My fascination with Dennis Lee’s bizarre, countercultural food writing begins with a recipe for something called a Chicago-Style Hot Dog Terrine. Lee takes what looks like an empty Sara Lee pound cake tin and layers the inside with all the trimmings of a Chicago-style hot dog—chopped onions, sliced tomatoes, bright green relish, sport peppers, and pickle spears. After boiling a package of Vienna Beef hot dogs and arranging them over the layers of toppings, he reserves the dirty water, adds gelatin to it, then pours the mixture over the deconstructed dog. When the vessel cools, everything is suspended in a makeshift aspic. The finished product looks like a rectangular loaf of translucent Jell-O made from processed meat—it’s a classic French dish, only made with hot dog bath water. “The whole thing is finished off with tart mustard and grassy celery salt,” he writes, “along with the humiliation that you just made this awful piece of shit.”
Lee’s anti-food-blog food blog, The Pizzle, where the hot dog terrine originally appeared, went viral nearly a decade ago via cooking experiments like “How to Make Puffy Cheetos at Home With Packing Peanuts” and “How to Ruin a Party: The Fart Dip Experiment.” In 2019, when he launched the Substack newsletter “Food Is Stupid,” it had the same playfulness and joyful irreverence, but with a more refined touch. His approach stands in stark contrast to food newsletters that seek to inspire epicureans with seasonal recipes and clever kitchen hacks, like Sohla El-Waylly’s “Hot Dish” or Mark Bittman’s “The Bittman Project.” Lee doesn’t make weekly trips to the greenmarket or garnish his food with microgreens or edible flowers. His absurdist recipes, most of which are designed to fail, feature common grocery items and processed foods, transmogrified into unthinkable preparations—think Froot Loops as a pizza topping or Doritos pulverized, then boiled into grits. Flavor is an afterthought, if not an outright inconvenience.
Despite its mostly inedible contents, the newsletter is beloved by chefs and food writers, and it’s read by thousands of curious rubberneckers eager to bear witness to Lee’s weekly culinary train wrecks. “He knows how to make something beautiful and delicious, but he's just doing it with wackadoo ingredients,” says Helen Rosner, an award-winning food journalist for The New Yorker. “It’s almost performance art.”
Among the many Frankenstein creations found in Lee’s weekly dispatches of “Food Is Stupid” are jelly bean cassoulet (a French stew made with jelly beans instead of the flageolet variety), hot and Sour Patch Kids soup (Chinese hot and sour soup flavored with Sour Patch Kids candy), Cinnamon Toast bungholes (deep fried rings of pork rectum dusted with cinnamon sugar), salmon roe boba tea (fish eggs standing in for tapioca pearls), and something ominously titled buffalo chicken pudding barfait (a trifle-like parfait of chicken-flavored vanilla pudding layered with spreadable Flip Whip Bleu Cheese and buffalo sauce gelatin).
Underneath the absurdity of the ranch dressing thumbprint cookies and kitty litter cornbread is biting commentary about food trends. In response to the deluge of cacio e pepe recipes from tastemakers like Molly Baz and Alison Roman (who euphemistically calls hers “tiny creamy pasta with black pepper and Pecorino”), Lee concocted the most ridiculous version imaginable: “Cacio e peepee.” His recipe is a perverse twist on the Roman pasta, prepared in a noxious stock made from boiled bully sticks (a dog chew toy made from pizzle, or bull penis, and the namesake of his original blog) thickened in a sauce of Kraft green-label Parmesan. “It’s brilliant,” wrote the chef and television host Andrew Zimmern (also a subscriber) to the followers of his “Spilled Milk” newsletter, “and an accurate portrayal of the cacio e pepe madness that’s whipsawed through our culture recently.”
In another heretical post, Lee deep fries a whole fresh black truffle after submerging it in an egg wash and breading it with Shake ‘N Bake. “The world is full of rare delicacies,” he writes, “but eating something that looks like a tumor plucked from the ground shouldn’t be something you can wave around in people’s faces to make them feel bad about themselves.” Having worked in fine dining restaurants where chefs handle fresh truffles like buried treasure, I almost gasped when he described dipping the crunchy truffle McNugget into a pool of ketchup. “I think I do it out of frustration at chefs not bringing the food stuff down-to-earth where we can see it,” Lee tells me.
