You deserve better than a slop bowl

A new year, an old-school hippie bowl

The Bite subscribers can now join the conversation — click the speech bubble icon to leave a comment or click the heart to like this post. Last week, I defended jarred garlic. This week, we’re going old-school. Let’s dive in!

In mid-December, as the year wheezed toward its end and everyone collectively stared into the psychic refrigerator to see what was left, Merriam-Webster announced its 2025 word of the year: slop.

Their corresponding release made it clear that just because the term was chosen doesn’t mean it was being venerated. “We define slop as ‘digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,’” they wrote. “All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again.”

The flood of slop in 2025, they concluded, was prolific and oddly mesmerizing. It included absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written books, “workslop” reports that waste coworkers’ time — and lots of talking cats. (Always the cats.)

“Like slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch,” the editors continued. “Slop oozes into everything. The original sense of the word, in the 1700s, was ‘soft mud.’ In the 1800s it came to mean ‘food waste’ (as in ‘pig slop’), and then more generally, ‘rubbish’ or ‘a product of little or no value.’”

I find this interesting because, as it happens, there is a parallel trend unfolding in the culinary world, running neatly analogue to the AI-driven slopification of the internet: the so-called “corporate slop bowl.”

A slop bowl has become internet parlance for a particular mash-up of ingredients — warm grains, vaguely globally inspired proteins, a surcharge for avocados — served up at fast-casual restaurants where the selling point of the cafeteria-style assembly line is efficiency, not flavor. The price point hovers around $18. Instagram and TikTok are punctuated with posts featuring half-eaten bowls and captions that range from the sincere (“Am I the only one who gets disgusted by their bowl midway through?”) to the unmistakably dystopian: Doordash your slop bowl. Get extra guac. Pay for it with Klarna. Default on the loan. Eat at your desk. Never stop looking at your screen. Create shareholder value.

They are easy. They are mundane. Which may be why there is such a robust online subculture devoted to “hacking” orders at these joints — swapping sauces, doubling proteins, gaming the system in hopes of coaxing pleasure from something designed, primarily, to be frictionless. And they may be losing some of their sheen. 

As Jordan Valinsky reported for CNN in late 2025, “the big three slop slingers — Cava, Chipotle and Sweetgreen — all reported similar problems in their recent earnings: Younger customers, particularly those aged between 25 to 35, are pinching pennies and choosing to forgo the $15 (or $20) warm bowls.”

The decline has been stark enough that it was a key talking point in Chipotle’s last earnings call of 2025. 

“We’re not losing them to the competition; we’re losing them to grocery and food at home,” CEO Scott Boatwright told analysts. “It is one of our core consumer cohorts. They feel the pinch and we feel the pullback from them as well.”

It is perhaps not so mysterious, then, that people are growing reluctant to keep throwing good money at something the culture has, collectively, agreed to call slop. Which, it bears remembering, is not a neutral word. As the editors of Merriam-Webster note, by the 1800s the term had come to mean “food waste.” And while we are, of course, big fans of creative food-waste reuse over here, let’s be honest: this is not that. There is a better way.

Coming off the back end of a very beige, very carb-forward holiday season — followed by a flu-turned-virus I can’t quite seem to shake — I find myself craving something else entirely. Something brighter. Something nourishing. Something with a lineage. What I want, right now, is what I would call an old-school hippie bowl.

Even when it isn’t called this on the menu — sometimes it’s a sunshine bowl, sometimes a macro bowl, sometimes a Buddha bowl (a term Buddhist monks themselves find a bit silly, for what it’s worth, according to this great Bon Appétit report on the origin of the phrase) — you know an old-school hippie bowl by virtue of the places you find it. At the lone, crunchy macrobiotic restaurant that continues to exist, stubbornly, as the city grows sleeker and more expensive around it. At the vegan café whose name contains the word “Bloom” or “Blossom.” Or made by the woman in your apartment building who has both a co-op volunteering shift and a single, long gray braid.

These bowls go by many names, but they are ontologically distinct from the slop bowl. Where the slop bowl is optimized for throughput, the hippie bowl is the product of belief. It emerges from a particular food lineage — one shaped by mid-century macrobiotics, health-food evangelists and a curious, earnest embrace of global cuisines. It favors whole grains, legumes, vegetables prepared with intention, and sauces that taste like someone cared. It is modular, yes, but not anonymous. It is nourishing in the old sense of the word.

And — this is the part that matters — it is better.

The old-school hippie bowl formula

This is not a recipe so much as a loose set of convictions. Think of it as a framework — forgiving, flexible, and happy to work with whatever you already have.

Plant-based protein

Marinated tofu. Spiced chickpeas. Sturdy, slow-cooked beans. A scoop of edamame. A generous mound of hummus, swirled with the back of a spoon. The point is substance — something that makes the bowl feel anchoring, not flimsy.

Greens

Massaged kale, peppery arugula, thin-sliced bok choy, spinach, cabbage. Season these, too. A spritz of lemon or lime and a sprinkle of salt is often enough — startlingly so — to make them feel alive rather than virtuous.

Colorful vegetables

Whatever your crisper drawer provides. Shredded red cabbage. Oven-blistered broccoli. Crunchy bell peppers. Thin-sliced cucumber. Roasted sweet potato coins. Aim for contrast — soft and crisp, sweet and bitter, warm and cool.

Grain

Brown rice, bulgur, couscous, farro. Something warm and nutty, something that takes up space. This is not a garnish; it’s a foundation.

Sauce

You cannot go wrong with an old-school tahini dressing: tahini, maple syrup, garlic, lemon juice and enough water to thin it into something pourable and generous. This is what brings the whole thing together. Be liberal.

