Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing,
Speaker 1: My chance to talk with artists, policy makers and performers,
Speaker 1: to hear their stories. What inspires their creations, what decisions
Speaker 1: change their careers, what relationships influenced their work. Eat food,
Speaker 1: mostly plants, not too much. That's a quote from my
Speaker 1: Guest Today writer Michael Pollen. Pollen is the author of
Speaker 1: seven books, including Food Rules and Eaters Manual, The Omnivore's Dilemma,
Speaker 1: and In Defense of Food. But don't call him an
Speaker 1: obsessive foodie. He's more comfortable with the classification of nature geek,
Speaker 1: whatever you call him. Pollen reshaped our relationship to what's
Speaker 1: on our dinner plate. You might think Michael Pollen was
Speaker 1: a young kid scheming how to get broccoli into his
Speaker 1: lunch room, but the food activist in him developed later.
Speaker 1: The love of writing came first. I had this idea
Speaker 1: I was going to be a college professor in teach English.
Speaker 1: And then I got there and I did a year
Speaker 1: of it, and it was really great. I mean, had
Speaker 1: a great experience. Um, But then I was getting to
Speaker 1: the hard part. I had to learn German and read
Speaker 1: the fairy queen and all this stuff I didn't want
Speaker 1: to do. And I had this wonderful journalism job this
Speaker 1: summer after my master's, So I decided I could write
Speaker 1: the kind of stuff I wanted to write as a
Speaker 1: journalist rather than as an academic. And you worked as
Speaker 1: a journalist where oh, I had a succession of jobs.
Speaker 1: I worked for a bunch of failed startups. Magazine Harper Yeah,
Speaker 1: Harper's the only one that survived. But at a certain
Speaker 1: point I had to make a judgment was I going
Speaker 1: to be a writer or an editor? And I had
Speaker 1: and I had written my first book, which is called
Speaker 1: Second Nature, while I was moonlighting at Harper's. I was
Speaker 1: doing it evenings and weekends. But then I had a kid,
Speaker 1: and you lose your your ability to use your weekends
Speaker 1: and nights that way. So at that point I was
Speaker 1: at this fork in the read Was I an editor
Speaker 1: a writer? I decided I wanted. I already had contracted
Speaker 1: for my second book. I was way behind on it.
Speaker 1: I would have owed a lot of money to star
Speaker 1: op it. So we decided let's leave town, live as
Speaker 1: cheaply as we could in rural Connecticut, and UM and
Speaker 1: I would just do be a writer and uh, um,
Speaker 1: and describe your first two books, which are not food related,
Speaker 1: were very exactly No, their their nature related. All the
Speaker 1: work is really about nature. I mean, I think my
Speaker 1: my meta subject is our engagement with the natural world.
Speaker 1: So my first but I didn't know that when I
Speaker 1: started off. My first book was about gardening. Um. In
Speaker 1: graduate school, I had studied Emerson and Threaux, and I
Speaker 1: was very I was completely invested in these American was
Speaker 1: beautiful American ideas about nature as divine and you know,
Speaker 1: God's second book with the Landscape and the wilderness was
Speaker 1: this very special place. And I love those ideas and
Speaker 1: love those writers. But when you start to garden, those
Speaker 1: ideas are a disaster because they preach um, it just
Speaker 1: kind of everybody gets along, you know, you don't don't
Speaker 1: worry about the squirrels or the woodchucks. And so I
Speaker 1: planted a garden based on those ideas, and it had
Speaker 1: no fence, and because fence and the violence of nature,
Speaker 1: greatd here. Yeah, And I was challenged. I was challenged
Speaker 1: by woodchucks, and I got into a war with one
Speaker 1: woodchuck in particular that I'm not very proud of how
Speaker 1: I conducted UM and this this woodchuck. I would plant
Speaker 1: the garden one weekend, he would come along and mow
Speaker 1: it down. The next weekend, I would do it again.
Speaker 1: And UM, I realized that all the kind of intellectual
Speaker 1: armaments I had were not adequate to dealing with this problem.
Speaker 1: And I started doing some things that I'm really not
Speaker 1: proud of. So, for example, UM, I I read up
Speaker 1: on the woodchuck. That was my normal approach, and I said, Okay,
Speaker 1: he's gonna have a burrow and the borrow is gonna
Speaker 1: have all these different rooms and they love. They're really
Speaker 1: clean freaks woodchucks. You wouldn't know. They look kind of sloppy,
Speaker 1: but they're clean freaks. So the first thing I did
Speaker 1: was I poured some like creosote and molasses down his hole.
Speaker 1: I found the borrow, thinking he would be grossed out,
Speaker 1: would move on. He wasn't. Um I he came back.
Speaker 1: He just made a new burrow and I went around it,
Speaker 1: and then I stuffed it with rocks and soil, thinking
Speaker 1: I would, you know, suffocate them, but they always have
Speaker 1: a back door. And I finally, UM, condominium developer should
Speaker 1: hire you clear out there and control department you're like
Speaker 1: a New York landlord. Yeah, or Donald Trump, I can
Speaker 1: get rid of those old ladies and standing the way
Speaker 1: of his parking lot. And I burrowed to the other side. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then I got this idea. I was driving along
Speaker 1: the road and I saw some roadkill, a dead woodchuck flattened,
Speaker 1: and I actually like scooped it onto a piece of cardboard,
Speaker 1: drove it home, stuffed it in the hole, thinking I
Speaker 1: would intimidate him. Basically, it didn't work, so ultimately I
Speaker 1: was reduced to doing something that I am a little
Speaker 1: bit ashamed of as someone who's thought of as an
Speaker 1: environmental writer. I I poured a gallon of gasoline down
Speaker 1: his um, down his burrow, thinking that it would fan
Speaker 1: out through all the little rooms, the latrine room, the
Speaker 1: food room, the kitchen, and I threw matt each in
Speaker 1: there and uh and in my in my mind, the
Speaker 1: fire was gonna like go way down the You know,
Speaker 1: I'd seen this image Crower basic. Well, actually it was
Speaker 1: modeled on There was a news item about a new
Speaker 1: fuel they developed for jet airliners that would be slower
Speaker 1: to combust, and they set up an old seven oh
Speaker 1: seven on an airfield somewhere and they put a camera
Speaker 1: in it and they lit a fire and to see
Speaker 1: if this would give people time to get out of
Speaker 1: the plane. But didn't work at all, and you just
Speaker 1: saw this image of the fire just shooting down the fuselage.
