Eliza Barclay

We’ve had some fun the last two weeks on The Salt with Meat Week and Pie Week. These brainchildren of a Morning Edition producer have yielded a motherlode of stories detailing just what it means to be a people that loves their meat and their pie.

Last week I had two posts on meat consumption in the U.S. One was a charticle with an infographic on what goes into a hamburger, which was surprisingly tricky to put together given the mushiness of data on the land, water, food and energy required for livestock production. Then I wrote about a survey we did with a health polling firm of 3,000 Americans on changes in how much meat people are eating. There’s actually not a lot of great data out there on this, and as many food reporters have noted, attitudes about meat consumption seem to be changing relatively fast right now, so it was a timely and revealing survey.

This week, we’re all about pie. I wouldn’t necessarily have guessed it, but it turns out many people have a very strong emotional response to stories about making pie. On Friday, I’ll pull together some of the cutest, funniest, and most absurd pie stories people have been sending on Storify, a cool little social media reporting tool I used for the first time last month for this story for Shots on the paleo diet.