programs. The Trump administration is pushing more states to follow suit by giving those that do preferential access to a $50 billion pool of money meant to improve rural health care across the country....
A Reddit user claiming to be a whistleblower from a food delivery app has been outed as a fake. The user wrote a viral post alleging that the company he worked for was exploiting its drivers and users. He claimed to be drunk and at the library to use its public Wi-Fi, where he was typing this long screed about how the company was exploiting legal loopholes to steal drivers' tips and wages with impunity. People lie on the internet all the time. But it's not so common for such posts to hit the front page of Reddit, garner over 87,000 upvotes, and get crossposted to other platforms like X, where it got another 208,000 likes and 36.8 million impressions. Casey Newton, the journalist behind Platformer, wrote that he contacted the Reddit poster, who then contacted him on Signal. The Redditor shared what looked like a photo of his UberEats employee badge, as well as an 18-page 'internal document' outlining the company's use of AI to determine the 'desperation score' of individual drivers. But as Newton tried to verify that the whistleblower's account was legitimate, he realized that he was being baited into an AI hoax....
How do you measure a year' In cups of coffee, yes, but also in the rushed early-morning breakfasts, the many trips to the grocery store, the slow dinners spent with friends. Each tells a story of how we filled our days. Some of this year's food preferences reflect how Americans' lives have changed. As my colleague Yasmin Tayag explained in May, diners serving the classic American breakfast'eggs, potatoes, and coffee'were once a staple of affordability. Now, as supply shortages and tariffs affect these foods, stepping out for breakfast 'can require a level of budgeting once reserved for fancy brunch.' It's not just prices that have changed; so, too, have Americans' taste preferences. In August, Ellen Cushing wrote about how food is becoming spicier. More than half of American consumers are likely to buy an item described as spicy'up from 39 percent in 2015, she reported. Then there are the fried-chicken sandwiches. Consumption has increased 19 percent at American restaurants, threatening the burger's long-held dominance....
