Today we chat with a familiar face—our gadget expert, Lisa McManus. When she’s not reviewing products on the television show, Lisa is busy with her role as the executive editor of our tastings and testings team. I caught up with Lisa to chat about her role as a consumer advocate, her proclivity for foraging, and, of all things, tasting Milk Bones.
Is there a specific moment you can recall when you thought, “I want to make the food world my life”?
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t love to eat and try everything—I literally tried everything. I never could wait for pasta to be done. I’d always pull it out and bite it and bite it and bite it. I’d eat it when it was raw, when it was one minute cooked, two minutes cooked. You can hand me a piece of pasta at any stage and I can be like, “Three more minutes.” It’s a totally useless skill, unless you’re making spaghetti. I also remember biting my dog’s Milk Bone to know what that tasted like—it was not bad.
I grew up in a really rural area, and we played in old abandoned farmhouses and orchards, and I could always find Concord grapes, apples, sour grass—things to eat outside. And I can still do that—we’ll go on hikes and I’m like, “Oh, there’s something to eat.” Food is my thing, I guess I have radar for it.