Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the heart of Manhattan and Rockefeller Center, New Stan Studios, joined as usual with uh John right behind me. How are you doing, John? Doing great, thanks. Everything good?
Everything's peachy. You enjoying this uh whatever this is, this springity spring? Absolutely. Nice, all right. Also in the studio today, we have always Joe Hazen rocking the panels.
How are you doing, Joe? Hey, thanks for joining us. Uh uh not in her normal place in an undisclosed uh location, Cheney like we have Nastasia Lopez. How you doing, Sas? Good.
Good. You sound so enthused to be here. I'm so so excited for you. Yeah. Uh in what?
I said I'm happy to be back. Yeah, yeah. Uh right, because you're you're back in uh you're back in New York as of next week, right? Or New York-ish. I'm in Connecticut, yeah.
I'm in Connecticut. Yeah, yeah. All right. Uh and in California, we got Jackie Molecules. How you doing?
I'm great. Yeah. It's still raining here somehow. So let me ask you a question. Like for years, all you've wanted is rain.
And now that you have it, you what are you thinking? Now that you've found rain, what are you gonna do with it? Well, I'm a transplant. So uh that's the easiest way to spot a transplant is if you know if someone's complaining about the rain. So guilty.
Yeah, all right, okay. And up there on Vancouver Island, we have our customer service extraordinaire person. Quinn, how you doing? I am good. It's great to be introduced to three.
Oh, geez. You know what? Quinn. The entire time on like, you know, for those of you that don't know, like when we get on the on, you know, together beforehand, Quinn just starts needing me today out of nowhere, needling me about bringing the wrong questions last week. You know, I don't know what it is.
What did I do? What did I do? You know, or as my stepfather would say, Who did I kill? Who did I kill? Just let me know.
Uh and uh today's special guest will introduce as normal before we start shooting the breeze is Benjamin Lore, the author of uh the Christmas present that my wife got me this year uh for Christmas. The secret life of groceries, the dark miracle. Oh, is it dark miracle of the American supermarket or dark miracle of the supermarket writ large? American supermarket. American super it's your show.
You can read in this thing. But I don't think we should, like, you know, uh I don't it's a first of all, it's a great, it's it's a great slug line. Dark miracle. It's like was that you or your editor? Oh, that was me.
That was I that was uh, you know, it's an unpopular unpop no one wanted miracles in the title. Really too ostentatious and religious and all these bad things. Um I'm I'm so I wrote a book and I'm trying to write another book, and the slug line of that is supposed to be the miracle of moisture management. And about five people on who, you know, are fans of that title, and everyone who knows me and cares about me is like, do not call it that. You know?
Yeah. Yeah. It's like a summer summer problem, like sweat schritzing. Well, I like the word moisture. Like to me, like, you know, pe people always hate on moisture, but like a cake is supposed still a cake is supposed to be moist.
Yeah. Moist. Because maybe a cake is supposed to be vaguely gross and sexual, maybe. Like moist implies human moistness. That's why people don't like it, right?
Moist implies dampness and humidity and like crotch rot. No? Yeah, a little fungal. It's more of the fungal aspects. Yeah, yeah.
But in a cake, it's clean and good. Moisture. Moisture. Because you know what people what do people hate, John? Dry.
Dry cake. Yeah, yeah. I was just complaining about that for my breakfast this morning. You had a dry cake. Dry cake.
No, dry pastry. Very sad. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Now. Okay, okay.
And you know, Joe Hayes in here, being of part Sicilian extraction, am I correct, Joe? Yes. You must enjoy a dry pastry. Um, yeah, I don't mind a dry pastry. Yeah, we have these uh these Sephardic cookies called tartolikus that are so dry but delicious.
Yeah, I like a what I guess what it is is that if a pastry is supposed to not be dry. Yeah, and your French pastry, uh dry. What kind of pastry? Yeah, what are we talking about, John? Pin raisin, pain raisin.
Oh god. Bread with raising. Yeah, bread with raisins. There we go. Yeah.
