Speaker 1: From Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where
Speaker 1: we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: These are not normal times. For the last few weeks,
Speaker 1: the only issue that's been in the news or really
Speaker 1: on anybody's mind has been the coronavirus. Consequently, we've really
Speaker 1: been trying hard here on Deep Background to bring you
Speaker 1: updates from the leading experts on the medical side, on
Speaker 1: the economic side, and on the constitutional political side, to
Speaker 1: try to make sense of what's happening. We promise to
Speaker 1: keep on doing that. This episode is a little different.
Speaker 1: It's about a topic that turns out to be of
Speaker 1: central importance in a moment of pandemic with everybody staying
Speaker 1: at home, namely the topic of food, what we eat,
Speaker 1: why we eat it, and how we think about the
Speaker 1: supply chains associated with the food that we put on
Speaker 1: the table. But this episode was not recorded in the
Speaker 1: middle of the pandemic. This episode was recorded before people
Speaker 1: started staying at home. Nevertheless, we think it's really important
Speaker 1: to bring it to you right now, because in the
Speaker 1: circumstances of pandemic and social distancing, we're sitting around our
Speaker 1: houses thinking about how to put food on the table
Speaker 1: for ourselves and our loved ones, and that entails cooking,
Speaker 1: cooking not purely for pleasure, but cooking because it might
Speaker 1: be the only way you're actually going to have a
Speaker 1: properly prepared meal. We know that by virtue of the
Speaker 1: fact that so many restaurants are closed in so many
Speaker 1: parts of the country, and also by virtue of the
Speaker 1: fact that so many grocery stores have had their shelves
Speaker 1: emptied as people go out to buy food in anticipation
Speaker 1: of possible long quarantines. So today we're going to hear
Speaker 1: from a person who has taught many of us how
Speaker 1: to cook, someone who has had a huge impact on
Speaker 1: my life and that of many others, the food writer
Speaker 1: Mark Bittman. There's a good chance you own or have
Speaker 1: seen at least one of his cookbooks. His most famous
Speaker 1: one is called How to Cook Everything. That book taught
Speaker 1: millions of people how to cook, and I have the
Speaker 1: feeling that it may be teaching many more how to
Speaker 1: cook in the weeks and months ahead. Recently, Mark released
Speaker 1: an updated twentieth year anniversary edition. He's also written Fish,
Speaker 1: The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking, a book that
Speaker 1: had a big impact on my relationship with my mother,
Speaker 1: as will explore, and a diet book called Vegan Before
Speaker 1: six Pm vb six, and beyond that almost two dozen
Speaker 1: other books on various aspects of food. He was a
Speaker 1: food columnist for The New York Times for thirteen years,
Speaker 1: and he's now editor in chief of the food publication
Speaker 1: he did. I talked to Mark about the transformation he
Speaker 1: has seen over the course of his career in how
Speaker 1: he talks about food and how we think about it.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for doing this. I really I
Speaker 1: appreciate it tremendously. I mean looking forward to it. If
Speaker 1: I could start on a personal note, I just want
Speaker 1: to say that your Fish book has played a central
Speaker 1: role in my relationship with my mother over many, many years,
Speaker 1: involving a complex polemic about whether it's okay to undercook
Speaker 1: the fish or, as you would put it, okay not
Speaker 1: to overcook the fish. Right, I have to say that
Speaker 1: fish is tricky, Cooking fish is tricky, and every general
Speaker 1: rule is pretty much wrong. So the thing is that
Speaker 1: some fish wants to be cooked for a long time,
Speaker 1: and most fish barely wants to be cooked all. So
Speaker 1: that is that was the first book I did. It
Speaker 1: was published in ninety four and the publisher wanted me
Speaker 1: to redo it. I said, it's impossible to write about
Speaker 1: fish now. There's so many moral mine fields ethical mine
Speaker 1: fields that anything you write, if someone wants to trash you,
Speaker 1: they can trash you. And it just it's not it's
Speaker 1: hard to encourage the eating of fish, even though it's
Speaker 1: good for people, because the sustainability issues and other issues
Speaker 1: are so fraught that I just kind of decided I
Speaker 1: wasn't going to write about it. Yeah, that's extremely fascinating.
Speaker 1: And the sense that there's a moral compunction that interferes with,
Speaker 1: you know, going back and even doing a second edition
Speaker 1: of the book or a further edition of the book
Speaker 1: raises a question that I've been really struggling with and
Speaker 1: thinking about our conversation advance. And here's what it is.
