There may be no subject that invites the extremes of sincere devotion and complete absurdity quite like food. Both are on display this week, whether in the restaurant kitchen that shaped Anthony Bourdain’s life, a tiny ceramic barn built for butter, or chicken salad turned into a competitive sport. Fortunately, there’s room at our table for all of it.

Long before the books, television shows, and globe-spanning meals, Anthony Bourdain was a reckless 19-year-old who found purpose in a Provincetown restaurant kitchen. Tony, now in limited theaters and opening nationwide August 21, follows the summer that set him on the path from dishwasher to culinary icon. 

To prepare for his turn as the young Bourdain, Dominic Sessa drew on his early bakery experience and trained in the kitchen at Brooklyn restaurant Gertrude’s with chef and memelord Eli Sussman. Bourdain’s longtime friend Eric Ripert, who makes a cameo in the film, notes that the teenager onscreen is very different from the humble, disciplined professional he later knew.

→ The chip-bag sandwich trades bread for a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips filled with chopped Italian-sub ingredients, all tossed together and eaten with a fork. Popularized by Yaphank Deli on Long Island, it lands somewhere between a chopped sub and a walking taco.

→ Two-ingredient watermelon ice cream turns a frozen watermelon half into both an ingredient and mixing bowl: pour milk or cream into the hollowed center, then scrape, scrape, scrape until it reaches your preferred consistency. Videos of the no-churn trick have racked up millions of views, with results landing somewhere between sherbet and soft serve.

→ Dot salads use melon ballers and drinking straws to carve watermelon, mango, kiwi, cucumber, and other produce into tiny, colorful spheres. The results are beautiful, precise, and an entirely unreasonable amount of work for a fruit salad.

Molly Yeh’s new 25-piece Anthropologie collection brings her colorful farm aesthetic to bakeware, linens, and kitchen accessories, including a barn-shaped butter dish and a utensil crock modeled after her cat, Sven. The launch also introduces Chef to Chef, Anthropologie’s new YouTube series, whose first episode features Yeh and Philadelphia chef Judd Hayne cooking together at her Minnesota farm.

→ In Food Network’s Kitchen Undercover, Antonia Lofaso watches from a secret command center while chef Nestor Milian joins the staff at struggling restaurants to uncover what’s going wrong. Think restaurant rescue by way of a culinary spy thriller.

→ Zach Galifianakis mixes children, gardening experts, agricultural history, and an unsurprising amount of bathroom jokes in Netflix’s This Is a Gardening Show. He also revealed producers considered calling his new show Between Two Farms, which seems like a missed opportunity to us. 

→ Self-appointed Chicken Salad Queen Bethenny Frankel has challenged Bobby Flay, Martha Stewart, Giada De Laurentiis, and other celebrity chefs to her Chicken Salad Olympics. Cat Cora and Rocco DiSpirito have already accepted, raising the stakes on a proudly low-stakes subject.

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Lindt’s new Tokyo Style Matcha Strawberry Chocolate Bar layers matcha filling, crisp genmai rice, and strawberry pieces inside a matcha white-chocolate shell. Rolling out nationally in August, it may be the next geographically themed candy bar to take over the internet.

Matilda! Miss Trunchbull forces Bruce Bogtrotter to finish an enormous chocolate cake in front of the entire school, turning punishment into one of cinema’s most triumphant desserts.