“Food Is Stupid” has a dedicated following among restaurant industry insiders despite its penchant for roasting them. Zoe Schor, a James Beard Award–nominated chef in Chicago, subscribes to food-related newsletters from icons like Ruth Reichl and Jeremiah Tower, but “Food Is Stupid” provides her a desperately needed breath of fresh air. “I enjoy the break from my day, my relentless inbox, and all the self-serious food blogs that are out there,” Schor says.
Lee’s culinary misadventures celebrate the joy of failure in the kitchen. He experiments with gonzo cooking techniques that professional chefs wouldn’t dare to, like making ramen in a dishwasher by placing the noodles in a bowl on the top rack and the spice packet in the detergent slot, tenderizing a steak by repeatedly running it over with his Toyota Camry, and preparing frozen popcorn shrimp in a popcorn maker. “It’s classic stunt journalism, but the thing that makes it wonderful is that Dennis is really smart and really funny,” Rosner says. “You can’t fake funny.”
Over the past few years, Lee’s Substack has amassed an audience of more than 4,500 total subscribers, resulting in appearances on high-profile podcasts like The Sporkful with Dan Pashman and Chewing with Louisa Chu and Monica Eng. But the newsletter is still somewhere between a labor of love and a side hustle: He earns almost $20,000 a year from paid subscriptions—which surpassed his expectations, but isn’t enough for him to give up his day job as a correspondent covering more conventional food-related news for The Takeout, a food culture website.
What distinguishes the content on “Food Is Stupid” from today’s viral rage-bait recipes like TikTok tabletop nachos and ice cream sundaes scooped into toilet bowls is Lee’s methodology. “I would never think of making any of his recipes, but sometimes when I read his stuff I think, This really makes sense from a cooking standpoint,” says Dave Park, the chef of Jeong, a Korean fine dining restaurant in Chicago’s West Town. Lee’s legit kitchen chops—he worked in a professional pizza kitchen for five years—make many chefs feel even more clued in on the joke, no matter how outlandish his recipes get.
“Dennis is like ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic,” says Kenji López-Alt, a chef and author of The Food Lab cookbook. “Weird Al is technically great. He’s a great musician, and he treats his songs seriously, but the subject matter is ridiculous.” Food writers, who are often expected to take food seriously for a living, revel in the silliness. “He doesn’t get stuck thinking of food as this holy, precious thing that we’re not allowed to fuck around with,” says Rosner. “The truth is: food is stupid. Finding freedom in that stupidity is so liberating.”
In person, Lee is nothing like his newsletter persona. He can be a bit shy, but an occasional sinister giggle will remind you of the mad scientist lurking behind his cherubic looks and mild-mannered demeanor. His wife, Davida, makes cameo appearances in the newsletter as a reluctant taste-tester, but many of his mutant creations are too scary for her to sample. Even Lee was surprised when she took a bite of his Puppy Chow puppy chow—a riff on the Midwestern confection, which is typically made with Chex cereal tossed in peanut butter, chocolate, and powdered sugar. Lee replaces the Chex with actual Puppy Chow, the dog food. He wasn’t surprised when she spit it into a nearby garbage can within seconds. “Usually, I wait to see if he spits it out first before I try it,” she says.
Some dishes, like his crab rangoon cheesecake—a dessert made with MSG-laced imitation crabmeat, a crust of pulverized fried wonton strips, and a drizzling of bottled sweet-and-sour sauce—turn out surprisingly palatable. Lee describes the flavor in facetious chef-speak: “It was savory from the MSG, a little crabby, and had just enough green onions in it so that you could really catch their scent.” Most weeks, he doesn’t bother providing recipe specs, but readers were so intrigued with the finished product that he issued an addendum three days later with instructions on how to make the unorthodox dessert.
After enduring a spirited monologue about his unhealthy obsession with Taco Bell—a restaurant he treats with the same reverence that gastrophiles bestow upon Noma—I ask Lee about the future of the newsletter. With a deep, self-deprecating sigh, he expresses a desire for it to become a sustainable, full-time pursuit. But he admits that the scatological nature of his work makes it difficult to command more mainstream attention. “The food media people don’t know where to put me,” he says, sounding a bit deflated. “I don’t fit into anything they’ve built.”
Before he completes the thought, Davida interjects, locking eyes with him lovingly. “I just hope it doesn’t kill him.”