My current favorite bowl

If you want a place to start, here’s the hippie bowl I keep making lately — the one that’s been getting me through gray days and lingering sniffles.

Plant-based protein

Chickpeas tossed with olive oil, harissa, garlic powder, chili powder, oregano, and an almost unreasonable amount of lemon zest. Baked on parchment until crispy and fragrant, about 15 minutes at 400 degrees, then set aside (or eaten straight off the baking sheet).

Greens

A mix of massaged kale and arugula, spritzed with more lemon zest and finished with flaky salt.

Grain

Bulgur, tossed warm with olive oil, lemon zest and dill.

Colorful vegetables

Shredded raw red cabbage and roasted sweet potato coins, caramelized at the edges.

Sauce

A simple tahini–maple dressing (¼ cup tahini, 1½–2 tablespoons maple syrup, 1 small garlic clove finely grated, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 2–4 tablespoons warm water to thin, ½ teaspoon kosher salt). Pour generously.

Hey there! It’s hard to believe it, but Valentine’s Day is right around the corner — and I’m starting to collect questions for an extra special holiday-themed advice issue. Do you have questions about what to make at home? Where to take someone out? How to temper chocolate for strawberries? Alternatively, do you, dear Bite readers, have advice for intrepid, romantic home cooks trying to impress a date? Let me know in the comments or send me a note at [email protected].

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What to make this week: My best oatmeal cookies

Typically, I use this space to point you toward something from the archives — a small, well-loved relic worth resurfacing — but this week, in the midst of an informal no-spend experiment that necessitated a pantry clean-out, I accidentally baked my way into what may be the best oatmeal cookies of my life, and I’ve just got to share them with you guys. 

They have the sturdy, homespun chew of a proper oatmeal cookie, but the soul of a snickerdoodle that has really committed: warm with cinnamon, unapologetically so. The dough is chilled, then rolled in Turbinado sugar and yet more cinnamon, like a good matching vest-blazer situation. 

One small note of care: these cookies are gloriously fragile when they first emerge from the oven, prone to collapsing under their own charms. Let them cool for about ten minutes — just long enough to gather themselves — and they’ll reward you by holding together long enough to make it from tray to plate (and, ideally, to your mouth).

Dry ingredients

• 1½ cups rolled oats (optional: pulse ½ cup if you want a smoother cookie)

• 1½ cups all-purpose flour

• ½ tsp baking soda

• 1 tsp baking powder

• 3 tsp cinnamon

• ½ tsp kosher salt

Wet ingredients

• ¾ cup unsalted butter, softened

• 1 cup granulated sugar

• 1 large egg

• 1½ tsp vanilla

Cinnamon sugar coating

• ¼ cup Turbinado sugar

• 2–2½ tsp cinnamon

• Pinch of salt

Instructions

1. Heat oven to 350°F. Line baking sheets.

2. Whisk dry ingredients together.

3. Cream butter and sugar until fluffy and pale — give it a solid 2–3 minutes.

4. Beat in egg and vanilla.

5. Stir in dry ingredients just until combined.

6. Chill 20–30 minutes

7. Scoop into balls (about 2 tbsp), roll generously in cinnamon sugar.

8. Bake 10–11 minutes — pull them when the centers still look soft.

9. Cool on the pan for 10 minutes, then transfer to a rack; they’ll finish setting gently.

What I’m reading and watching: “Home Ec for Everyone” and “Severance” 

I could happily lose an afternoon — yours included — talking about what we’re quietly misplacing as a culture as home economics classes continue to disappear. When I reported on this in 2024, there were only about 6,000 schools left in the United States still offering home economics (or the more antiseptic “family and consumer sciences,” depending on the district). At the same time, report after report shows Gen Z — and now Gen Alpha — squeezed by grocery prices, while fintech has granted them unprecedented visibility into their spending and a surprisingly tenuous grasp on their actual monthly costs. Information everywhere, clarity nowhere.

As both the economy and the way we pass down practical knowledge continue to shift, younger Americans increasingly need guidance beyond TikTok comment threads and Reddit spreadsheets for learning how to budget, meal plan, and shop — all skills once taught, without irony, in home ec classrooms. For anyone craving a refresher (or a first pass), “Home Ec for Everyone: Practical Life Skills in 118 Projects” is an unexpectedly satisfying place to begin.

The book offers illustrated, step-by-step instructions alongside charts, lists, and reassuringly earnest graphics, covering everything from frosting a birthday cake to fixing a zipper to reviving a dingy T-shirt to caring properly for iceberg lettuce (a vegetable that, frankly, has endured enough disrespect). The tone is generous, the tasks approachable — suitable for anyone from a capable middle schooler on up. As the authors write, “No matter how simple the task, doing it with your own two hands provides a feeling of accomplishment that no app or device will ever give you.” Consider it a gentle manifesto, disguised as a how-to.

On the television side of my consumption this week: Season two of “Severance.”

Yes, I’m late — there is simply too much excellent television — but for the uninitiated, the Apple TV thriller follows a group of office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their professional and personal lives, and what happens when the “severed” employees begin to question the truth of their labor at the mysterious Lumon company. Among the show’s most deliciously unsettling details are Lumon’s culinary-themed workplace perks. In season one, there were melon bars and waffle parties, offered like sacramental bread.

In season two, after a growing interest among “outies” in the rights of their severed counterparts, the office vending machine receives a morale-boosting upgrade: fruit leather, cut beans, Christmas mints and salsa.

It’s strange, dark and very funny — and well worth watching if you’ve ever witnessed management attempt to pacify a low-grade rebellion with a pizza party and a memo about gratitude.

Until next week,

Ashlie Stevens, senior food editor

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