Speaker 1: I feel as though when you started writing as a
Speaker 1: food writer, the genre, not yours in particular, but the
Speaker 1: way the genre worked was still very much a kind
Speaker 1: of life improvement. If you will cook this recipe in
Speaker 1: this way, it will taste good, so you'll feel better
Speaker 1: because you're eating better food, and your life will be
Speaker 1: better because the people around you will also enjoy this.
Speaker 1: And now the genre, including very much your work has
Speaker 1: evolved so that very often you're also telling us what's
Speaker 1: good for the world, not just what's good for you
Speaker 1: reader in cooking or in eating, but how the world
Speaker 1: will benefit. And so the problem with eating fish, for example,
Speaker 1: as you say, it might be great for you, but
Speaker 1: it might be really bad for the world. So how
Speaker 1: do you think about that those those two roles. Obviously
Speaker 1: they can be mixed, But first of all, do you
Speaker 1: think that has changed over the course of your career?
Speaker 1: And more importantly, how has it changed for you? Well?
Speaker 1: You is a wonderful analysis and totally true. And I
Speaker 1: started cooking in the seventies and we were ignorant. So
Speaker 1: those questions weren't raised because we in general were more ignorant.
Speaker 1: I in particular was way more ignorant. So things did
Speaker 1: start to change, but they changed very slowly. People didn't
Speaker 1: talk about climate change, people didn't talk about waste, and
Speaker 1: it's taken until now. You know, we want to we
Speaker 1: people who are striving to have food being taken seriously
Speaker 1: on a grander stage in a I mean not just hunger,
Speaker 1: but all of the issues that we talk about, malnutrition
Speaker 1: and sustainability and the impact of agriculture on the environment
Speaker 1: and climate change and all of that stuff. We, I guess,
Speaker 1: me and my comrades whatever think that food has gotten
Speaker 1: underplayed in its role in these huge issues. And I
Speaker 1: still think that's the case, although more and more people
Speaker 1: do talk about food and agriculture in that bigger sense.
Speaker 1: But and you're out there talking about all as are as.
Speaker 1: You say, your comrades, but you know, I'm just one voice,
Speaker 1: and not a particularly loud one. But yeah, back in
Speaker 1: the sixties and seventies, you ate food because it tasted good,
Speaker 1: and you cooked because it tasted better, and you kind
Speaker 1: of didn't You might think about good ingredients, but if
Speaker 1: they were there, you saw them and you ate them,
Speaker 1: but you didn't go talking about them all the time.
Speaker 1: I don't think even so, even within the doing good
Speaker 1: for the world, there's still two different parts. There's the
Speaker 1: health part and then there's the global health part, the sustainability.
Speaker 1: You know that the planet as it were, as the
Speaker 1: as the patient, well, well we're the happy and sad
Speaker 1: circumstance here, and quite possibly unique or at least unusual,
Speaker 1: is that what's good for you is good for the planet,
Speaker 1: and vice versa. That the way to eat for your
Speaker 1: body's optimal health happens to be the way that good
Speaker 1: agriculture would be providing you with food and protecting the
Speaker 1: health of the earth. So and is that genuinely by accident?
Speaker 1: I mean, this is something I'm puzzling over very much.
Speaker 1: I mean, God, right, so exactly. So, I mean we're
Speaker 1: actually going there, believe it or not. We're going to
Speaker 1: God in this conversation one way or another. But you know,
Speaker 1: the vegans, the hardcore vegans, would say, yeah, it's not
Speaker 1: a coincidence at all, and a lot of them would
Speaker 1: offer it. Not all, but some of that would offer
Speaker 1: a kind of what I would call a secular theology
Speaker 1: in which we are in some way in communion with
Speaker 1: the earth, and therefore it's not a surprise that that
Speaker 1: which is good for our bodies is grown out of
Speaker 1: the earth. You know, I don't think I'm making this
Speaker 1: out to be much more mystical than a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of vegans would describe it as as being.
Speaker 1: And I should say, I'm not a vegan. I'm trying
Speaker 1: to channel that at that point of view here. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean vegan or not, because you can believe that
Speaker 1: animals and even eating animals are part of this system.
Speaker 1: I don't think you have to be a vegan to
Speaker 1: believe that that there is some kind of system that
Speaker 1: nourishes both the planet and people. So I don't think
Speaker 1: this needs to be a vegan or non argument. In fact,
Speaker 1: it makes more sense from that's real a cosmic perspective
Speaker 1: to be an omnivore. Insofar as you think there's some
Speaker 1: evolutionary component to this, you know, it's probably not a
Speaker 1: coincidence that humans have evolved to be omnivorous. Right, It's
Speaker 1: not a that we can say, I think with some assuredness.
