In “There’s No Business Like Hansen’s Sno Bliz-ness,” Gravy producer Eve Troeh takes us to New Orleans, home of the sno-ball. In the South you need strategies to beat the summer heat, and ice plays a big role. Street vendors used to shave big blocks of ice by hand and add flavored syrup—a treat that became known as a sno-ball in the Big Easy.

In the late 1930s, a local man, Ernest Hansen, invented a machine that changed the tradition. Sharp blades, encased in metal, turned chunks of ice into the most fluffy, fine “snow,” and he eventually patented this creation. While he kept his day job in New Orleans’ manufacturing industry, Ernest’s wife Mary ran with her husband’s invention. She set up shop at home and eventually moved to a brick-and-mortar, dishing up fresh “snow” and dousing them with signature flavored syrups that she made by hand. They called their place Hansen’s Sno-Bliz.

Remarkably, Ernest’s hand-built machines are still in use today, as are many of Mary’s syrup recipes, and the business continues to cool off customers with some “air-conditioning for your tummy.” Hansen’s Sno-Bliz is now in its 86th year, with Ernest and Mary’s granddaughter, Ashley Hansen, at the helm. Ashley’s was a long and loving journey to take on the business. She learned alongside her grandparents day by day. In a city that practically worships tradition, she honors her family and her customers by maintaining not just the original 1930s ice-shaving mechanics and syrup recipes, but also by cultivating the warm hospitality her grandparents always extended to anyone who entered.

The cinder block corner shop on New Orleans’ Tchoupitoulas Street looks humble, but you’ll always find a line of customers stretching outside around the corner. The James Beard Foundation even bestowed Hansen’s with its prestigious title of American Classic. New Orleanians from every corner of the city—and visitors from all around the world—eagerly line up to experience Hansen’s, and form an of-the-moment community with each other as they choose their flavors and chat.

In this cool edition of Gravy, Ashley Hansen shares the history, innovation, and spirit of her family’s institution, always with Hansen’s Sno-Bliz motto in mind: “There are no shortcuts to quality.”

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Few companies have inspired more fanatical devotion among Texans than the convenience chain Buc-ee’s. Described by the New York Times as both a “Disneyland of roadside capitalism” and the “through line of America’s second most sprawling state,” its iconic, buck-toothed beaver mascot has been spotted not just on billboards, but on wedding cakes and tattooed arms of its most loyal customers. Founded as a small-town gas station, today it boasts 47 locations across the South known for massive floor spaces brimming with souvenirs, fudge, BBQ stations, cases of jerky, and walls of branded snacks like “beaver nuggets.” 

Yet unlike other treasured Lone Star enterprises like Whataburger, Blue Bell, or the grocery chain H-E-B, Buc-ee’s ascendance has been a fast, recent phenomenon. They are also far from the first convenience chain to endear themselves to travelers through reliably clean restrooms, kitschy gifts and road food. In fact, one could argue they stand on the shoulders of the Georgia-born Stuckey’s, whose nutty treats sparked a mid-century rest stop empire. 

Today, both brands find themselves at a crossroads. Buc-ee’s is rapidly expanding, while following years of corporate mismanagement and decline, Stuckey’s is rebuilding itself one pecan log roll at a time. 

In this episode we’ll ride shotgun with Gravy producer Evan Stern as he explores how food has shaped these companies' brand identities, how they’re grappling with change, and what their stories reveal about the past, present, and future of snacking on the American road.

Along the way, we’ll step inside a Buc-ee’s that sprawls over 65,000 square feet, get to know some devoted customers, and hear from journalist Eric Benson, who argues this chain has come to symbolize 21st-century Texas. We’ll also meet Stephanie Stuckey, who, following a career in politics and environmental law, now serves as the chair of Stuckey’s. She shares her grandfather’s journey from pecan broker to gas station magnate, how she envisions Stuckey’s evolving, and why the road trip remains ingrained in the company’s DNA.

The resulting piece is a profile of two brands that have shaped and continue to make American highways a “corridor of consumption.”

