NYT Acrostic February 9, 2025

Food For Thought

Last spring, we offered an acrostic based on a quotation from Christina Tosi’s book Dessert Can Save the World.  This week’s quotation comes from a 2014 publication that returns us to the theme of food, but with a different angle on the subject.  Its author, Dan Jurafsky, is a Stanford University professor who focuses on both linguistics and computer science, two disciplines that he brings to bear in his perceptive treatment of The Language of Food. The book includes fascinating examinations of how linguistic choices in restaurant menus influence our reactions to the offerings.

The particular quote we selected highlights the fact that certain foods we identify with particular countries – in the case of the United States, for example, hamburgers, French fries, and ketchup – often originated elsewhere.  Those examples got us to thinking about fast food and junk food which, while not Jurafsky’s primary focus at all, did point us to a variety of clues and answers that probably caused us to gain weight merely thinking about them, e.g., Slurpee, nuggets, ganache, and frappe.  

We wish to thank our NYT colleagues who suggested two words in Estonian (jäätis and kohupiimakreem) to plump up Clue K.  If, like us, your Estonian is a bit rusty, those terms turn out to refer to ice cream and curd cream, the latter a particular delicacy in Estonia:

Finally, in case you haven’t seen Unfrosted, Jerry Seinfeld’s 2024 movie about the history of Pop-Tarts that popped up in Answer B, we found it quite funny.  On second thought, perhaps it’s something of a stretch to say that Unfrosted presents the history of Pop-Tarts in, say, the way that Ken Burns presented the history of the Civil War:

What did you think?