Hi friends,

Looming TikTok ban impending and libraries under siege, I’m considering the necessity of IRL and virtual third space this week. Where might community thrive in this evolving landscape? (This is also a PSA to support your local library.) Collective gathering is a vital tool in mitigating climate change and climate preparedness. Our social spaces are traditionally pay-for-time; experiential, dining out, and drinking. Creating accessible socialization not only helps you know your neighbors (the most important folks in a local crisis) it strengthens community resilience in these changing times.

I’m envisioning a year of intentional gathering. Built around potlucks, nature walks, mindful foraging, library dates, gardening, volunteering time at local kitchens and walking shelter dogs, r/FridgeDetective (I found my people)–there is infinite possibility in cultivating unconventional third space. As we shift into post-inauguration, I encourage you to consider your own areas of gathering. How do you show up here and how can you best create space?

If you too are pining for bygone days of Tumblr, you’re not alone. 

And, for support on social space sans alcohol, scroll on for more about Dry January and habit shifts for the new year!

As always–

Stay hungry,
Hawnuh Lee | Founder, Closed Loop Cooking

Speckled radicchio.

The dish >>

• If you have space and capacity consider fostering or adopting a local shelter animal. It’s a hero responsibility, and your love and patience will make all the difference to an animal in need. 

• Help the Altadena Seed Library reseed. This incredible org distributes free seeds and seed education to combat shade inequity and improve local food sovereignty.

• You can also donate to this list of displaced Black families (other groups linked within) affected in SoCal.

• Ecological wealth is the only wealth that matters.

• This speckled radicchio ribbon salad is exactly what winter produce dreams are made of.

• Just a reminder–all is not lost! 

• And this cheat sheet on moving away from fossil fuels. (Also checking out their reg seaweed packaging.)

• Def tuning in for this talk on innovative food solutions from Columbia Climate School’s Food for Humanity Initiative on 2/4.

• I cried reading the kitchen that can be rebuilt, and the memories of so many homes lost.

• Appreciating these matriarchal pickles.

• And this maraschino cherry candle process.

• (CLC is also now on Bluesky 👀)

Speckled radicchio ribbon salad with vegan aged white cheddar.

New age NA–the why’s and ways of a Dry January

writeup by Maia Welbel

Imagine it’s 2015 and you’re home from college on winter break, meeting high school friends at a bar, wearing your favorite off-the-shoulder going out top. You’re waiting to order and thinking about how you felt vaguely nauseated all night last time you had a vodka soda, and waking up with a dull ache in your head last Saturday after drinking two glasses of wine with your parents at shabbat dinner the night before. What you could honestly go for right now is a pamplemousse LaCroix or a hot peppermint tea, but you know that if you don’t order something boozy, your friends will want to know why. They’re not ill intentioned, but you don’t feel like having to fend off facetious jokes about pregnancy and you don’t want to drag down the mood. You order a mojito with ginger and hope the herbs at least do something to keep your stomach settled. 

Fast forward a decade and I think, for a lot of us, this situation would go down differently. I phased alcohol out of my life shortly after graduating college, not because I struggled with dependency or even had any particularly bad experiences with it, just because it didn’t make me feel great socially or physically. My proclivities lean more bookstore-browse than bar-hop so throughout my 20s I didn’t find myself in many situations where that caused a lot of friction, but it’s only in the last year or two that I’ve fully let go of anxiety around having to explain my teetotaling. That is in part thanks to more developed self-confidence and simply caring less about judgement from my peers as I’ve gotten older — but I can’t deny the role that the chic-ification of NA culture plays too. Nowadays you’d be unlikely to find a bar menu at a trendy establishment that doesn’t feature at least a mocktail or two. And as wellness culture continues to permeate the mainstream, going alcohol-free is more likely to be perceived as healthy lifestyle choice than a social aberration. Whether you’re doing Dry January this year or just wanting to be more intentional about the role alcohol plays in your life, there’s never been a better time to go straight edge. 

~

We’ve just been through peak Wellness Goal Setting Time™, and the idea of starting the year off sans drink is more popular than ever. Dry January has 54.8M views on TikTok at the time of writing, up from from 28.2M last year — DIY mocktail recipes, NA wine reviews, and of course #fail videos abound. The beverage market is meeting the moment with a plethora of NA options (spending surpassed $11 billion worldwide in 2022) from functional elixirs infused with ingredients like adaptogenic mushrooms and CBD, to zero-proof liquor alternatives and NA beer. NA bottle shops have even been popping up all over the country. One thing we can say for sure? Good branding makes sobriety a lot less of a buzzkill. 