Speaker 1: And that was exactly what I wanted to happen. But
Speaker 1: as uh as you know, I'm an English major, not
Speaker 1: a physics major, and a physics major would have known
Speaker 1: that fire is never going to go away from oxygen.
Speaker 1: It's always gonna go tord oxygen. So the fire came
Speaker 1: the wrong way and there was this torrent of flame
Speaker 1: that just kind of threw me back and shocked me
Speaker 1: into an awareness that this is probably not the best
Speaker 1: way to deal with the natural world. You can literally
Speaker 1: hear the Woodchuck laughing inside the bar. It was. They
Speaker 1: had a lot of caddy check in this, It really was.
Speaker 1: It was. It was embarrassing, um, but it was. It
Speaker 1: was that. Well, what I learned is that I get
Speaker 1: to ask you that question, what did you learn, Michael
Speaker 1: pol these misadventures with the Woodchuck? I learned that Emerson
Speaker 1: and Threaw really didn't have very good guidance to us
Speaker 1: on doing things like farming, like gardening, like engaging with
Speaker 1: nature when we have no choice but to intervene. They
Speaker 1: were very good for lot, Yeah, exactly, and so that
Speaker 1: you need another ethic in order to figure out how
Speaker 1: to deal with Look, as Americans, we've been very good
Speaker 1: at creating wilderness. We invented the wilderness, and we locked
Speaker 1: up and threw away the key to about eight percent
Speaker 1: of the American land masks. Really impressive accomplishment. Probably our
Speaker 1: greatest contribution of world culture is the wilderness park. The
Speaker 1: rest of the world is like wilderness. You know. It
Speaker 1: was considered ugly in Europe and uh, you know the
Speaker 1: warts of nature, you know, and they hated it. Um.
Speaker 1: But we didn't have an ethic for dealing with the
Speaker 1: other which is why we made such a mess of it.
Speaker 1: The wilderness ethic is silent about agriculture. It's silent about cities,
Speaker 1: it's silent about suburbs. And so I realized that I
Speaker 1: needed to look for a new way to think about
Speaker 1: nature in these places I was drawn to like gardens
Speaker 1: and farms, and and so I began that that journey
Speaker 1: that I'm still on. And your next book was one.
Speaker 1: My next book was about architecture. It was about building.
Speaker 1: I built building on my property. It was called a
Speaker 1: place of my own was a complete bomb um because
Speaker 1: the building was The building is fantastic. The book it
Speaker 1: just I made a few mistakes with the book, but
Speaker 1: it too was about nature, I realized. And it's in
Speaker 1: your second book that you really figure out what you're
Speaker 1: about as a writer. And I think all writers have
Speaker 1: a set of kind of final questions that if you
Speaker 1: scratch deep enough, you will see that everything Michael Lewis
Speaker 1: writes is about success. You know, whether he's writing about
Speaker 1: sports or Wall Street, that's fundamentally the question that he's
Speaker 1: interested in. And you can go through any numbers and
Speaker 1: find what that question. Is it about money? Is it
Speaker 1: about love? And I realized writing the book about architecture,
Speaker 1: which I thought was a departure from nature Um, what
Speaker 1: I was drawn to was the nature issues in architecture. So,
Speaker 1: for example, does nature tell us how to build in
Speaker 1: any way? Does it have any useful information or is
Speaker 1: it a pure confection of culture? Did you conclude that
Speaker 1: it did happen? Yeah, And at the time, architecture was
Speaker 1: going down this incredibly theoretical path where it was all language.
Speaker 1: This is the moment of Peter Eisenman and Robert Venturi
Speaker 1: and and deconstruction. And it was completely out there and
Speaker 1: there were no rules. You can do whatever you wanted.
Speaker 1: But in fact there are rules. I mean they're based
Speaker 1: on our bodies. What makes our bodies feel good in
Speaker 1: a certain kind of space. Um, not to mention the
Speaker 1: nature of materials and trees and and uh So I
Speaker 1: kind of like realized, Oh, I guess that's my topic.
Speaker 1: Is that what you learned from writing the book was
Speaker 1: to get what you want to be writing. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I went back to plants in the next book. I
Speaker 1: wrote a book called The Botany Desire, which was kind
Speaker 1: of a d dive into our relationship with four domesticated
Speaker 1: species um, each of which got ahead in life by
Speaker 1: gratifying human desires. So there's an apple, which gratifies our
Speaker 1: desire for sweetness, profound desire. There's tulips gratifies our desire
Speaker 1: for beauty. Cannabis gratifies our desire to change our consciousness.
Speaker 1: You know, your next book is is it about drugs?
Speaker 1: It's about psychedelic experience. Okay, we're gonna we're getting back there.
Speaker 1: So so Botany of desire to talk to about cannabis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that was my That's where I started looking at
Speaker 1: that really interesting question is why is the species? Do
Speaker 1: we want to change our consciousness? I mean, it's not adaptive, right,
Speaker 1: it puts you at all sorts of risk. But we
Speaker 1: have this desire and in fact, many animals have it too,
Speaker 1: which is kind of a mystery which which animals have
Speaker 1: a desire to Elephants love to get drunk, and you
Speaker 1: can imagine how much it takes. Um, how do they
Speaker 1: get drunk? Well, they'll accidentally, you know, there's a few ways.
Speaker 1: I mean in nature, when fruit rots, it ferments, and
Speaker 1: so if you find a split coconut and it just
Speaker 1: sits there for a while, it's got alcohol in it,
Speaker 1: and they'll they love that. But in India they're they're
Speaker 1: also all these wonderful reports of them. Um, someone will
Speaker 1: have a still or you know, and they'll just knock
Speaker 1: it over and take whatever. Yeah, and there are many
Speaker 1: animals and I don't know if you have cats, but
Speaker 1: if you've ever given it, I mean it was my
Speaker 1: cat's problem with cat neep. Actually that sensitized me to this.
Speaker 1: I had a cat that and I grew catin up
Speaker 1: for him, and he came down to the garden every
Speaker 1: evening when I was this is in Connecticut, when I
Speaker 1: was harvesting somebody for dinner, and what he wanted was
Speaker 1: ahead of his cat neet. But every night I had
Speaker 1: to show him where it was. He forgot where it
Speaker 1: was every single night because he would get so screwed
Speaker 1: up on it and was wasted. He was wasted and that.