Like a little French French pastry. It's you know, a little like pinwheel kind of thing. It's got some, I don't know, it should be a little like custardy inside, flecked with some raisins. It's delicious, yeah. Can we just say that the French do not make the best pastries?
No, it's the Austrians. Everyone knows this. Even French pastries are made better by Austrian peas. Yes. But French still excellent.
Okay. Yeah, still very good. Okay. Yeah. But not the one you had this morning.
No, no. Not also not in France. Let me let me ask you, let me ask you a question. Let me ask you a question. Was this your fault or the baker?
Was this three days ago pastry? This is like this morning that I got on my way in to here from a storefront. Was it worse than a streetcar pretzel? Because that's to me is like the highest promise and the lowest reward. Yeah, I don't know.
I it's really running on nostalgia. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Had one once with your dad, and that was that's it. Yeah, and then you have one now, and you're like, oh, the texture's bad. Everything is bad.
Yeah. It's simultaneously wet on the outside and dry in the middle. But my expectation was the pretzel, you know, is is to not be great with this. I was hoping for something very good. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Do you know uh the band King Missile? No. Oh, yeah.
Joe does. All right. So John, uh, yeah. So Joe knows King. So King Missile was famous for a couple of songs.
Yeah. They Jesus is Way Cool. Uh what was a um Detachable. This is a technical term, man. It's a song quote.
So even though it's family show, detachable penis. Classic. Classic. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Anyway, uh John Hall, I think is the name of the lead singer.
He also has a great song about cheesecake, where he starts driving a cheesecake truck and then eats all of the cheesecakes and then like basically runs away from home because he that's it, but he's still happy. He's like the utility monster. If you know about if you ever had a friend who's an economics major, the utility monster is someone who like their enjoyment stays the same regardless of how many things they consume. And so they just consume all of it, right? And he's that way with cheesecakes.
Because for me, I love cheesecake, but like, you know, two slices max. This guy eats like a whole truck of cheesecakes. It's Homer Simpson-esque. Yeah. Right.
Another utility monster. Anyway, so he is a poet, as it turns out, and he has a book. Detachable penis. Say no more. Right.
Obviously. The amazing thing about that song is that, you know, it comes off, obviously. It's detachable. And he finds it on St. Mark's Place.
This is in the 80s. And it's, you know, the people used to sell things on blankets over there, which they still do in parts of the cities, but I don't think they do it there anymore. It's like a churro in the subway. Right, right, but it's shaped kind of like a detachable penis. And what the interesting thing is is that the guy wants too much money for it, and so he bargains him down.
And I think it's amazing that you would find your own penis for sale and then bargain for it. Like, wouldn't you just pay the going rate? Maybe you've been disappointed with it your whole life. I mean, it's like uh Well, anyway. Do I really want this?
You know, I don't know how even how we got here, but I want to buy he has a book out that I don't know whether it's any good, but I'm gonna buy it for Nastasi anyway. It's called uh The Daily Negation. And it's just a poem every day about like just negating everything. Got it. Yeah.
It's like this uh contemplate your own death, like the the death clock app. Uh yeah, yeah, but not even like more apathetic than that. More just like, you know, hey, why would you expect today is gonna be different from yesterday? Like that kind of stuff. But like for every day.
It's kind of like an antidote to people's, you know, uh what would not self-help, but like uh, you know, like those daily affirmations. Yeah, yeah. It's the exact opposite. Anchor your expectations in the streetcar pretzel. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's how we got it. See, Benjamin. It's gonna only get better. You gotta come back all the time to tell me to to drop a little hint of why we were talking about something in the first place. Uh it's a good start to the show.
You can anchor expectations about me with the streetcar pretzel. Exactly. It's only gonna impress people. Uh so uh Quinn or uh or Jack, you got anything uh good from the week? Anything?