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In “Oh, Snapper! Mislabeled Mississippi Seafood,” Gravy producer Boyce Upholt takes listeners to Biloxi, Mississippi—a town that has

What makes this story particularly fascinating is the public's reaction, or lack

Biloxi's seafood industry once thrived on genuine abundance. Indigenous peoples had harvested oysters here for thousands of years, and by 1904, the town earned its “seafood capital” moniker through a booming cannery industry that shipped Gulf oysters nationally and internationally. But the same forces that built Biloxi's reputation—industrialization and globalization—eventually undermined it. Imported seafood began dragging down local prices in the 1980s, and disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill further devastated

Mary Mahoney’s fraud, meanwhile, turned out to be just the tip of an iceberg. A consulting group used genetic testing and found that out of 44 area restaurants, only 8 were properly labeling their shrimp. Yet Biloxi's dining scene is also experiencing a renaissance. Chefs like Alex Perry at Vestige and Austin Sumrall at White Pillars have earned James Beard nominations while championing local ingredients and sustainable sourcing. Even at more casual spots like Bradley's—located inside a gas station—proprietors prove that serving authentic Gulf seafood can be both affordable and profitable.

What parts of Biloxi’s identity matter? What does it mean, really, to be local? As Biloxi transforms from a working fishing port into a tourist destination dotted with casinos and chain restaurants, the town faces a choice about what parts of its heritage to preserve. The seafood fraud scandal serves as a mirror, reflecting not just economic pressures but cultural ones—revealing how a community that built its identity on the ocean’s bounty must now decide whether that connection still matters.

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Gravy podcast is excited to share a special episode of a new podcast called Buzzkill, from our friends at FERN, the Food and Environmental Reporting Network. Buzzkill explores the dramatic decline of pollinators, including the American bumblebee, whose numbers have plummeted by 90% in just two decades. The series, hosted by Teresa Cotsilos, delves into how industrial monocultures, rampant chemical use, and unsustainable land practices threaten pollinators—and, by extension, three-fourths of the food crops we grow. This show is the first episode in the six-part series.

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The Cuban sandwich. If it’s made with ingredients different from someone else’s recipe, you might find yourself in an hours-long argument in the middle of Little Havana. In Miami and Tampa, Florida, restaurant owners, historians, and Cuban Americans recount their own memories of the Cuban sandwich, as well as the story of its origins. In this episode of Gravy, reporter Kayla Stewart explores the sandwich’s long-standing origin story, new research about the Cuban sandwich, and how the South influenced the sandwich’s popularity and the current identity of Floridian Cuban Americans.

Gravy thanks La Segunda Bakery, Sanguich de Miami, and Ana Sofia Pelaez, author of The Cuban Table, for contributions to this episode.

Kayla Stewart is a James Beard Award-winning food and travel journalist, cookbook author, and a Senior Editor at Eater. Her work has been featured in Eater, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, and others.

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In “A Muddy Future for Louisiana Crawfish,” Gravy producer Eva Tesfaye traces the aftermath of the summer of 2023, when a severe drought in Louisiana devastated the 2024 crawfish season. The dry soil and extreme heat killed the crawfish while they were still burrowed underground, meaning when farmers flooded their fields in the fall, they found their harvest would be dismal for the spring. That caused both farmers and consumers to suffer. In Louisiana, where crawfish are normally around $3 per pound, prices reached as high as $9 a pound. In Texas, it was even higher, around $12 a pound.

Tesfaye followed this story while it was happening, and it left her with a new question: With climate change bringing more extreme weather, are there ways to protect the state’s beloved mudbugs? To answer that question, she talked to Michael Moreaux, a crawfish farmer experimenting with different agricultural practices to attempt to produce healthy crawfish that can weather anything.

By focusing on the health of his female crawfish, using native grasses to feed them and filtering the water in his ponds, Michael seems to be producing tasty, resilient crawfish. He wants farmers and academics alike to take a look at his work, but the way the crawfish industry is set up makes it difficult for farmers to innovate, and academia doesn’t have enough crawfish specialists to solve all the problems threatening the state’s harvest.