Speaker 1: But I realized it was a very interesting strategy on
Speaker 1: the part of the plant because these are defense chemicals,
Speaker 1: and rather than kill him outright, which would have led
Speaker 1: to the evolution of resistance to their toxin, they just
Speaker 1: confused them so they can't find the plan the next day.
Speaker 1: In Cooked, which I watched a couple episodes of Your Costar,
Speaker 1: in the first half, as a lizard in the ground
Speaker 1: in the Western Australian outback, a huge, ugly, damn lizard
Speaker 1: is being cooked by these people who seem to enjoy
Speaker 1: it actually and uh and that opening is incredible, the
Speaker 1: fire break they do. And then a pig is the
Speaker 1: coaster of the second half. But you go to a
Speaker 1: factory farm and you you touch on the conditions there,
Speaker 1: so you're saying to people, eat pig and eat meat
Speaker 1: if it's raised the right way. If it's a saying,
Speaker 1: if you're gonna eat meat, you owe it to yourself
Speaker 1: and you owe it to the animals to take a
Speaker 1: look at the process and that if you can't own that,
Speaker 1: the fact that an animal has to die for you
Speaker 1: to eat meat, something a lot of us don't think about,
Speaker 1: and in some senses live the way they live. And
Speaker 1: then and then it's even worse. I mean, there are
Speaker 1: different ways that an animal can live, obviously, and I
Speaker 1: think that makes a profound difference, at least to me
Speaker 1: and my own eating decisions. Um, So we wanted to
Speaker 1: kind of like remind people that it's very consequential act
Speaker 1: when you eat meat. And the wonder of the modern
Speaker 1: food chain, the industrialized food chain, is that the process
Speaker 1: is completely hidden from us. You know, these these meat
Speaker 1: shows up at shrink wrapped, it's it's they don't even
Speaker 1: leave bones in it anymore. It's just protoplasm. You know,
Speaker 1: I could have come from anywhere. Kids don't realize that
Speaker 1: when they need a chicken nugget. And I know this
Speaker 1: from my own kid. He hadn't made the connection between
Speaker 1: a chicken nugget and chicken. And I think the film
Speaker 1: opens the way it does. Alex give me who's the
Speaker 1: director of that episode and oversaw the whole thing. I
Speaker 1: really wanted to reconnect with the fundamentals of eating meat
Speaker 1: and it's not always a pretty thing. And and I
Speaker 1: think it was a way to say right off the bat,
Speaker 1: this is not food porn um. You're gonna see some
Speaker 1: things that are not appetizing in this film as well
Speaker 1: as some things that are incredibly appetizing. And over the
Speaker 1: course of that one hour, you go from perhaps some
Speaker 1: feeling of disgust. There's that young woman who eats the
Speaker 1: pork is amazing moments. Yeah, I'm thinking to myself, you
Speaker 1: must have very incredible powers for the vegetarian woke in
Speaker 1: house and go I'll have some pick. How the hell
Speaker 1: did that happened? Good barbecue is really temptation. It's a
Speaker 1: powerful temptation. The smell of it, the uh and I
Speaker 1: was you know, that was not a setup. We had
Speaker 1: no idea she was. We had it. We had made
Speaker 1: vegetarian sides because I knew any group now you have
Speaker 1: in California with twenty people, you're gonna have four or
Speaker 1: five vegetarians, and but she was like really curious about it,
Speaker 1: but we didn't twist her arm. There's some vegetarians online
Speaker 1: are very upset about that scene. I've been getting some
Speaker 1: grief that you know, we forced her into it or something.
Speaker 1: But if you watch it, you can sell and and
Speaker 1: the play of emotions over her face is just priceless. Um,
Speaker 1: and she did. She was kind of I mean, great
Speaker 1: barbecue is pretty sure had that wonderful look that kind
Speaker 1: of I hate to admit it, but this is really good. Now.
Speaker 1: One of the most interesting parts of the films when
Speaker 1: you get into the second program and you talk about
Speaker 1: food service. At one point, when you're talking about the
Speaker 1: evolution of food service in this country, you basically have
Speaker 1: somebody say, the guy who's selling you your gas now
Speaker 1: is selling you your food. He's flinging a pizza at you,
Speaker 1: throw a window or whatever, sacks and so forth, and
Speaker 1: you make this incredibly compelling statement about how, you know,
Speaker 1: we just where is this stuff coming from. When you
Speaker 1: talk about the cost of protest going up, and you
Speaker 1: talk about the amount of time down to down to
Speaker 1: twenty seven minutes using to prepare food, do you think
Speaker 1: that there's an answer for this in American society. Well,
Speaker 1: I do. I'm an optimist, and you know, I would
Speaker 1: love nothing more than to see a renaissance of home cooking.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, sometimes societies try things and they
Speaker 1: realize they don't work out. We've tried this industrial food
Speaker 1: system now for you know, a generation basically, and we're
Speaker 1: seeing what it does to us. I mean, we have,
Speaker 1: you know, epidemic chronic diseases UM. You know, type two
Speaker 1: diabetes is going to affect a third of people born
Speaker 1: in the last ten years. A third. We're spending most
Speaker 1: of our health care money on UM treating chronic diseases
Speaker 1: linked to diet totally preventable. The Aborigines in the first
Speaker 1: episode talking about how until sugar was in tradition that
Speaker 1: they weren't fat people. That's right. So it's had a
Speaker 1: profound effect on us. And I sometimes think, and this
Speaker 1: isn't this is kind of an overblown analogy. But you know,
Speaker 1: when crack came into the ghettos, it was like a
Speaker 1: huge issue, big problems, and but at a certain point
Speaker 1: communities turned against it and they realized that this is
Speaker 1: really not working for us, this is destroying our communities.
Speaker 1: I think we are having We're not at quite at
Speaker 1: that stage yet, but we're having a moment of recognition
Speaker 1: that the way we're eating is causing more problems than
Speaker 1: it is giving us solutions. And it is giving us solutions.
Speaker 1: It's it's freeing us from the labor of cooking. If
Speaker 1: we don't want to cook, we don't have to anymore.
Speaker 1: But when you turn over your your meal preparation to
Speaker 1: large industrial corporations, we see what they do. They create
Speaker 1: feed lots, you know, these brutal landscapes where animals now
Speaker 1: live and they're fit. You know, they're giving hormones and
Speaker 1: they're given antibiotics. Uh. They create these monocultures or corn
Speaker 1: and soybeans that have taken over the Midwest. UM. And
Speaker 1: you know, agriculture now is um the second biggest contributor
Speaker 1: to climate change. It's a third of greenhouse gases somewhere between.