Young people are largely driving this move away from alcohol-centric socializing. Americans under the age of 25 spent 60 percent less on alcohol in 2023 than they did in 2003 when adjusted for inflation, and according to a 2024 Gallup poll, the proportion of young adults who say they drink fell from 72 percent to 59 percent in that same timeframe. People ages 21 to 29 drank less during the pandemic when they couldn’t go to bars and parties, and the trend persisted. Despite the ways that COVID isolation exacerbated hardships associated with substance use for many people, this particular shift makes sense to me. If your entire experience of adult social life thus far had been connected to alcohol, you might not even fully understand how it affects your body and mind. When those environments were stripped away, young folks who engaged in heavy drinking before the pandemic had the chance to question whether the behavior was benefiting them, and a good chunk of them chose to change their ways even once gathering was once again feasible. 

Another important element of the sober-curious movement is increased awareness of health risks associated with drinking. The same Gallup poll found that between 2016 and 2024, the share of respondents who viewed moderate drinking as “bad for health” increased from 26 percent to 45 percent. In 2022, the WHO declared, “When it comes to alcohol consumption, there is no safe amount that does not affect health.” Just this month, the Surgeon General released an advisory highlighting alcohol use as a leading preventable cause of cancer in the U.S. and calling for updated labeling. The desire to reclaim agency over one’s long term health through lifestyle choices has exploded in the zeitgeist over the past decade or so, and there are no signs of that slowing down. Abstaining from alcohol as a way of caring for your body is  becoming more and more broadly normalized. 

If you’re interested in drinking less in 2025, here are some ideas to wet your whistle:

• Get clear on why: If you have tangible objectives to come back to, you’ll be more motivated to stay on track.

• Set realistic goals: Only you know what habits will be best for your lifestyle, take gradual steps where you need to, and make a plan you can stick with.

• Loop in friends and family: Talk about it with the people around you and let them help with accountability.

• Create new rituals: If you’re used to a glass of wine after work, try replacing it with a different soothing beverage or sweet snack, or treating yourself to a warm bath or face mask.

• Make it fun: Try out that fancy shrub at your nearest specialty grocer or make yourself a spontaneous weeknight DIY mocktail.

• Project confidence: Yes sobriety is having a moment, but certain social environments can still make declining a drink stressful. If you find yourself having to explain, try saying something casual and straightforward like “I’m just feeling great without it right now" or "It’s not my thing at the moment."

• Embrace imperfection: At CLC we’ll take any opportunity to remind you that habit shifts don’t have to be all or nothing. If you wind up having a drink when you didn’t plan to, don’t judge yourself or give up on your original intentions, just take it as an opportunity to reset.

Need further guidance? Take a note from plant-based, crater bartender Kianna Bell of Soul and Craft PDX in Portland, OR:

“‘You never know the reason behind someone choosing a non-alcoholic cocktail over a boozy one and in my experience, an NA drinker still wants (and deserves) the fun and lavish experience that a standard cocktail drinker has. From taste, to viscosity, to presentation and garnish, the experience has many opportunities to be fun, interesting, exciting and memorable and more than just a myriad of fruit juices combined in one glass. 

Let yourself step outside the box. Play with new ingredients like verjus, herbal teas, shrubs, homemade tonics (think a combination of things like dandelion, elderflower, lemongrass, bitter roots and herbs). Utilize the leftover scraps from cooking to make fun flavor infusions. Play with a unique zero proof spirit like Pathfinder's bitter hemp and root distillate or Seedlips Garden 108 that features english peas, spearmint and thyme. Let your curiosity and creativity take over to create a drink that's truly crushable.”

A favorite mocktail of Kianna’s:

Tea & Tamera

• 4 oz lemongrass tea

• 1 oz Jack Rudy elderflower tonic

• ½ oz lemon juice

• 1 oz verjus rouge

• 4 - 5 dashes rose water

Shake together and pour over ice. Feel free to tweak measurements to your liking!

Crafting a memorable beverage experience is what you make it. From elevating seasonal fruits, sampling coffee and teas, to making your own syrups or just enjoying plain H2O–however you imbibe is a chance to bring intention to your glass.

This is the wonderful note of chaos I wanted to leave TikTok on. <3

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Have an idea we should feature in the newsletter? Want to work with us? Drop a line at [email protected]. We can’t wait to see what y’all cook up next! #closedloopcooking