Doug Mack
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douglasmack.bsky.social
Doug Mack
@douglasmack.bsky.social
8K followers 420 following 8.7K posts
Snacks, Americana, and other curiosities.
📖 The Not-Quite States of America, about the U.S. territories (W. W. Norton).
🍟Agreeably nerdy food history newsletter: https://snackstack.net

He/him, just another dad in Minneapolis.
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douglasmack.bsky.social
choose your holiday and plan ahead for tomorrow
2025 Daily Holidays that fall on November 17, include: Electronic Greeting Card Day Homemade Bread Day International Happy Gose Day International Students Day National Baklava Day National Black Cat Day National Farm Joke Day National Take a Hike Day National Unfriend Day Petroleum Day The Little Mermaid Day World Prematurity Awareness Day
November 16, 2025 at 11:43 PM
douglasmack.bsky.social
Stuffed bunny toy wearing polka dot cape on front of vast, gray square. In the background is a grand historic building with a ton of columns
November 16, 2025 at 2:17 PM
douglasmack.bsky.social
I also VERY MUCH stand by the observations about how authoritarianism doesn't always look aesthetically bleak, and it's dangerous to assume it does
In the end, though, “I can’t believe our governance looks kinda like Belarus!” is the same thing as “I can’t believe these streetscapes and businesses in Belarus look like ours!” It misreads circumstances and history in both places, and sees the fun stuff and the bleak stuff as a divide of contradictions and opposites, rather than interlocking gears that turn together. It’s easy to take the wrong message from the landscape around you, to imagine that malls and cocktail bars are an indication of continuous progress and underlying function, that everything is fine as long as there are on-trend shoes, global pop stars, and MEAT FESTS to be had.
November 16, 2025 at 2:47 AM
douglasmack.bsky.social
And then there are there these Icelandic futsal kits
Futsal jersey with blue/green/black background and a polar bear roaring while a volcano erupts. It all goes extremely hard.
November 15, 2025 at 9:38 PM
douglasmack.bsky.social
Honestly such a fascinating and compelling op-ed—and an example of why these pieces are better when they come from actual experts instead of professional pundits.

There's a complicated argument here and it's built fact by carefully researched fact, which makes the ending hit even harder.
To reduce the overdose crisis, we need to stop exploiting drug tragedies to serve other geopolitical agendas. It wasn't started by villainous foreign traffickers, and there is no drug-free utopia waiting for us if we shut off one illicit supply chain. We can save a lot of lives, and support a lot of struggling communities, by aiming for the "least worst" solutions. Fentanyl is a hard problem that has cost a lot of lives. Let's stop being distracted by foreign boogeymen and do something about it.
November 15, 2025 at 2:26 PM
douglasmack.bsky.social
Really good history and analysis here
Screenshot Which is to say: Fentanyl traffickers were responding to consumer demand. They did not create it. The opioid crisis initially struck white areas not because of a conspiracy to destroy heartland America. Rather, it was a devastatingly ironic result of white Americans' privileged access to the medical system. Physicians' willingness to recognize and treat their pain opened their communities to pharmaceutical companies' flood of opioids. The drugs' ubiquity meant that they were easy to get whether one had a prescription for them or not.
November 15, 2025 at 2:13 PM
douglasmack.bsky.social
i mixed a bit of this into the tomato sauce for the pineapple + pepperoni pizza and damn that's good
Trader Joe's jalapeno sauce
November 15, 2025 at 1:11 AM
douglasmack.bsky.social
pizza night
Homemade pepperoni pizza with pineapple on half Homemade cheese pizza with pesto mixed into the tomato sauce
November 15, 2025 at 12:51 AM
douglasmack.bsky.social
I really love it even if I can't read it without Google Translate (all the essays are in Japanese)
Exploded view of breakfast sandwich across a two-page book spread Table of contents listing 30 different sandwich essays
November 14, 2025 at 7:01 PM
douglasmack.bsky.social
"oh, these books? yes, i always have them out and flip through them every day"
"Birthday Monsters" and a book called "Sammys" with an illustration of an open-face sandwich on the cover
November 14, 2025 at 6:53 PM
douglasmack.bsky.social
It would be so funny if Hydrox ice cream were the original cookies and cream
HOLLAND HOUSE COCKTAIL MIX HOSTESS CUP CAKES HYDROX ICE CREAM IDEAL DOG FOOD IVORY SALT From the Reporter Dispatch newspaper in White Plains, NY, 1951
November 14, 2025 at 4:03 AM
douglasmack.bsky.social
Precursor to cookies and cream: macaroon ice cream (1942)
There's a conspiracy on down at the Grisham's plant and you're the ob-ject. The guys and gals of Grisham's are always scheming for new ways to tempt your appetite. They know you get tired of eat-ing the same old things day after day, so they stay awake nights figuring out new ones for you. S That's how you happen to be enjoying Grisham's Mac-aroon Ice Cream this month. Somebody said, "Wonder how it would be if we got us a lot of macaroons and crumbled them up in Grish-am's Ice Cream." And somebody else said, "Let's try it." So they did. And it turned out to be so good that they decided to make it Macaroon for March. This snow-white almond flavored ice cream with hits of crunchy cookies through and through is reviving tired appetites all over town. How about yours?
November 14, 2025 at 3:31 AM
douglasmack.bsky.social
lol 30 seconds of research shows most/all of those claims are wrong