Speaker 1: Greenhouse gases come from agriculture. UM. And that's particularly weird
Speaker 1: because you have to remember, at the base of the
Speaker 1: food chain is a plant doing photosynthesis, Okay, the ultimate
Speaker 1: in sustainable production, right, turning sunlight into sugars into food.
Speaker 1: So food, the food system doesn't have to be a
Speaker 1: contributor to climate change. It could be the opposite. But
Speaker 1: we've were essentially eating fossil fuel. Now it's interesting you
Speaker 1: say that because a friend of mine said to me,
Speaker 1: he said, oh wow, wonderful for you that you own
Speaker 1: acreage on Long Island where you live, because we're all
Speaker 1: going to be growing our own food in there's fifteen
Speaker 1: or twenty years because of because of drought driven by
Speaker 1: global warming. Like where Yeah, No, this is I mean,
Speaker 1: when we say that the food system is unsustainable, we're
Speaker 1: not just saying we have an esthetic objection to it.
Speaker 1: We're saying that their problems with it that are going
Speaker 1: to lead to a breakdown. And we don't know exactly
Speaker 1: where the breakdown will come. It could be, you know,
Speaker 1: shortage of fossil fuel, because that's really what runs it all.
Speaker 1: The fertilizer is made from fossil fuel. That transportation, the processing. UM.
Speaker 1: We now, just to give you an idea, UM, we
Speaker 1: used to generate for every calorie of fossil fuel energy
Speaker 1: we put into the food system, we got back two
Speaker 1: point three calories of food. Okay, that was a net gain,
Speaker 1: and that was the sun that was solar energy. Now,
Speaker 1: we put in ten calories of fossil fuel energy to
Speaker 1: get one calorie of food, So we're losing nine calories
Speaker 1: of fossil fuel energy for every calory we get. And
Speaker 1: that's meat production behind large. So it might break down there,
Speaker 1: or it may break down because we can't afford the
Speaker 1: healthcare effects or the climate change effects. I don't know
Speaker 1: where that breakdown happens, but yeah, it's it's on a
Speaker 1: it's on a really dangerous trajectory. And there was so
Speaker 1: much locally grown stuff from Riverhead. I'm just going to
Speaker 1: talk about the area that I live in from Riverhead,
Speaker 1: Up Island, west of uh, the Hampton's as people called,
Speaker 1: I hate that phrase. But and then there's some local
Speaker 1: agriculture on the east end where I live, and yet
Speaker 1: everything there that's grown locally has higher right costs. And
Speaker 1: for the that what it is. When I grew up
Speaker 1: on Long Island, we would drive out there and they
Speaker 1: were all farms. You know, there were potato farm Long
Speaker 1: Island potatoes were famous from there, and UH and there
Speaker 1: was you know, my grandfather was in the produce business
Speaker 1: on Long Island and he was buying produced from all
Speaker 1: the local farmers but then he began buying their land
Speaker 1: and turning it into shopping centers and things like that,
Speaker 1: and so you have this translation process as and real
Speaker 1: estate costs do drive what happens to what happens to
Speaker 1: land and some of the prices. The fact that high quality,
Speaker 1: local organic produce the demand is huge. People are learning
Speaker 1: that it makes a difference how something has grown, and
Speaker 1: that that you know, hasty vegetables or are an amazing thing,
Speaker 1: but you know they don't take as much work to cook.
Speaker 1: But you notice, probably as I do, that that the
Speaker 1: best meals I ever had is like to go to
Speaker 1: a an Ecuadorian rice and beans placed upon eighty nine
Speaker 1: and Amsterdam World taxi drivers eat well, that's peasant cuisine.
Speaker 1: And peasant cuisine is inexpensive, democratic and wonderful. But it's
Speaker 1: being destroyed and it's being intentionally destroyed. And there's a
Speaker 1: scene in the second episode, the Water episode where they
Speaker 1: go and I thought this was amazing journalism on the
Speaker 1: part of the filmmaker Caroline Suit produced that one um
Speaker 1: where they go to the Nestly factory where they are
Speaker 1: trying to figure out how to sell the Indians who India,
Speaker 1: Indians who have this amazing food culture and and and
Speaker 1: cling to it. And I mean, I know, I have
Speaker 1: Indian students and they still grind spices every day fresh
Speaker 1: and they bring tiffins with their lunch and they won't
Speaker 1: eat our crap. You know, they're just they're gonna stick
Speaker 1: to their Indian food. Um. But they were trying to
Speaker 1: figure out how how to give the Tandori flavor to
Speaker 1: Maggie noodles, those you know, poor walls noodles and um.
Speaker 1: And they had all these chefs and they're trying to
Speaker 1: duplicate this flavor. And they are systematically taking apart those
Speaker 1: cuisines and turning them into flavoring. Do you think it's responsible?
Speaker 1: How do governments decide or do they legislate even to
Speaker 1: make processed food that are easy to cook and feed
Speaker 1: people a lot of calories more available because the quickest
Speaker 1: road to political instability is hunger and high food prices.
Speaker 1: We've seen that revolution, I mean beginning with the French
Speaker 1: Revolution and the the Arab Spring was about high wheet.
Speaker 1: That what's coming on in any of they just want
Speaker 1: to feed people, Uh. In India. In India, there there's this,
Speaker 1: there's several there's a cultural phenomenon too, I mean, which
Speaker 1: is that the prestige of Western food, the prestige of
Speaker 1: American junk food. It's sexy, yeah, any doubt. And you
Speaker 1: and you're entering the middle class, you start eating meat
Speaker 1: like an American, you start eating KFC like an American,
Speaker 1: and this idea which and that's marketing, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's really good marketing, and that that that this stuff,
Speaker 1: which is so inferior to what they have, is the
Speaker 1: glamorous food, and that's part of it. But also the
Speaker 1: fact that cooking takes work, and there are other ways
Speaker 1: to spend our time. And if you offer to do
Speaker 1: the work for somebody and you've got something you just
Speaker 1: have to pour water on and it's acceptable. Some people
Speaker 1: will go along with it. I hope the Indians don't
Speaker 1: fall for the Maggie noodle ploy. And if there's any
Speaker 1: culture that won't, it's that one. More on what Michael
Speaker 1: Pollen thinks about the future of food coming up explore
Speaker 1: the Here's the Thing archives, where I ask Amy Schumer,
Speaker 1: is she a foodie? You're not. I love food, but
Speaker 1: I don't know about it. Take a listen at Here's
Speaker 1: the Thing dot org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're
Speaker 1: listening to here's the thing. In two thousand twelve, former
Speaker 1: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg introduced a proposal to
Speaker 1: limit the sales of sugary drinks larger than sixteen ounces.