Anything food food or not? Food, food adjacent, perhaps. I uh I made this series eats bologners that was recommended to me via somebody in the Discord, and um it was as delicious as advertised. Okay, so what makes this different from any other bolognaise, or as uh those uh freaks call it? Now, in England, when they call it spag ball, do they mean bolognese, or are they talking about spaghetti and meatballs?
Because like whenever they say spag ball, I just tune, I'm just like I turn off. I can't, I can't listen. I have no idea. And anyone anyone know British people? You know British people.
What do they mean, Joe? He's married to a British. It's bolognese. All right. Do you co-sign that, Joe?
Yeah, I have no idea. Spag ball. What the hell? Uh all right. So what's different about this bolognese uh as opposed to you know, your run-of-the-mill bolognese?
Uh it was it was uh lamb, pork, beef, and then chicken livers that you kind of blend up. Um otherwise, pretty much as you'd expect. Oh, panchetta too. I'm sorry, panchetta as well. Well, you know, the chicken liver is definitely the secret.
Oh, the chicken liver, you add it to any type of bachamel like lasagna, it is phenomenal. So here's an interesting here's an interesting uh point. Um I was growing up listening to people read and talk about food. Now, obviously, there are many, many classic uh sauces. My my uh Francophone and file friend behind me will uh attest have liver in them, but it was widely taught when I was uh young that adding liver to long cooked things like soups or gibbleth gravy would make them bitter and unpalatable.
Uh and so it's glad I'm glad to see that there is a a turnaround on this, at least with poultry livers. You know what I mean? They liver comeback. Yeah, liver liver comeback. I you know, I think also like my generation is was one of the first generations to truly detest liver.
You know, like my parents' generation tolerated it, my grandparents' generation loved it. You're like at the intersection of like heavy metals enter the ecosystem consolidate in the liver. Yeah. And then you have to also eat the liver. Like a real battery, the battery-tasting liver.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And also like a very huge switch in the concept of health in major to uh to put quotes in the same way that uh someone will talk about in your book puts quotes on quote health food. Uh yeah. Uh anyway, uh interesting. So you like this?
Uh you like your uh your bolognaise? Yeah, it was it was very good. All right. Okay. Very, very good.
And what did you put it on? Uh pepper dough. Okay. Okay. Did you cook it the way that uh Katie Parla told you to cook it?
What's the word she uses that sounds like chowed? Don't remember. Kyode. Kyode. Kyoda.
Like more hard. Oh, like extra alden. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a extra eldentic. I did, actually.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because as soon as she said it, in my mind just erased what she said and put the word chode in. You know what I'm saying? And now I can't undo it.
It's one of these things that's gonna like, you know, I'm not gonna be able to undo it. I don't know. Uh what about you, Quinn? You got anything? Anything?
Uh made a nice orange gelato and the creamy. It was actually interesting. I had to use, I didn't have to. I wanted to use a 10% cream from a local dairy. Well, what's a 10% cream?
That's like a non, that's a non-thing. What is 10% cream? Heavy, heavy, heavy. That was the highest fat, you know, product. And I wanted to use their their stuff.
But that's like I made two. Like even half and half is like 15, right? Percent fat. I don't know. That's weird, man.
I don't know, man. I don't know. I'll have to look at this. You have to send me your local uh supply. Hey, did you ever try that the uh olive oil yet that uh is from uh that weird little place?
Was it any good? Oh, you mean the local stuff? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great.
Yeah, it's really good. Okay. We gotta get some to our to our we have uh an oleologist who comes on the show periodically, uh Benjamin, who uh we have to get the accredited. Uh they he flies around the world and like self-accredited. Well, he knows he's not though.
He's got a real deal. Okay, I didn't even know there was such a thing. Yeah, and he's called from place to place to judge things. Oh wow and and he he takes a very forgive me the whole oleology community. You can just call him Captain Oily, but uh he takes umbrage when I call him Captain Greasy because he's like ideal in oil, not grease.
Yes, he's very he plays like uh vegetal. He plays like Pansouri. I don't know. Like, like it's a whole thing. Anyway, he is very skeptical of anyone else's taste in olive oil other than his own.