Speaker 1: But um, it's hard because if you're going to put
Speaker 1: a layable on it that it's mystical or spiritual, then
Speaker 1: it's difficult to make that argument. You kind of either
Speaker 1: believe it or you don't. But if you're gonna put
Speaker 1: a label on it, if you're gonna say it's not
Speaker 1: a coincidence that what's good for the planet is good
Speaker 1: for the people who live on the planet, that doesn't
Speaker 1: have to be a mystical or spiritual argument. That can
Speaker 1: be a pragmatic argument. I just don't know that I'm
Speaker 1: prepared to make it it's a great prefer the question. Well,
Speaker 1: fine to say right exactly. Yeah, I think that it's true.
Speaker 1: It is hard to believe it's a coincident, like it
Speaker 1: just happens to be that way. I don't know that
Speaker 1: anyone's made the argument that growing the plants that nourish
Speaker 1: your body are by necessity the plants that are good
Speaker 1: for stewarding the land. And it is that way. But
Speaker 1: it's not because of teleology or God or something but
Speaker 1: it and it's not because of nature, because we're literally
Speaker 1: talking about his culture, which originally is like the culture.
Speaker 1: The word culture comes from agriculture. It's about growing stuff.
Speaker 1: So it's a self conscious thing. It's not a hundred
Speaker 1: gatherer picture. It's not a paleo diet account whereby the
Speaker 1: things we really should eat would be just the things
Speaker 1: that we happen to find, because if that were the case,
Speaker 1: we really wouldn't be able to sustain anything like the
Speaker 1: global population that we do. We need to grow some stuff, Well,
Speaker 1: we don't know that we are sustaining it, and we
Speaker 1: do know that populations that are five thousand years old
Speaker 1: have sustained themselves by doing more earth friendly forms of agriculture.
Speaker 1: So the biggest and oldest populations in the world, which
Speaker 1: are in Asia, eat mostly plants and always have and
Speaker 1: have done agriculture that could be argued is sustainable. And
Speaker 1: if something has proven itself over five thousand years. We're
Speaker 1: talking about rice culture now, right, yeah, kind of kind
Speaker 1: of but we culture too, but culture where there have
Speaker 1: been water challenges and weather challenges and challenges to the
Speaker 1: civilization themselves, but that the food culture has been sustained.
Speaker 1: There's no Western food culture that's been sustained for anything
Speaker 1: like that period of time, and certainly not in North America.
Speaker 1: I mean, everything that we've done in the last say,
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty two hundred years, is only that old.
Speaker 1: That's how old it is. Yes, you can't call that sustainable,
Speaker 1: even if at the moment it appears to be working.
Speaker 1: It's not long enough to say, oh, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: You know that it's funny to get into the kind
Speaker 1: of philosophical or interesting to get into the kind of
Speaker 1: philosophical side of things, because when people argue that industrial
Speaker 1: agriculture is the way to do it, because how else
Speaker 1: are we going to support them doing air quotes? How
Speaker 1: else are we going to support ten billion people blah
Speaker 1: blah blah, and that anything else is a pipe dream.
Speaker 1: The pipe dream is to imagine that industrial agriculture is sustainable,
Speaker 1: because there's so much evidence that it isn't. And the
Speaker 1: reality is to say, we need to make it better.
Speaker 1: How do we make ag culture better? That's not a
Speaker 1: pipe dream to say how do we make agriculture better?
