Killer Meals

One of my most prized possessions is a 1977 Push Pin Studios magazine with Al Capone eating salmon caviar toast on the cover. The issue’s theme is “food and violence,” which is to say, I’m the target demographic for Outlaw’s Digest, a new podcast launching October 8th that promises “true crimes from food history in sizzling style, a feast of malfeasance and felony from the pages of the past.”

Everyone wants to have a food podcast right now, and the landscape to volley for people’s earbuds is crowded: From TASTE to the relaunched Expense Account from J. Lee and Emily Sundberg’s Substack Feed Me to food podcast networks like Gastropod, Milk Street, and the Splendid Table. Happy Hour with Ina Garten recently debuted with Vox. But Outlaw’s Digest goes a different direction, circumventing the ease of trends and celebrities, to look backwards at history—merging two dominant pop culture forces, food and crime. (It’s a subject matter other podcasts have explored—a short-lived series, called Cooked and Booked, was put on by Food Network.) But the timing could be right: 19 million users in the U.S. listened to true crime podcasts in 2024. And though a Forbes report questioned whether the market was cooling, it remains the dominant genre in podcasting. Still, the Outlaw’s Digest team is only focused on capturing a self-selecting niche listener.