Speaker 1: The proposal, which the soft drink industry fought hard against,
Speaker 1: was finally killed by the New York State Court of
Speaker 1: Appeals two years later. My Guest Today writer Michael Pollen
Speaker 1: paid close attention to the case. Bloomberg had the right idea.
Speaker 1: It was very interesting to watch what happened to him, um,
Speaker 1: and how badly he got beaten up for this. I mean,
Speaker 1: he wasn't taken away anyone soda. He was basically saying,
Speaker 1: just to have a pause between that sixteen ounce soda
Speaker 1: and the next sixteen ounces. I just think, do you
Speaker 1: want to do that? That's all. It's a It's what
Speaker 1: the social scientists called a nudge, right, which is which
Speaker 1: is the least um interfering kind of social engineering you
Speaker 1: could possibly have. Right, It's like do you opt into
Speaker 1: organ donation or opt out of organ donation? Okay, these
Speaker 1: are all called nudges. And so this was merely a nudge.
Speaker 1: And it was like people's freedom was being taken away
Speaker 1: from them. I think there are a couple of problems
Speaker 1: with what he did. I think he made one tactical mistake,
Speaker 1: which is he should have talked about children, because the
Speaker 1: nanny culture, which is really the argument used you know,
Speaker 1: you're the government shouldn't be a nanny, doesn't apply to kids.
Speaker 1: Kids can't make their own personal responsibility is meaningless when
Speaker 1: you're talking to kids. Adults have to make decisions for them,
Speaker 1: whether it's parents or other people in the community. And
Speaker 1: so had he made this about protecting children, I think
Speaker 1: he would not have gotten as much grief that was.
Speaker 1: I think that was a mistake, but it was very
Speaker 1: interesting to see how we put up with social engineering.
Speaker 1: Every time we walk into the supermarket. I mean, we
Speaker 1: are being manipulated in ten ways till Sunday. I mean
Speaker 1: when you walk down from the beats of the music
Speaker 1: that they play, to the high of the oatmeal as
Speaker 1: opposed to the lucky charms, to where the milk is
Speaker 1: all that stuff? Now, um, are you diet couch? Do
Speaker 1: you weigh yourself? Have you ever been heavier than you
Speaker 1: wanted to be? And as a result of what like,
Speaker 1: what did you eat? In my twenties, I worked in
Speaker 1: New York, worked for a magazine, and every day for lunch,
Speaker 1: I had a cheeseburger, French fries, and a beer, which
Speaker 1: seemed totally you have it at the same place was
Speaker 1: a fabulous cheeseburger Charlie Os or someplace in Times Square
Speaker 1: where it was just near my office, and my friend
Speaker 1: Michael Schwartz and I would go out there and and
Speaker 1: ask what we would have, and we thought that was
Speaker 1: totally normal. And I weighed about I don't know, thirty
Speaker 1: or forty more pounds than I do now. I you know,
Speaker 1: I was sensitized to food relatively late in life, and
Speaker 1: now I don't count calories. I seldom weigh myself, and
Speaker 1: I eat whatever I want to eat, but merely what
Speaker 1: you want. Yeah, what I want to eat, what gives
Speaker 1: me pleasure. I mean, my journalism is made certain things
Speaker 1: very hard to eat. I mean I've been on those
Speaker 1: feed lots and in those hot confinement operations and and
Speaker 1: industrially produced feed lot and meat. I just this no
Speaker 1: appeal at all, and I will avoid it. I mean,
Speaker 1: if if if I go to your house and you
Speaker 1: serve me some feed lot steak. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: make a scene, but I haven't had beef since nineteen
Speaker 1: nine two. I haven't had pork since nine two, and
Speaker 1: I don't miss either one of them. So why did
Speaker 1: you stop beating meat and two? Uh? Well, the truth
Speaker 1: is is that initially I did it to seduce my
Speaker 1: former wife. She told me she was a vegetarian. I said,
Speaker 1: oh my god, so am I. I took me to
Speaker 1: a restaurant. I said, I'll have the roasted squash. Oh
Speaker 1: this is great. I'll make it too keen wash salad.
Speaker 1: But then she saw a couple in and out burger
Speaker 1: rappers stuffed under the seat of my car a few times,
Speaker 1: and she said, we know, why are you lying to me?
Speaker 1: Why don't you? And then Peter, I have no appetite
Speaker 1: for I just especially when you say to me the
Speaker 1: culture of deception you're involved in, Like now, the beef
Speaker 1: industry has beef blend. So every hamburger you eat in
Speaker 1: a fast restaurant is they're like, okay, there's seven stocks,
Speaker 1: and which one of us caused the go ahead? Animals
Speaker 1: represented in the average burger unbelievable, believe. But once I
Speaker 1: realized that that's they're going to go to those links
Speaker 1: to hide something. I said, well, I always tell people,
Speaker 1: I say you liked meat, to go get yourself a
Speaker 1: really nice piece of stick, pay the money for really
Speaker 1: quality and you know where I've kind I went through
Speaker 1: that whole exercise too, and learning a lot about what
Speaker 1: was going on with their meat eating. I was doing
Speaker 1: all this reporting on the industry and and also philosophically
Speaker 1: went through this thought process which I wrote about in
Speaker 1: The Omnivorous Dilemma. But I came out in a surprising place,
Speaker 1: which was eating meat in a very limited way because
Speaker 1: there was a kind of agriculture I wanted to support, basically,
Speaker 1: which was grass fed beef production, which I think environmentally
Speaker 1: can be really beneficial. And and also the presence of
Speaker 1: animals on farms. The most sustainable farms I've seen, and
Speaker 1: I've been looking for great sustainable farms for the last
Speaker 1: fifteen years, have both plants and animals working together, as
Speaker 1: you find in nature always um and the plants feed
Speaker 1: the animals, and the animals with their waist feed the plants,
Speaker 1: and that nutrient loop is like essential to nature's um
Speaker 1: uh successful operations. And so there's a handful of farmers
Speaker 1: doing this really well in the country right now, and
Speaker 1: I want to support their work. And these animals also
Speaker 1: get to live, um, you know, a very good life
Speaker 1: in keeping with their creature, really character. They get to
Speaker 1: have the behaviors that they want and the diet that
Speaker 1: they should have. And as the farmers say, they have
Speaker 1: one bad day and um, and of course that's the
Speaker 1: day of their slaughter. And UM. I'm just very comfortable
Speaker 1: supporting that. It's hard to find that meat. It's expensive
Speaker 1: and and if you limit yourself to that meat, you
Speaker 1: will only have meat like once a week. And that's
Speaker 1: about what. But the guy on the on the water
Speaker 1: episode w says, have the cake and the cookies in
Speaker 1: the ice cream, as long as you make it all yourself,
Speaker 1: make it all yourself. When you when I watched the show,
Speaker 1: I uh, beyond the croc that you have there, that
Speaker 1: was your mother's croc that you cooked in that pot. Um,
Speaker 1: you do get the sense you miss home a little bit,
Speaker 1: is that there's a boy in you that had a
Speaker 1: want was your Your mother was adored by all New
Speaker 1: Yorker was obviously because of her column for many many years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and she was a great, responsive, responsible. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: she fed us really well, and she she made a
Speaker 1: home cooked meal, I would say, four nights a week,
Speaker 1: and uh, we got to have a TV dinner on
Speaker 1: Saturdays when they went out, which was a great treat.