Speaker 1: It's a pipe dream to say we figured out agriculture. No,
Speaker 1: we haven't. Quite the opposite. We figured out how to
Speaker 1: erect the earth and how to cause a public health
Speaker 1: crisis by force feeding people junk food. So what is
Speaker 1: the answer? You know, the answer is it has to
Speaker 1: be better. The answer is it has to change. We'll
Speaker 1: be back in just a moment. I want to ask
Speaker 1: you about the process whereby food writers and then the
Speaker 1: people who read them came to see the world in
Speaker 1: the way that you're describing, came to care first. I
Speaker 1: would say, probably in order, first about taste, then about health,
Speaker 1: and then about sustainability and the world. And the reason
Speaker 1: I want to ask about that is that I think
Speaker 1: the answer may have something to do with a very
Speaker 1: particular elite, you know, upper middle class for lack of
Speaker 1: a better term. You know New York Times reading, and
Speaker 1: you know, I'm guilty as charged, you know, as as
Speaker 1: a reader and sometime contributor. And the reason I'm asking
Speaker 1: this is, when the history of this is told, will
Speaker 1: they say, you know that it was something about pretty
Speaker 1: rich people who nevertheless had some or maybe because they
Speaker 1: had the money, were capable of thinking ethically that drove
Speaker 1: this this kind of process. Because if that were true,
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's a true story or a
Speaker 1: fair story, but if it were a true story, it
Speaker 1: does come from a certain kind of excess and excess
Speaker 1: of wealth and excess of you know, elite cultural position,
Speaker 1: and then it comes to seem like good common sense
Speaker 1: with you know, people like you functioning as kind of
Speaker 1: the profits of the story, you know, the ones who
Speaker 1: are who are telling this story and telling us, you know,
Speaker 1: what we ought to believe. And then it's not a
Speaker 1: coincidence that you start by telling us what we ought
Speaker 1: to eat because it tastes good, and then you move
Speaker 1: through that to telling us what to eat in order
Speaker 1: to make the world a better place. You know, there
Speaker 1: are many other factors that you haven't mentioned, but I
Speaker 1: think one thing you're overlooking in this story is that
Speaker 1: let's say one third of the world has been eating
Speaker 1: according to the tenets of sustainability forever, and they're not
Speaker 1: New York Times readers, and they're not white elites. But
Speaker 1: they may not have been doing it in order for
Speaker 1: it to be sustainable. They may just have been doing
Speaker 1: it because it worked for them. Come on, that's not sustainability.
Speaker 1: I mean it worked for them for five thousand years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but people don't always I mean, just to push back
Speaker 1: a little bit, I mean, I hear what you're saying,
Speaker 1: but people don't always do something because they know that
Speaker 1: it's always worked. I mean they people do things on
Speaker 1: a daily basis for all kinds of ordinary reasons. Sometimes
Speaker 1: failing to change something that's people. You know, take some
Speaker 1: oppressive structure that we've that's been around for five thousand years,
Speaker 1: I don't know, sexism or something like that, people say, well,
Speaker 1: we always have done it this way, so we stick
Speaker 1: with it. And then a critic wants to say, yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know, you think that works, but it doesn't
Speaker 1: work for half the people, and so, you know, I
Speaker 1: don't want to jump to the conclusion that the antiquity
Speaker 1: of a practice shows that it's necessarily a good one. Well,
Speaker 1: except when people switch from traditional diets to contemporary Western
Speaker 1: diets they get chronic disease. Yes, there's no question that
Speaker 1: is the truth. So I think that it's arguable and
Speaker 1: demonstrable that traditional diets work and that we're not discovering
Speaker 1: anything new here when we're saying eat a diet that's
Speaker 1: heavy in plants and light in anything else. What we
Speaker 1: have done that's new is in the last one hundred,
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty years, is invent a bunch of
Speaker 1: food that makes people sick that didn't even exist before that.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I think maybe it takes public intellectuals or whatever.
Speaker 1: The shortcut version of what you said before is to
Speaker 1: recognize that first, a lot of it is an academic
Speaker 1: comes out of academia. But the marketing of that junk
Speaker 1: food targets everyone, but it targets less well off people disproportionately,
Speaker 1: and it targets everyone to the extent that it can,
Speaker 1: and it targets us so well that it's almost as
Speaker 1: if there's no choice but to eat junk food. So
Speaker 1: rebelling against that or recognizing that is not easy, and
Speaker 1: many people are just simply too busy you know, they're
Speaker 1: just like trying to get some food. And there's a
Speaker 1: wealth and a class element obviously there as well. It's
Speaker 1: you have to live in a neighborhood where there are
Speaker 1: shops that's self fresh food. You have to be able
Speaker 1: to afford to buy them. Although of course ideally it
Speaker 1: would be just as affordable as other food, but it
Speaker 1: isn't at the moment. You have to have the time
Speaker 1: to actually put the food on the table. And I
Speaker 1: recognize that lots of people who have free time to
Speaker 1: say they don't when they really do. But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, there are people who are working two or
Speaker 1: three jobs and are genuinely at the margins economically who
Speaker 1: really don't have the time. Right I used to say,
Speaker 1: I used to argue that people everybody should cook, and
Speaker 1: that it was ironic that people would watch cooking on
Speaker 1: television and say they didn't have time to cook at home. Yes,
Speaker 1: but there are so many people who have transportation challenges
Speaker 1: and two job challenges and scheduling challenges and childcare issues
Speaker 1: and da da da dada, on and on and on.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's right to say that anymore. I
Speaker 1: probably wasn't right to say it in the first place. Um,
Speaker 1: although it's a good line, and it's a great line,
Speaker 1: and it's and there are people who watch TV instead
Speaker 1: of cooking. I mean, maybe they're exhausted, pistending about exercise.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're watching sports on television, why an't
Speaker 1: you out there working out? And right that in theory
Speaker 1: that makes good sense. People's realities are are complicated, right,
Speaker 1: I think the real the real issue here, the real
Speaker 1: I don't think the real tragedy is that junk food
Speaker 1: marketers target everybody and they're very, very sophisticated. That kind
Speaker 1: of marketing, which is scientific and algorithmic and way beyond
Speaker 1: my understanding at least, you know, gets us to eat
Speaker 1: all kinds of things that we know we shouldn't be eating,
Speaker 1: and there's there's no question about whether we should be
Speaker 1: eating them the way quantities we are. And everyone has
Speaker 1: that experience. Everyone has the experience of looking at some
Speaker 1: piece of junk food and thinking, I know, I'm not
Speaker 1: supposed to eat that, and then eating it. Right, probably
Speaker 1: even Gwyneth Paltrow sometimes. But the point is that I
Speaker 1: don't think that that's the thing that doesn't get talked about.