One person interested in Michael’s methods is the young farmer Bruno Sagrera, who is struggling to break into the crawfish industry. Having grown up on a crawfish farm, he believes there are dire problems with the way crawfish are farmed today, but can’t get his family to buy into the practices he wants to try—so he’s on his own.

Both Michael and Bruno want to improve crawfish farming practices so that Louisianans can continue to eat the beloved mudbugs for generations to come.

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In “Fruitcake in Space,” Gravy producer Bronwen Wyatt explores a bizarre footnote in the annals of human space travel. In 1968, a scientist at a military research facility developed a very unusual recipe: a nutritionally-fortified fruitcake designed as an emergency ration for astronauts. It might be easy to dismiss this fruitcake, but we’re here to argue that it’s part of a larger story—one that takes us from the early days of NASA’s space program to our current quest for Mars. Wyatt investigates the importance of safe preservation techniques in space, how NASA determines what food astronauts will actually eat, and why fruitcake actually makes perfect sense as an emergency ration.

In an archival interview from 1966, dietician Mary Klicka at the Natick Laboratory Army Research, Development, and Engineering Center points to the unique challenges of preparing acceptable menus for long-term space travel. Wyatt speaks to Vickie Kloeris, who managed NASA’s food systems for nearly thirty years from the laboratory at Johnson Space Center in Houston, and Jennifer Levasseur, a curator specializing in food at the Air and Space Museum. Finally, retired astronaut Cady Coleman shares her perspective on dining in orbit. Coleman, who volunteered for the role of "food czar" on the International Space Station, tells how food becomes a form of currency and a tool for building camaraderie among astronauts.

Kloeris, Levasseur, and Coleman emphasize that dining space is about more than the mechanical function of obtaining enough calories to survive. Even in the most barren environments, our cultural drive to bond over food is a connection to our lives on earth and part of what makes us human. The selection and preparation of food—work that is often dismissed as inconsequential domestic labor—is a crucial part of the success of any mission in space.

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In “Got (Raw) Milk? The Small Family Dairy Farms Behind a Big Controversy,” Gravy producer Bianca Garcia takes listeners to Milky Way Farm, the last dairy in Anderson County, South Carolina, where raw milk sales are keeping the Peeler family afloat.

Their neighbors have succumbed to the pressures that have defined a generation of farmers. Between 2003 and 2022, South Carolina—where the state beverage is a glass of cold milk—lost 75 percent of licensed dairy operations. They have found their market in a niche constituency, though the wider public might disapprove. Raw milk is a risky product, often considered a public health risk.

Raw milk is unpasteurized, meaning it hasn’t been through a sanitizing kill step. Scientists worry that it can make consumers vulnerable to bacterial or viral infection, but raw milk lovers can’t get enough of the creamy taste and allegedly healthful properties.

This debate is situated in what seems to be a public health emergency. Reports of bird flu infecting dairy cattle leave public health officials worried that drinking raw milk can spread disease. Under the Trump presidency, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has vowed to increase public access to raw milk as a part of his Make America Healthy Again agenda. Raw influencers and “tradwives” promote it endlessly on social media. Through all this noise, it’s easy to lose sense of the fact that this is an issue that starts on the farm.

In this episode, you will hear from L.D. Peeler, acting patriarch of Milky Way Farm, his daughter, Iris, and son, Davis. Each plays a role on their small family farm, which raises 120 Jersey cows: Davis works on the farm, L.D. manages the finances, and Iris does the public relations. They each have different, but entangled, stories to tell.

At Milky Way Farm, we are reminded that, just like any other food, raw milk starts with the land, the animals, and the people that make it possible. Guided by the community’s desire for a tasty and safe product, the Peelers have shaped their business to meet this need. Thus, in the face of economic pressures of the dairy industry and cultural pressures around the product, they have risen above—like the cream beneath the lid of their bottled pints.