Speaker 1: And Sunday we'd have order in something but um, often
Speaker 1: Chinese food. And yeah, she would make beautiful meals. She
Speaker 1: she loved Julia Child and was learning from Julie Child,
Speaker 1: so she would actually like we would get to have
Speaker 1: booth Burgan on Tuesday night because she was trying it
Speaker 1: out and see if she could make it. So we
Speaker 1: were very fortunate. She's still a great cook. Um. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's some of my love of food definitely
Speaker 1: comes from that and the memories of the table, you know, um,
Speaker 1: being with my sisters and my mom. My father, oddly enough,
Speaker 1: usually wasn't at dinner because he had this long commute
Speaker 1: from Manhattan, and so he would get there and have
Speaker 1: leftovers a little bit later. I know, it's a shame
Speaker 1: he had like a two hour commute, but amazing things
Speaker 1: happened at the table. And you know, as you give
Speaker 1: up cooking, you give up eating together, and when when
Speaker 1: you start going to the microwavable meal. Everybody gets their own,
Speaker 1: and there's something about eating from the same pot that
Speaker 1: puts people on the same page psychologically, I think, And
Speaker 1: we give that up and increasingly we're eating alone. We're
Speaker 1: eating in the car of American food gets eaten in
Speaker 1: the car right now, Um, we eat alone way too
Speaker 1: often and so we're losing. It's not just about the food.
Speaker 1: I mean, food is important, but there are the institutions
Speaker 1: that come with it. Now, your son is viewed in
Speaker 1: the film in the second episode doing his little contribution.
Speaker 1: Does he does he still enjoy food and people the camera? No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: they're you know, that was taken when he was fourteen.
Speaker 1: Actually he's now twenty three, so that footage is old
Speaker 1: and you actually see him again in the fourth episode
Speaker 1: in his full he's a big hairy guy. Now. It's funny.
Speaker 1: He had a very complex history with food, which is
Speaker 1: that he really couldn't need it. For about eight years.
Speaker 1: He was one of those really picky eaters only eight
Speaker 1: white food drove us absolutely crazy. It was very hard
Speaker 1: to feed and we were actually happy if he would
Speaker 1: eat a McDonald's meal because at least he was getting
Speaker 1: some protet because he was one of these kids. It
Speaker 1: was noodles rice. Um, no, no, that would be mixing food, macaroni.
Speaker 1: He was a purist. He was a purist, hated sauces,
Speaker 1: would never put butter on noodles. When we went traveling,
Speaker 1: we would bring his brand to pasta with us to
Speaker 1: like a resort, and we'd say, would you make a
Speaker 1: ball of this? And he and they would cook up
Speaker 1: his barilla pasta, his noodles the shape that he liked
Speaker 1: at the moment, and he would take one bite and
Speaker 1: he said, this tastes different. Of course, the water was
Speaker 1: different and he could taste it, and so he just
Speaker 1: he just said, this is horrible. So he started bringing
Speaker 1: the water from home. We didn't go that fard. What
Speaker 1: does he do now? He works for an architect he's
Speaker 1: he's a junior designer and an architecture firm in Brooklyn.
Speaker 1: But in in high school he went to work in
Speaker 1: a restaurant and he did prep cooking at a really
Speaker 1: good restaurant near us, and um, he learned to eat
Speaker 1: there and he watched how food was made. And if
Speaker 1: kids cook, they will eat what they cook. And that
Speaker 1: was a really important insight for us. If you have
Speaker 1: a kid who's really picky, get him in the kitchen,
Speaker 1: make them do something, make them make what I love,
Speaker 1: and make whatever they want, and they will eat it
Speaker 1: because the mystery of like what's hiding under that sauce?
Speaker 1: And you know, they kids think you're putting something over
Speaker 1: on them whenever you serve them food. But if they
Speaker 1: make it, they're like, oh, it's okay. It's made of this,
Speaker 1: which is normal in that, which is normal in this thing,
Speaker 1: and and maybe it's okay. And so he started eating
Speaker 1: and now he loves food. He's a great eater. He's
Speaker 1: a really great cook. Um. So, No, one of the
Speaker 1: things you touch on is the evolution of cooking in
Speaker 1: terms of feminism. The second episode talks about how you
Speaker 1: know what women are out the door doing other things?
Speaker 1: Do you feel that men and women we can find
Speaker 1: some way where we can achieve something culturally where we
Speaker 1: can both share the cooking without a doubt. That's what
Speaker 1: we have to do. That's I mean, the answer is
Speaker 1: not to get women back in the kitchen. No, and
Speaker 1: it shouldn't happen, And it's to get the whole family
Speaker 1: back in the kitchen. And uh, it's enormously important to
Speaker 1: get your kids cooking. I mean, I really think it's
Speaker 1: irresponsible parenting to to send a kid out into the
Speaker 1: world not having a clue out of roasted chicken or
Speaker 1: how to how to make a basic meal. Um, it's
Speaker 1: it's a really critical life skill for their health, for
Speaker 1: their success, you know, dating, for all these kind of things.