Speaker 1: It gets talked about a lot, but it doesn't get
Speaker 1: talked about enough because that is the thing that's wrecking
Speaker 1: both our health and the health of the planet. So
Speaker 1: one solution to that is regulation, and I went to it.
Speaker 1: I'm down with that. Yeah. And when Mike Bloomberg was
Speaker 1: mayor of New York, he went big time into some
Speaker 1: versions of that. I mean, I suppose from some perspective
Speaker 1: they were pretty modest. You know, you can't buy soda
Speaker 1: in a fort. You know, he tried to get a
Speaker 1: soda taxs past and fail and so so, but that
Speaker 1: was a backup plan. And you know, there was some
Speaker 1: backlash to the Bloomberg approach. You know, people talked about
Speaker 1: the nanny state or the nanny mayor. That's something that
Speaker 1: may or may not follow him, you know, in his
Speaker 1: political future. How do you think about the possibilities, the
Speaker 1: real world possibilities of the kind of regulation that might
Speaker 1: be necessary to deal with the big corporations, because, as
Speaker 1: you point out, it's not enough just to educate people,
Speaker 1: because not withstand the education, there are all these other
Speaker 1: pressures on us. I mean, you're asking me to predict
Speaker 1: the winner of the twenty twenty election, because you're not
Speaker 1: going to make progress when you have a president who's
Speaker 1: trying to dismantle the EPA and every other progressive or
Speaker 1: potentially progressive arm of government. So we are at the
Speaker 1: point where we're trying to defend regulations that exist. Well,
Speaker 1: let me ask a simpler question that, or maybe it's simpler.
Speaker 1: I mean, do you think that disclosure regulations of the
Speaker 1: kind that require you know, chain restaurants to list the
Speaker 1: number of calories and their dishes and things like that
Speaker 1: are I mean, there's some data suggesting that they have
Speaker 1: some effect at the margin, So I'm not asking you
Speaker 1: about the data. What I'm asking is whether, at an
Speaker 1: instinctive level, you think, yeah, you know, if we do
Speaker 1: a whole lot more labeling will be much better off,
Speaker 1: or if your instinct is no, labeling is not going
Speaker 1: to be enough to go against the kind of sophisticated marketing.
Speaker 1: What we need is some actual legal rules that say,
Speaker 1: you know, certain kinds of food can't be sold to kids,
Speaker 1: or can't be sold in certain packaging, or can't be
Speaker 1: advertising in a certain way, which is what we've done
Speaker 1: with tobacco. I guess I think the answer is both.
Speaker 1: I think that there's that incremental change is necessary at
Speaker 1: this point, even if it's just symbolic or representative. And
Speaker 1: I think food labeling, putting calories on, I mean, there
Speaker 1: is some data that says that it's useful, but it's
Speaker 1: certainly not revolutionary. But if you say more information is better,
Speaker 1: more truth is better, more actual truth is better. And
Speaker 1: we're starting by saying, you know, a whopper has a
Speaker 1: thousand calories or whatever, and you might want to know
Speaker 1: that that's something when you get to real transparency, when
Speaker 1: you can say we're going to have video cameras everywhere
Speaker 1: that that animals are confined, and we're going to show
Speaker 1: you on a minute to minute basis. You want to
Speaker 1: know where this burger is from. Here's how you can trace.