Miami Herald, 1977:
Kooky Cookie How to have your ice cream and cookies too. Farm Stores Cookies 'n Cream Ice Cream. Creamy, rich vanilla ice cream loaded with bits and pieces of chocolate cookies. One taste and you'll love the way the cookie crumbles.
November 14, 2025 at 2:42 AM
douglasmack.bsky.social
this made me wonder who created "cookies and cream" as a distinct, named flavor

a quick search led to those four magical words of food history: "there are competing claims"
There are competing claims as to who first invented and marketed cookies and cream ice cream. Malcolm Stogo, an ice cream consultant, claimed to have created the flavor in 1976,[1] 1977[2] or 1978.[3] South Dakota State University claims the flavor was invented at the university's dairy plant in 1979 by plant manager Shirley Seas and students Joe Leedom and Joe Van Treeck.[4][5] In a 2005 press release, Blue Bell Creameries claimed they were the first company to mass-produce the flavor, in 1980.[6] In 2006, The New York Times reported that Blue Bell made "no claim to have invented it but certainly pioneered the flavor."[7] However, as of 2020, the company's website proclaimed, "We were first to create this innovative flavor."[8] Blue Bell Creameries applied to register the trademark "Cookies 'n Cream" in 1981.[9] John Harrison, the official taster for Dreyer's/Edy's Ice Cream, claims he invented it first for the company in 1982.[10][11] In 1983, cookies and cream became one of the top five best-selling flavors of ice cream.[12]
November 14, 2025 at 2:30 AM
douglasmack.bsky.social
Sorry, sorry, one more from the same camera
MnDOT traffic cam view of aurora
November 13, 2025 at 4:10 AM
douglasmack.bsky.social
Same MnDOT traffic cam has aurora again tonight
MnDOT traffic cam view of aurora
November 13, 2025 at 2:57 AM
douglasmack.bsky.social
Genuinely: Wisconsin had a surplus of dairy so a professor was like, "let's put some in cigarettes"

bsky.app/profile/butt...
THE PROFESSOR said if all filters were of the cheese-charcoal type it would take one half billion pounds of cheese a year to meet the demand. "That would certainly solve the dairy surplus in a hurry," he said. Lardy conducfed lab tests on the cheese filter at the request of wholesale lum-berman Stuart Stebbings of De Pere, Wis., who origi-nated cheese candy and hit on the idea of a cheese filter Stebbings had planned to market smoked cheese when it occurred to him that the cheese's ability to
November 12, 2025 at 9:51 PM
douglasmack.bsky.social
Never thought to research "cheese filter cigarettes" for the newsletter but there are actually a bunch of news stories on the subject, with all the quips you can imagine
CONSIDER TOO, the evolution this idea will undergo if the cigarette industry, by some chance, yields to the suggestion of a cheese filter tip. In all probability, the pioneers in the field will rely at first on the good old common garden variety of American cheddar, popular alike with men and mice. Competition among cigarette manufacturers be-ing what it is, however, the time soon would come when there would be variations. Reflect for a moment on the possibilities inherent in a roque-fort cheese filter tip. Or one fash-ioned from liederkranz or lim-burger or any of the other Teutonic varieties which are known for certain distinctive qualities. Even if no mistakes are made, the thought of inhaling a puff through a tunnel of 20,000 liederkranz filter fibers is, in a sense, over-powering. Especially if the ciga-rette is one of the menthol-cooled variety.
November 12, 2025 at 9:46 PM
douglasmack.bsky.social
I love that you can even see the aurora in this *black and white* traffic cam photo
Black and white photo of night sky over highway from MNDOT traffic cam
November 12, 2025 at 6:09 AM
douglasmack.bsky.social
still going
MnDOT traffic cam view of aurora
November 12, 2025 at 6:06 AM
douglasmack.bsky.social
This one is still going
MnDOT traffic cam view of aurora
November 12, 2025 at 6:03 AM
douglasmack.bsky.social
round 2 less visible but still super cool to see it in my own backyard
Little flare of red in a deep blue sky
November 12, 2025 at 5:45 AM
douglasmack.bsky.social
"popular with friends"
many, many posts of aurora skies
November 12, 2025 at 4:17 AM
douglasmack.bsky.social
aurora on MnDOT traffic cam

511mn.org/search/aroun...
Aurora on MnDOT traffic cam
November 12, 2025 at 4:07 AM
douglasmack.bsky.social
free album cover
MnDOT traffic cam view at night but it's all blurry with red car lights and maybe blue aurora in sky
November 12, 2025 at 4:05 AM