Speaker 1: It's it's a big deal. And we're sending kids out
Speaker 1: a whole generation and they don't have a clue, and
Speaker 1: they're totally dependent on the industry, which means they lose
Speaker 1: control of their diet and they lose control of the
Speaker 1: ability to make these decisions about what kind of food
Speaker 1: system they want to support. So I think it's very
Speaker 1: important to get everybody in the kitchen. And what happened
Speaker 1: with feminism and food A story we tell in the
Speaker 1: second episode is that the industry have been trying to
Speaker 1: insinuate itself into the American kitchen for a hundred years
Speaker 1: with processed food. Women who were doing most of the
Speaker 1: cooking were rejecting it. They just didn't feel good about
Speaker 1: having these companies cook for them. They couldn't take credit
Speaker 1: for what they made. Quality wasn't very good. Then you
Speaker 1: have this this tension that erupts when women go back
Speaker 1: to work, and in households across America, you have this
Speaker 1: argument about housework because it's not fair that women work
Speaker 1: and also do childcare and also clean and also cook.
Speaker 1: And so there was this very tense renegotiation going on,
Speaker 1: and before we could complete it, the industry steps forward
Speaker 1: and say, hey, stop arguing, we got you covered. We'll
Speaker 1: do it all. And KFC has this billboard campaign across
Speaker 1: America with an image of their big red and white
Speaker 1: bucket of chicken and two words above women's liberation, and
Speaker 1: they aligned it was it was sort of like the
Speaker 1: quote says, mother can find out what is happening in
Speaker 1: the outside world. My god, what a time counsel shot
Speaker 1: that is. But you know, the idea that liberation would
Speaker 1: disguise dependence in fact on these corporations was lost on everybody.
Speaker 1: And so so the important point though, is that that
Speaker 1: these companies let men off the hook as much as
Speaker 1: they let women off the hook because men didn't want
Speaker 1: to do any more work. And so when you had
Speaker 1: companies coming saying, don't argue, we'll do it, everybody jumped, well,
Speaker 1: what's wrong with how do you fight, they're gonna win
Speaker 1: because they're oh yes and no. I mean, we all
Speaker 1: have power. I mean one of the great things about
Speaker 1: this issue is we get three votes today, you know,
Speaker 1: and people are voting in a different way for a
Speaker 1: different kind of food system. I mean, eating is a
Speaker 1: political act. And um, those of us who can afford
Speaker 1: to buy the sustainable chicken and beef or whatever, you know,
Speaker 1: not everyone has the same vote, and that's unfortunate. And
Speaker 1: that's why voting with your fork is not We also
Speaker 1: need to vote with our votes, and we need new
Speaker 1: policies without question, um and policy change you'd like to see, well,
Speaker 1: the big policy change, I mean right now, as as
Speaker 1: the film suggests, we're we're subsidizing the least healthy calories.
Speaker 1: We subsidize the sweeteners and the soda. We subsidize the
Speaker 1: building blocks of junk food, which is corn and soy.
Speaker 1: That's what the government subsidizes. We do nothing for the
Speaker 1: people growing program with energy. We subsidized oil and we
Speaker 1: don't exactly. So we have to we have to align
Speaker 1: our agricultural policies with our health and environmental objectives. Right now,
Speaker 1: they're working across purposes. We are subsidizing the creation of
Speaker 1: sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup. At the same time,
Speaker 1: the government is also paying for dialysis for for type
Speaker 1: two diabetes. That's crazy, that's it's supporting both sides in
Speaker 1: the war on type two diabetes. UM. Obviously, you have
Speaker 1: members of your family, your your sister's husband, of the
Speaker 1: well known actor, people who suffered from diseases and have
Speaker 1: been sick with diseases. Do you wonder everyth there's a
Speaker 1: link between diet and some of these diseases that are
Speaker 1: non diabetic related diseases. I think there's a link between
Speaker 1: a lot of disease and diet. I I don't know
Speaker 1: about Parkinson's. I've never seen any research about that. UM.
Speaker 1: I think we will find that Alzheimer's is connected, that
Speaker 1: it is a disease of inflammation. Basically, there's a kind
Speaker 1: of a grand unified theory of a great many diseases
Speaker 1: that's coming to the floor, and it's built around the
Speaker 1: idea of inflammation. That we have bodies that are now inflamed.
Speaker 1: That's why we have so many more allergies, so many
Speaker 1: more autoimmune conditions. And it may turn out that Alzheimer's
Speaker 1: is another one of those inflammatory diseases. And what inflames
Speaker 1: us is a shitty diet, is a junk food diet,
Speaker 1: and we know that and we can we can see
Speaker 1: you can feed people, um, a junk food meal with
Speaker 1: lots of fat and sugar and salt, and you can
Speaker 1: check their markers for inflammation within hours and you see
Speaker 1: them spike. And many of us live in a permanently
Speaker 1: inflammed condition because of the way we're eating. So it's
Speaker 1: no wonder we're getting these diseases. But Parkinson's, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't think we know. Um. I'm a believer in
Speaker 1: the some uni unifying theory as well, which what is
Speaker 1: it that's causing Parkinson's and and autism clusters and this
Speaker 1: whole lot of things that we didn't deal with in
Speaker 1: these numbers before. And you know, we are also exposed
Speaker 1: to lots of toxins. And there are some people who
Speaker 1: think that Parkinson's is related to pesticides. Some people I know,
Speaker 1: they posit that. You know, they go over to Europe
Speaker 1: and they eat the bread and eat the pasta. They
Speaker 1: don't have the same problem. They don't have the bloating,
Speaker 1: they don't have and they commack, are they are they
Speaker 1: imagining that. Yeah, there, I'm pretty sure they're imagining it
Speaker 1: for two reasons. One, there's no G M O wheat
Speaker 1: on the market anywhere in the world. It hasn't been approved.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's been approved, but Monsanto's declined to sell
Speaker 1: it because the wheat farmers don't want it. So far
Speaker 1: to most of the wheat that you eat in Europe
Speaker 1: is grown in like North Dakota and Saskatchewan. They don't
Speaker 1: grow enough wheat. So I mean it may be that
Speaker 1: in Europe you're getting bread that's properly fermented. We talked
Speaker 1: about this in the third episode, is that we've sped
Speaker 1: up the making of bread in such a way that
Speaker 1: the gluten doesn't get broken down. So instead of having
Speaker 1: these long sour dough fermentations we I went to I
Speaker 1: I went to a wonder bread plant, and they can
Speaker 1: with thirty seven different chemicals get a loaf of bread
Speaker 1: to to do everything within four hours, you know, rise, baked, package,
Speaker 1: the whole thing, and but they're not properly fermenting it.