Speaker 1: I mean that's doable. We can trace the history of
Speaker 1: any any piece of food you like. You can see
Speaker 1: where it's from, how it's raised, how it was processed,
Speaker 1: and so on. That I think will help change consciousness.
Speaker 1: But I think some form of recognizing that sugar is
Speaker 1: the tobacco of the twenty first century, that junk food
Speaker 1: is damaging our health, and that government's job is to
Speaker 1: protect the public health, and to recognize that just like
Speaker 1: government's job is to recognize that vaccines are public health tools.
Speaker 1: If people don't think that, that's really unfortunate. But they're wrong.
Speaker 1: So now what do you want government to be about. Well,
Speaker 1: in facts, the case of vaccine, though, at least to
Speaker 1: my mind, is a pretty clear case where the law
Speaker 1: ought to dictate. Part of the reason for that is
Speaker 1: that they're such a big spillover effect on everybody else
Speaker 1: if I don't vaccinate my kids, So, you know, without
Speaker 1: talking about the case of the genuine religious objector you know,
Speaker 1: the core case of you know, the person who's it's like, well,
Speaker 1: I just don't want to do that. I think it's
Speaker 1: probably not healthy. I myself am very comfortable saying the
Speaker 1: law should mandate that. It's a teeny bit harder to
Speaker 1: say that in the case of sugar, because although bad
Speaker 1: eating has spillover effects in the sense that I need
Speaker 1: more healthcare and then other people have to help pay
Speaker 1: for that healthcare, it doesn't have the same insignificant which
Speaker 1: is not insignificant, but it doesn't have quite the same
Speaker 1: immediate spillover effects as non vaccination. I mean, there's no
Speaker 1: argument you're eating yourself to death is not going to
Speaker 1: kill me, but it is going to inconvenience me. And
Speaker 1: there's a spectrum here. So you start with vaccines, you
Speaker 1: move to tobacco, which has the second hand smoke arguments, suppose,
Speaker 1: and then you say, well, your ability to drink ten
Speaker 1: cans of coca day or whatever actually does or may
Speaker 1: affect my children's health because my children can't think about
Speaker 1: this stuff in a way of supposedly thoughtful grown up can.
Speaker 1: And by keeping the mark getting of coke, for example, unlimited,
Speaker 1: by not joining sides and trying to rein in the
Speaker 1: rapacious marketing of people who are trying to sell sugar
Speaker 1: sweetened beverages to everybody all the time, you're threatening the
Speaker 1: life of my children, for example. Sure, and I you
Speaker 1: know the argument it's wearing your arm ends where your
Speaker 1: fist meets my face kind of thing. Yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: mean it's it's appropriate that you that you mentioned that
Speaker 1: adage because that's also where you hit the real objection
Speaker 1: from libertarians, you know, where they say, well, we have
Speaker 1: to draw the line somewhere, and that line is at
Speaker 1: my chin, you know, and this is only metaphorically affecting
Speaker 1: you know, me or my kids. And I think you
Speaker 1: also have to add to that the kind of often
Speaker 1: class based reaction that says, look, I have few enough
Speaker 1: pleasures in my life, and you really want to take
Speaker 1: away from me this the pleasure of having this coke.
Speaker 1: And you know, then the educated person quote unquote says, well,
Speaker 1: you don't understand. You only like that coke because the
Speaker 1: marketing has made your brain like that coke. And that's
Speaker 1: about the point where in the ordinary person might want
Speaker 1: to punch you, you know, you know well, but can't
Speaker 1: because the libertarianism. Right, But you see what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think I do think there is a
Speaker 1: kind of instinct to say. One of the things that's
Speaker 1: wrong in our society is that educated people think they
Speaker 1: know what's best for us. And you know, I'm going
Speaker 1: to make my own decisions, and don't tell me that
Speaker 1: I only have these decisions because I'm deluded into it
Speaker 1: by corporate advertising. Well, even though you and I may think, yeah,
Speaker 1: you are, yeah, But also if you say I don't
Speaker 1: want educated people to make decisions that affect me, you're
Speaker 1: sort of implying that you want uneducated people to democracy. Right,
Speaker 1: That is called democracy and educated people. But if they're
Speaker 1: more uneducated people, they make the decision. That's right, and
Speaker 1: that's the position we're in now. And that's why when
Speaker 1: you started this conversation and said you're asking me to
Speaker 1: predict the winner of the twenty twenty election, because yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, our food habits and desires are formed at
Speaker 1: a really young age. If we don't take control over
Speaker 1: what our children see and eat when it comes to food,
Speaker 1: what they see in how they're marketed to and what
Speaker 1: they wind up eating as a result of that, if
Speaker 1: we don't have some kind of intervention in that arena,
Speaker 1: we are going to have generation after generation after generation
Speaker 1: of unhealthy adults. Because we all know how hard it
Speaker 1: is to change are you said it before? We all
Speaker 1: want to eat a whopper now, and then we all
Speaker 1: know how hard it is to change the way the
Speaker 1: way that we eat. And that's because when we were
Speaker 1: four years old, or now even two years old, we
Speaker 1: were being bottle fed kool aid, or you know, encouraged
Speaker 1: to drink coke or to eat candy or sweeten the
Speaker 1: breakfast cereal and obvious one and so on. I don't
Speaker 1: think you can make that stuff illegal, certainly not in
Speaker 1: the current climate, but you can rein it in a
Speaker 1: little bit I think let's talk a little bit, if
Speaker 1: we could, about cooking as a discipline, either a self
Speaker 1: discipline or a pleasurable activity, or some combination of those things.