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In “What’s in Store for the Pawpaw Patch?” Gravy producer Anya Groner examines the pawpaw, a long-overlooked fruit that’s now being domesticated, making its way into farmers’ markets, restaurants, and even beer.

What plant has leaves that smell like green pepper, fruit that can taste like pineapple or turpentine, and bark that can be woven into baskets? Enter the poor man’s banana, also known as the pawpaw. Two decades ago, you’d be hard-pressed to find a nursery with a pawpaw tree for sale, but these days the mid-sized tree and its fruit has a near cult following. Though indigenous to the eastern United States, pawpaw trees fell out of popular consciousness for almost a century. The reason is at least in part economic. The fruit ripens and rots so quickly that it’s never been commercially viable. But, in recent years the northern-most variety of “custard apple,” a family of trees that includes the soursop and cherimoya, has had a remarkable comeback.

Over two decades ago, horticulturalist Neal Peterson sparked a renewed interest in the fruit after patenting seven pawpaw cultivars, which he bred for flavor, low seed count, and perishability. Yet not everyone lauds the growing popularity of pawpaws. Dr. Troy Wiipongwii, Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Conservation at the College of William and Mary, says this surge of interest could backfire, causing an overproduction of the fruit that ultimately hurts the ecosystem. And Sean Wilson, who uses pawpaws to flavor seasonal beers at FullSteam Brewery in Durham, North Carolina, worries that too much cultivation might result in a bland fruit. 

So what’s next? Will pawpaws become the next “it” fruit, destined to flavor everything from soap to cocktails? Or will oversupply collapse the market and leave us with a flavorless fruit? In this episode, Groner takes us to a festival in Paw Paw, West Virginia, to explore what we lose and what we gain as America’s largest indigenous fruit, the pawpaw, is bred for market.

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In “Flambéed! The Art & Theater of Bananas Foster,” Gravy producer Eve Troeh takes listeners to Brennan’s, the iconic restaurant in New Orleans’ French Quarter, where skilled servers pull off one sensational culinary feat, table after table and day after day—Bananas Foster, flambéed tableside.

Brennan’s opened its doors more than seventy years ago, and its early years coincided with a hot trend in fine dining at the time: tableside dishes. Many know this practice, when a server wheels over a small cart to your table and makes a dish right in front of you. One of the iconic recipes in this pantheon of the tableside tradition is Bananas Foster, a rum-laden flambéed dessert that was invented at Brennan’s in 1951. Today, the dish appears on menus worldwide, and Brennan’s serves the original day and night, dazzling diners with a fiery display.

The ritual of tableside dining, once a hallmark of fine establishments, originates in European opulence, where elaborate presentations convey status and sophistication. While the tradition waned in the 1960s and 70s, Brennan's steadfastly preserves it, offering not only Bananas Foster but a repertoire of tableside classics, each dish a testament to culinary craftsmanship.

So what is it like to produce this “show” of Bananas Foster, day in and day out? For the staff at Brennan's, mastering the art of tableside service is a rite of passage. It takes a special kind of server to pull it off, as well as intensive training, special equipment, and a careful attention to safety as the dessert’s rum and liqueur sauce is lit. For Gravy, Troeh visits the Big Easy to speak with Christian Pendleton, general manager at Brennan’s, and Chalaine Celestain, a Brennan’s captain (or leading server) for whom tableside preparations are one part of a complex repertoire. From controlling the flames to engaging guests in the experience, she embodies the spirit of hospitality that defines Brennan's. Maureen Costura, professor of liberal arts and food studies at the Culinary Institute of America, offers historical context.

Despite the occasional mishap, the allure of tableside dining endures, offering patrons a glimpse into a bygone era of elegance and charm. For Christian and his team, it's not just about serving a meal; it's about creating memories and fostering connections with each guest.

In an ever-changing culinary landscape, Brennan's remains a bastion of tradition, where the art of tableside dining continues to captivate and delight. As long as there are flames to ignite and stories to tell, Bananas Foster will remain a cherished tradition, ensuring that the legacy of Brennan's lives on for generations to come.

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