I was just doing a little research about New Orleans restaurants, in prep for my visit on Thursday, when I discovered Dan Baum’s New Yorker blog about living in the Crescent City.

All of it is interesting (especially a post about riding bikes), but the post on grocery shopping (or “making groceries,” as apparently people say) is absolutely fantastic. Of course it’s dedicated to the things that really interest me:

I figure I owe it to myself—I owe it to my readers!—to plunge in with a cultural anthropologist’s zeal and explore, during my brief sojourn here in Louisiana, all the excellent reasons to kill pigs.

And there’s a brilliant comparison between grocery stores in Boulder, Colo., and New Orleans.

If I were ever to go back to grad school, it would be in NYU’s Food Studies program, and I would write a vast, comparative study of groceries around the globe. I would never finish my dissertation, and I would become one of those thirty-years-ABD cranks, but I would love my work.