Speaker 1: So you've just reissued the twentieth edition right of the
Speaker 1: wonderfully named How to Cook Everything, And I presume that
Speaker 1: your own thinking about what it means to cook has
Speaker 1: changed from the time that you wrote that book until today.
Speaker 1: If so, maybe I'm wrong, Maybe it hasn't changed. Do
Speaker 1: you think about the purpose of cooking the same way
Speaker 1: now as you did that I'm so much less obsessive
Speaker 1: about it and so much more easy going about it.
Speaker 1: And people still seem to like the food that I'm
Speaker 1: not even talking about the books. The books speak for themselves,
Speaker 1: But when friends come to my house or I cook
Speaker 1: somewhere else, people still seem to think. I know what
Speaker 1: I'm doing and the food is good, and I think
Speaker 1: it's pretty good, but it's not sweated over, it's not
Speaker 1: obsessed about. And I used to do that, and then
Speaker 1: I realized people love it when you cook for them.
Speaker 1: They're so happy that you that you're cooking for them.
Speaker 1: They're so grateful. Everybody loves to have someone say I'll
Speaker 1: cook for you, Yes, so this the bar is not
Speaker 1: that high. But you know you're cooking for somebody, you
Speaker 1: already have the benefit of the doubt. And the fact
Speaker 1: is that most of the food out in the world
Speaker 1: is so bad that when you are cooking for your
Speaker 1: friends or your family or whatever, you're usually producing stuff
Speaker 1: that's much much better than what they're getting for lunch
Speaker 1: or dinner days that they're not being cooked for or
Speaker 1: not cooking themselves. So I think I'm more laid back
Speaker 1: about it. Did you originally have some of the the
Speaker 1: artisans or the artists love of the undertaking or was
Speaker 1: your view always some version of the important thing is
Speaker 1: that you're taking some kind of fresh ingredients that and
Speaker 1: cooking them. Well, I think at the beginning, I really
Speaker 1: like I still really like steep learning curves. So at
Speaker 1: the beginning I knew nothing. So I could make a
Speaker 1: boiled lobster or or some French fries or a whitebread
Speaker 1: of the kind that I wouldn't even consider eating, let
Speaker 1: alone making now and be ecstatic yes at the craft
Speaker 1: of doing it. Yes, but I kind of know the
Speaker 1: craft now. I mean I'm not. And you've also done
Speaker 1: a lot to teach people some basic techniques. I mean,
Speaker 1: to me, that was the most transformative aspect of your
Speaker 1: whole approach. And that's how I think had a huge
Speaker 1: influence on many other food writers and on many other cookbooks.
Speaker 1: And forgive me if I'm wrong, but I think you
Speaker 1: might have been the first person to sort of present
Speaker 1: it to the reader in that way. You know, learn
Speaker 1: this suite of techniques, which isn't actually that enormous. It'll
Speaker 1: take you a long time to get good at them.
Speaker 1: But if you get competent in these suite of techniques,
Speaker 1: you can kind of cook. Yeah, I can think of
Speaker 1: people who did that before me, but you know, I
Speaker 1: was the first person to do it after a while
Speaker 1: of no one having done it, So fair enough, that's
Speaker 1: good enough. It feels that way, and I was adamant
Speaker 1: about doing it that way, and all my books look
Speaker 1: like that, and so it's my style. And I'm happy
Speaker 1: about that last question. And I'm really grateful for your time.
