New York Times, Wednesday, June 21, 2023

I'm not exactly sure when I came up with this theme idea, but the term FOOD CHAIN pops up a lot in my life: both because I'm an ecologist and because I do food justice-related organizing in my community.

I had no special strategy for creating the FOOD CHAIN in this puzzle. I would just start with a food and see how far I could take it. This probably wasn't the most efficient method, but it was made easier by referring to alphabetized lists of foods (which can be found on a surprisingly high number of websites).

I'm pretty happy with the final set of theme answers. I'm glad all the foods are fairly well hidden. My only complaint is that DATES is plural while all the other foods are singular. I originally had LIVE STOCK, but the editors felt STOCK wasn't a substantive enough food. Luckily, I found LIVE DATES as a replacement, which I think is a more fun answer anyway.

My payment for this puzzle is being donated to The Okra Project.

Friends and I have turned up so many oddball wordplay discoveries over the years, and so many die on the vine because they don't fit the crossword mold. You need four to five long themers, and they must be colorful — ideally multi-word phrases, which editors prize for their color. They also have to shoehorn into crossword symmetry. It's a wonder that anything fresh ever pops up in the crossworld.

If Jimmy had come to me with a FOOD CHAIN idea, connecting a bunch of food words so that they broke up into disguised but valid words, I'd have thought it an interesting idea but likely impossible to pull off well. You could connect things like BEET SUGAR PLUM TOMATO SOUP, but where's the spice in that?

In contrast, compare these two strings, which contain the exact same letters but with spaces shifted:

APPLEGATE AUTOMATON ACHOO LIVE DATES

APPLE GATEAU TOMATO NACHO OLIVE DATES

TOMATO within AUTOMATON, along with AU finishing GATEAU, is genius. It feels impossible that the second line exhibits crossword symmetry. All praise the great goddess Cruciverba!

(Okay, DATES in LIVE DATES aren't impressive since there's no space shifting, but what are you gonna do.)

Sometimes a puzzle is best served without a revealer, allowing solvers to make the leap themselves, but I would never have figured out the theme without the FOOD CHAIN clue. I went from frowning upon all the single-word themers — some too short to realistically serve as themers — to incredibly impressed. Even as I take yet another look at the GATE AU TOMATO N sequence, my fascination is still high.

All that, plus solid gridwork? In a debut? Can't wait to see what Jimmy serves up next.