Speaker 1: So therefore the gluten is not breaking down, and it
Speaker 1: may be that change that is giving people a lot
Speaker 1: of trouble with gluten um, it's gluten plus something else. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it is something else. And and but they're different,
Speaker 1: I mean people, they're different. I mean there are real
Speaker 1: people with Celiac disease who are allergic to gluten in
Speaker 1: any form and shouldn't eat it. But then there's this
Speaker 1: massive people who are convinced that if they just got
Speaker 1: off gluten, you know, they would sleep better, their sex
Speaker 1: would be better, their their lives would be fine. And
Speaker 1: there's a very powerful marketing machine encouraging us to feel
Speaker 1: this way. Um. I just think that the number of
Speaker 1: gluten intolerant people um is growing so much faster than
Speaker 1: any biological change in the human species can account for.
Speaker 1: So there are some real their people struggling with it.
Speaker 1: And it may because they're inflamed it, maybe because their microbiomes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people will think that for quickest about And but we're
Speaker 1: always looking for dietary salvation in this country. We're always
Speaker 1: pointing to the evil nutrient and the blessed nutrient. And
Speaker 1: it used to be saturated fat with the evil nutrient.
Speaker 1: Now it's gluten and sugar. And there'll be another one
Speaker 1: next year. So yes or no question? Is the book
Speaker 1: Cooked and especially the show Cook, which has got a
Speaker 1: very warm tone to it. It's a very warm and
Speaker 1: very wealthy celebration, but it's a very warm, warm program.
Speaker 1: Do you think in some part that this was something
Speaker 1: you did to answer some charges of elitism against some
Speaker 1: of the work you've done. Some people have found your
Speaker 1: work rather elitist, you know, I think that we were
Speaker 1: trying to We didn't want to put a lot of
Speaker 1: chefs in this, We didn't want this to be a
Speaker 1: foodie thing. I hate the I hate the word foodie
Speaker 1: and everything that attaches to it. And that cooking is
Speaker 1: this universe, human universal people do it all over the
Speaker 1: world every different socio economic scale. But do you think
Speaker 1: do you think you bring that to the four more
Speaker 1: so in this project than any else you've done. Maybe
Speaker 1: maybe we have, Um, I mean it is you know,
Speaker 1: cooking is a very democratic activity. It's still available to
Speaker 1: all of us. We still have kitchens. They still sell
Speaker 1: houses with kitchens and rent houses with kitchens, and we
Speaker 1: have pots and pans and knives, and they still saw
Speaker 1: they still sell raw ingredients down at the supermarket along
Speaker 1: with the rotissary, chick and everything else. Um, and so
Speaker 1: it is I don't buy that. It's elitist, and um
Speaker 1: the charges sometimes made and um, any kind of concern
Speaker 1: and interest in food is is is you know, is elitist,
Speaker 1: and it's it's very interesting that companies like well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very interesting that companies like McDonald's get to occupy
Speaker 1: the populist high ground. Multinational companies are offering the democratic food.
Speaker 1: I don't buy that. So my last question for you is,
Speaker 1: what right do you have to write a book about
Speaker 1: psychedelic drugs? What possible? Well, I don't have a lot
Speaker 1: of experience with them. Actually, what's what's the curiosity for you?
Speaker 1: The curiosity for me is there's a revival of research
Speaker 1: around psychedelics, and we are learning amazing things about the
Speaker 1: brain by studying what happens to people on psilocybin, especially
Speaker 1: an LSD. To some extent, these drugs are also proving
Speaker 1: to be as they were in the fifties before this,
Speaker 1: you know, most of us are history of psychedelics begins
Speaker 1: with Timothy Leary in a way. That's the end of
Speaker 1: the first phase, which was some really serious research in
Speaker 1: the fifties, and obviously, yeah, Huxley and a group of
Speaker 1: psychiatrists who were having very good luck administering into their patients,
Speaker 1: using it to cure alcohol addiction, using it to help
Speaker 1: people die. And so I started learning about this research,
Speaker 1: which is underway now, and I wrote a long piece
Speaker 1: for The New Yorker about it, called The Trip Treatment
Speaker 1: last year, and um, and realized there was a whole
Speaker 1: world I didn't know that much about. And here I was,
Speaker 1: you know, nearing sixty and um, thinking about mortality and
Speaker 1: and here was this drug that was I saw helping
Speaker 1: people die. And I thought that was fascinating. Why was that?
Speaker 1: Why would why would this mystical experience change your complete
Speaker 1: outlook about mortality? And I saw that in many people
Speaker 1: that it did, and I saw them die in different
Speaker 1: kind of deaths, so that that kind of got me interested.
Speaker 1: And since then I've been puzzling over questions of like,
Speaker 1: why should a mushroom make a chemical that gives humans
Speaker 1: mystical experiences? That's kind of trippy Cooked, which is on Netflix. Now.
Speaker 1: What's interesting to me is You've given me a great gift, truly,
Speaker 1: because I've got little kids and I want to teach
Speaker 1: them about food by cooking food with them. I don't
Speaker 1: want to sit there and say to them, don't eat
Speaker 1: that and don't eat that, and you're not gonna you
Speaker 1: can't have that. I want to sit down and want
Speaker 1: to sit them, Well, what do you want? We're gonna
Speaker 1: make it. Whatever you want to eat. By now you
Speaker 1: can hear's how you make We're gonna make Let's do it.
Speaker 1: I can't wait. You know. Some of the sweetest moments
Speaker 1: of my time with my son when he was still
Speaker 1: at home was cooking together. And you see a little
Speaker 1: of that in that in that second episode. Um, but
Speaker 1: it was there's something about especially with a teenager. Teenagers
Speaker 1: are very hard to talk to eye to eye, all right,
Speaker 1: it gets very difficult. Um, I have a twenty year
Speaker 1: old sorm Okay, so you know, but side by side.
Speaker 1: That's why you have all your difficult conversations with your
Speaker 1: kid in the car, usually right because you're both looking
Speaker 1: their head but but chopping onions. Um. You know, working
Speaker 1: side by side, doing a project together, that's the best
Speaker 1: time to talk to your kid, and that's when they
Speaker 1: just open themselves up. I thank Michael Pollen for opening
Speaker 1: up to me. Our time was up before I got
Speaker 1: to ask him what his favorite packaged food is. I
Speaker 1: found out later cracker Jack's You can see Michael Pollin's
Speaker 1: four parts series Cooked on Netflix. I'm Alec Baldwin and
Speaker 1: you're listening to Here's the Thing. M