Speaker 1: When you think about, you know, what an addition of
Speaker 1: how to cook everything would look like if you did
Speaker 1: it again in ten years or even twenty, how do
Speaker 1: you imagine it evolving in the future. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: if you there have been three editions of Had Everything,
Speaker 1: the first yellow one and then a red one, and
Speaker 1: then the second pale or yellow one. And a lot
Speaker 1: of the changes are cosmetic. That is, people wanted photographs
Speaker 1: from the beginning, so now we have photographs, and we
Speaker 1: have more charts, and we have more graphics. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a more interesting book all around. But the biggest
Speaker 1: change is that there's less meat and more plants. And
Speaker 1: I think that in ten years there'll be less meat
Speaker 1: still and more plants still. And I think in twenty
Speaker 1: years the same. I think that I think the world
Speaker 1: will follow you. It won't just be your movement there.
Speaker 1: I'm following. I'm not setting trends. I'm following trends or
Speaker 1: I'm seeing trends. I don't. This is not me. I mean,
Speaker 1: of course, there's there's a given take, right, there's a
Speaker 1: boomerang effect or whatever. But I think I'm representing what's happening.
Speaker 1: I speak to crowds all the time, and I always
Speaker 1: ask who here is eating less meat than they were
Speaker 1: ten years ago. And there's a few cantankerous people who
Speaker 1: want to prove their independence who don't raise their hands,
Speaker 1: but everybody raises their hands. Everybody's eating less meat than
Speaker 1: they were ten years ago, and that's true in every
Speaker 1: audience I go to. More than ninety percent of people
Speaker 1: raise their hands. I don't know, so I'm asking you
Speaker 1: because you might are their bigger picture of statistics supporting that,
Speaker 1: or is that like people who are buying your books
Speaker 1: and coming to listen to you. Well, I think there's
Speaker 1: very much of us speaking to the preaching to the
Speaker 1: choir aspect of this, for sure. But you know the
Speaker 1: fact that and it's a whole separate conversation about the
Speaker 1: fact that Burger King is selling a vegan burger I
Speaker 1: think I think speaks to that too. I think people
Speaker 1: are looking for ways around eating meat. The fact that
Speaker 1: they are readily changing through a different form of junk food,
Speaker 1: as in the impossible burger is maybe a good thing
Speaker 1: and maybe not. It's very complicated. Might be bad for them,
Speaker 1: but good for the world. Satisfy one of our central goals,
Speaker 1: but not one of the others. Right, But they could
Speaker 1: be eating falafel and be good all around in a way.
Speaker 1: It's just that no one's about their marketing falafel in
Speaker 1: that way. Well, there you go, there's your business. Opportunity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I might be working on it, except I'm not so,
Speaker 1: thank you very much. Yeah, it was fun. The conversation
Speaker 1: I had with Mark was really eye opening, at least
Speaker 1: for me, and thinking about the changes in how we
Speaker 1: interact with the whole topic of food. I think we're
Speaker 1: going to have a lot more opportunity to reflect on
Speaker 1: that in the days and weeks ahead. I'm certainly looking
Speaker 1: at what's in my refrigerator very differently than I was
Speaker 1: before the coronavirus. Not only is there a lot more
Speaker 1: of it, had to be really mindful about choosing what
Speaker 1: was going to go in there, what could be frozen,
Speaker 1: what could be preserved, what would be good, how I
Speaker 1: get fresh vegetables. And we also have to think much
Speaker 1: more seriously than usual about the supply chain of how
Speaker 1: food gets onto our tables. After all, in a world
Speaker 1: where we're all social distancing, real human beings have to
Speaker 1: be out there doing their jobs full time and taking
Speaker 1: on the corona risk just in order to get food
Speaker 1: continuing to come to us. The centrality and importance of
Speaker 1: food workers has never been clearer in my lifetime. If
Speaker 1: you're at home practicing social distancing the way most of
Speaker 1: us are advised to do. Good luck with it. I
Speaker 1: hope you're managing. I hope the food on your table
Speaker 1: is tasty. If you're out there doing your job trying
Speaker 1: to enable the rest of us to stay home and
Speaker 1: stay safe, please accept my thanks and all of our appreciation.
Speaker 1: Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our
Speaker 1: producer is Lydia gene Cott, with studio recording by Joseph
Speaker 1: Fridman and mastering by Jason Gambrell and Martin Gonzalez. Our
Speaker 1: showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by
Speaker 1: Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Godwell,
Speaker 1: Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. I also
Speaker 1: write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg dot com Backslash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original
Speaker 1: slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com Backslash Podcasts.
Speaker 1: You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman.
Speaker 1: This is Deep Background.