It's Monday, January 14, and Trump Is Serving Fast Food to the NCAA Football Champions

Welcome to Off-Menu, where we'll be rounding up all the food news and food-adjacent internet ephemera that delighted, fascinated, or infuriated us this morning.

• The NCAA football national champion Clemson Tigers will have the honor of visiting Donald Trump's White House later today (a tradition which, like paychecks for federal employees, has become less guaranteed than it has historically been under the current administration, with plenty of title teams from college and professional sports refusing the invite, while others claiming never to have received one). Regardless of your politics, a trip to the White House to celebrate a singular achievement like winning the college football championship is pretty cool. You get to shake hands with the leader of the free world, check out the halls where actual competent presidents walked and worked, and apparently dine on…some cheap fast food? Love me some Burgers King.

• The Cincinnati Zoo reads MUNCHIES (guys! you forgot the plural part).

• According to a number of British tabloids citing a study conducted by a lozenge brand, people who self-report as vegan also self-report taking more sick days and visiting the doctor more frequently. It's entirely possible that a lack of meat or dairy might weaken the immune system. In fact, a more academically rigorous 2007 study found evidence that a vegetarian diet resulted in lower red and white blood cell counts. But this particular case calls for an adamant reminder that correlation—especially between people who care enough about their health to institute a strict diet and people who regularly visit the doctor—does not imply causation.
• Chef and humanitarian José Andrés shared that his World Central Kitchen will be responding to "another type of disaster emergency in the United States" by setting up a kitchen on D.C.'s Pennsylvania Avenue to feed federal employees, many of whom have resorted to visiting food banks as the their weeks without pay stretch on.

Someone on Twitter (with the incredibly on-the-nose username "Today Years Old") discovered that you can fold down the curvy top part of your McDonald's french fry container to make a shelf of sorts upon which to dollop your ketchup…

…and Fox News wrote about this and the ensuing "Twitter debate." To each their own, but French fries are not a grab-and-go food, friend. Put your ketchup on the plate.

Here is a video of a man playing Toto's "Africa" on a series of sweet potatoes and gourds that he hand-crafted into musical instruments, which is not how I self-soothe, but maybe it should be.

It's not nearly enough degrees out right now so I'm dreaming of summer, baseball, dugouts, and the kind of days that necessitate 380 pieces of Dubble Bubble.