For Eater, Bettina Makalintal reports on a refreshing trend in the restaurant industry: businesses embracing lo-fi, handwritten communications and announcements in response to the ceaseless AI slop we’re served across social media these days. From a grocery store’s hand-illustrated flyers to a burger joint’s Sharpie-scribbled menu specials, restaurants are choosing advertising with a human touch and rejecting polished AI-generated graphics.

It’s hard to think of a path of more friction than choosing to run a restaurant; why add even more friction to that? In these conditions, yes, it costs more to hire a photographer to promote your new menu than to generate one with AI, but it’s also increasingly clear that many people would rather see a badly taken, lo-fi photo than an engineered AI image. For one thing, it feels like a reflection of one’s values. To me, a restaurant that employs AI art is capitulating to the culture of slop, akin to reheating premade food from Sysco. It’s impossible to square with a value system that cares about craft and integrity.

Before I read this piece, all I knew about tomatoes was that homegrown tastes infinitely better than store-bought. For Offrange, Mitch Hagney educated me on how tomatoes ripen naturally and unnaturally, and how Big Tomato forces the issue in huge warehouses by pumping in ethylene gas. It might just inspire you to grow your own.

Tomatoes are climacteric fruits, like bananas, avocados, and mangos, which means they can be harvested unripe and complete the process later. Ethylene sends the hormonal signal to ripen. When that process happens naturally, cells near its seeds start producing the gas and it diffuses outward through the fruit. Each cell the gas reaches begins its own production, and the cascade softens the flesh and the tomato turns red from the inside out. That allows the fruit to be picked much greener, shipped far, and then ripened when they’re close to their eater.

To do it artificially isn’t complicated, but it is expensive. Ethylene floods the room at carefully calibrated amounts, and the operator compresses what might take weeks into five days. Sensors log temperature, humidity, and gas concentrations around the clock. The tomato turns red from the outside in.