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Speaker 1: In your experience of being in the front line, of
Speaker 1: being with the soldiers, I'd like to ask you what
Speaker 1: they feel about eating. They do they how do they
Speaker 1: express the need for good food or food? How do
Speaker 1: they want to be fed?
Speaker 3: Well, food is comfort, obviously, but food is survival primarily.
Speaker 3: So in most military situations, no matter which military were with,
Speaker 3: the priority is hearty food that's portable, right, So if
Speaker 3: you're embedded with the American military, it'll be MRI's Meals
Speaker 3: Ready to Eat, which are those little cardboard boxes full
Speaker 3: of little pouches and you sort of add hot water
Speaker 3: and it heats up some sort of chicken casserole whatever.
Speaker 3: But each of those packs has like two thousand calories.
Speaker 3: I mean, if you only add one of those a day,
Speaker 3: you'll be totally fine. I haven't actually seen many of
Speaker 3: the militaries that I've been with recently eating things like that.
Speaker 3: It's always been in Ukraine, I see a lot of
Speaker 3: these open faced sandwich type things. So they'll do rye
Speaker 3: bread with pork fat, with a boiled egg, with salmon,
Speaker 3: with a pickle, with sausages mostly cured. The Ukrainians do
Speaker 3: a lot of preserved things, lots of pickle things, lots
Speaker 3: of condensed jammy things that they'll smear on bread. And
Speaker 3: then in the Middle East, a lot of it is
Speaker 3: sort of catches, catch can but there are moments, it's
Speaker 3: in my experience, where there will be a big delivery
Speaker 3: of something and then they'll set out a feast for
Speaker 3: the army. So I had like an amazing experience with
Speaker 3: the Kurdish Peshmerga on a mountaintop overlooking Mosul where they
Speaker 3: were in a tent and we walked in and it
Speaker 3: was laid out with just platters of rice and meat
Speaker 3: and bread and little salads and picky things, and you know,
Speaker 3: people would just rip up bread and grab a hunk
Speaker 3: of meat with the bread, and you know, amazing. But
Speaker 3: the logistics of military feeding is mind blow I mean,
Speaker 3: it's it's quite an endeavor. And you know, we never
Speaker 3: expect to be fed in any of these situations. We're
Speaker 3: always i mean, just energy bars and nuts and you know,
Speaker 3: whatever sort of bare bones calories we can keep in
Speaker 3: our bag so that at minimum we don't have to
Speaker 3: we don't have to ask to take food away from
Speaker 3: the people who need it to fight.
Speaker 1: But is that your responsibility is a producer, to make
Speaker 1: sure there's food? Sure, how do you do it?
Speaker 3: We just load up, We load up before we head out,
Speaker 3: as simple as that. And then I mean, in a
Speaker 3: place like Ukraine, there are supermarkets functioning all over the
Speaker 3: place and very beautiful, clean, well stocked gas stations, so
Speaker 3: you know, it's just a constant make sure we have it,
Speaker 3: make sure we have it, and you know, you end
Speaker 3: up doing a lot of pre eating, like I'm not hungry,
Speaker 3: but I'll eat because I never know when.
Speaker 1: My next meal comes.
Speaker 3: And then at the end of the day you're like, oh, man,
Speaker 3: I just has five giant meals because I was pre
Speaker 3: eating and then somebody served me something and you know,
Speaker 3: I overdid it.
Speaker 1: When you come home, if you've been in this situation
Speaker 1: of danger, of fear, of lack of food, Ye, isolation?
Speaker 1: Does it take an adjustment to it.
Speaker 3: Actually took me a while in my career to figure
Speaker 3: out the right way to decompress from these things. Because
Speaker 3: even in America, when I was a young producer, I
Speaker 3: was covering school shootings. And when you're young and covering
Speaker 3: school shootings like Virginia, you know, those students who were
Speaker 3: killed in Virginia Tech were two years younger than me
Speaker 3: at the time, so that that was really traumatic. And
Speaker 3: I used to go home after those trips and just
Speaker 3: crawl into bed and lie there for a couple of
Speaker 3: days and then emerge. And actually it wasn't serving me,
Speaker 3: and I was really not treating the trauma in any
Speaker 3: real way. And what I've what I've actually learned is
Speaker 3: as soon as I come out of a war zone,
Speaker 3: I like pack my life full. So as soon as
Speaker 3: I come home, I'll throw a dinner party that night
Speaker 3: or the next night, or I'll immediately book some exercise
Speaker 3: classes or spend some real time with my kids, or
Speaker 3: you know, just make a bunch of plans and dive
Speaker 3: right back in into sort of the warmth of everybody
Speaker 3: around me.
Speaker 1: Do you sleep well?
Speaker 2: I do?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean I mean, I'm lucky. I don't
Speaker 3: have to live in a war zone. I get to
Speaker 3: leave a war zone. So I think the job has
Speaker 3: given me actually a amazing amount of perspective and gratitude.
Speaker 3: So I know how lucky I am that I can
Speaker 3: sleep without a siren and have water running water in
Speaker 3: my house in a hot shower.
Speaker 1: Where would you like to go next? If you do
Speaker 1: not like to go? But is there a kind of war,
Speaker 1: the conflict conflict that is going on now that particularly
Speaker 1: treats you.
Speaker 3: I think, I mean, I'll be going back to Ukraine
Speaker 3: probably very soon. The Iran conflict is interesting. We're trying
Speaker 3: to figure out how to cover it because it's it's
Speaker 3: impossible to get there, so we're trying to figure out
Speaker 3: interesting ways to cover it. The Ebola outbreak is happening. Yeah,
Speaker 3: we have a team going. But they're very different calculations
Speaker 3: for me because I've got small children, and yeah, I
Speaker 3: really don't want to get ebola. They are six and eight,
Speaker 3: two daughters.
Speaker 1: What's the longest you've been away when you go on
Speaker 1: a trip.
Speaker 3: The longest since having children is about I think the
Speaker 3: twenty twenty two Russian invasion of Ukraine. Was the longest.
Speaker 3: I think that was about three and a half weeks,
Speaker 3: but I try to keep it to two weeks max.
Speaker 1: When you go on vacation, where do you go.
Speaker 3: I spend a lot of time in France. I love France.
Speaker 3: I go to Osgor these days. It's near Beerits just
Speaker 3: fut the Beirits, and it's amazing. It's it also has
Speaker 3: a saltwater lake in the middle of town, and so
Speaker 3: they've got oyster shacks all around it. So you go
Speaker 3: and oysters and rose and oh it's the best.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love it, and literally.
Speaker 3: Annually I spend a lot of time in Ligouria as well.
Speaker 3: I mean the sort of Mediterranean is the best place.
Speaker 1: It is not a cookbook, you know, I was thinking
Speaker 1: that or a memoir of some of these stories. Yeah,
Speaker 1: food under Fire.
Speaker 3: It's interesting because people love food and the people are
Speaker 3: endlessly curious about how other people eat. So it's you
Speaker 3: as
Speaker 1: Mhm.