"By 10, I could cook a full meal. I’ve loved it ever since."
Anthony Gilbert stood in the parking lot of A&J Corner Store, beneath the “hot food, cold beer, tobacco” and “lottery” sign, and offered seemingly simple instructions on how to enjoy a “frozen cup.”
The golden combo of juice and fresh pineapple chunks, frozen in a clear plastic cup, looked refreshing on a warm December morning.
“You just squeeze it a little bit and push the bottom,” Gilbert said, expertly freeing his frozen hunk of juice and flipping it back into the cup upside down for ease of eating.
A Tampa Bay Times reporter squeezed his own cup, launching the entire popsicle onto the asphalt, startling a feral chicken and drawing groans from a group of men hanging at the edge of the lot.
“I saw that coming,” Gilbert said, chuckling. “You have to know how to do it.”
Gilbert, 41, is showing people how to eat well in parts of Tampa that don’t traditionally get a lot of media exposure. The self-made food critic was at the corner store that morning to record a review of its hot lunch for Facebook and Instagram, where his combined following has grown rapidly over the past six months to more than 65,000 people.
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