So when when you tell him that you like something, he's like, mm-hmm. You know what I mean? But not in a bad way. He's not trying to make you feel bad, just wants you to know that he doesn't trust your palate. You know what I'm saying?
Sure. Yeah, right. It's like my art teacher used to say, he's like, you know, yes, everything is relative, but some more relative than others. Sure. Yeah, anyway.
Uh all right, all right. Anyone else? Uh anyone else? Uh Benjamin, do you have any good food uh stories over the past week? I uh I go and I just been cooking tacos.
I went to Mexico a few weeks ago, and I whenever I I just settle into a nice rut of something extraordinarily simple and uh very boring and just make it until I slowly grow disgusted with myself for the same food item. I like that. Slowly grow disgusted with myself. Well, that kind of fits in with the tenor of your book. Yes.
Disgust. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, love and disgust. Yeah.
Love and disgust together. Uh so anyway. I like that it's a better subtitle. It's a dark miracle. Well, love and disgust in the American supermarket.
First of all, uh, I rarely, especially on like non-food books, a lot of people in like, you know, in our orbit have read this book. Um it is it's super interesting because you very specifically seem, or you very specifically in the book, shy away from trying to be the next food Jesus. I hate food Jesus. You know what I mean? Like uh share that.
Yeah. And so like the fact that you kind of explicitly up front are like, hey, hey folks, no answers here. You know what I mean? Like uh it makes it uh compelling read, but also a little bit more must have been more difficult for you, and that's probably why it took over five years of research to to do, is that it's kind of like going into this book is like jumping into an ocean that's pulling you down under. It's crazy.
You know what I mean? And uh yeah, it was a downer actually by the end. I mean, there's some dark I got into it for upbeat reasons. I I was just curious about the supermarket. I live I love I like I go on vacation, I'll go to the grocery store.
You know, I like I like the supermarket, it's like a relaxing place. Um, I browse the aisles, I feel reassured in a supermarket. But uh the more that I swam in the supermarkets of water, yeah, the darker it got, the more it pulled me under. Um but uh but yeah, I did I I didn't want to give a false hope. I not that there isn't hope out there.
There is a lot of hope, but there aren't any tidy solutions, and they're nothing that that provides like neat answers. And so my editor was definitely banging the drum. Like, let's get a final chapter with like six bullet points that says tell us how we're gonna solve it and leave everyone with like a uplift. And I was like, absolutely not. Like, not for this.
Like, let's leave this boat untied. Well, but that's I mean, that's the only way to do it. I mean, I don't know whether or not that helps or hurts sales. I mean, you can tell me, I don't know, but like in terms of like our community, and uh, you know, like both John and I were involved. Uh, one of our other things is Museum of Food and Drink, and like that's kind of where where we get into it is that all of the people who try to provide you quote unquote answers fall on one side of these two extremes that you deal with quite a lot in the book, which is either like elitists who don't really understand the depth of the problem and have these pat solutions and corporate chills.
And so somewhere in between these, you know, like somewhere, not even in between these, because it's not there's no in between, it's not a continuum. Like somewhere, it's and the book is just like this is this is what I found. Holy crap. You know what I mean? Like, let's just take a look at this.
And I do think solving these problems are like not that far from like solving like human nature problems. So quick fixes to like like externalizing it is very tempting because you can recognize it. You can say that's gross. I don't want to have to deal with that. I want I want to like to think that gross things shouldn't exist in the world, but it's not that it's not that simple to solve them.
I mean, a lot of them are motivated by our own worst qualities, and until we're willing to like do some of that work. Um I don't know. I do go back and forth on this. There's something I think, especially in this time, there's something a little irresponsible about putting out something without any hope in it. I don't think the book has no hope.
I mean, I think the tone is pretty funny and upbeat uh at times. And oh, it's very funny. Yeah, and there's an absurdity that I think is how I deal with the fact that we're in a broken world sometimes, and I think that can provide its own hope. Um, but I'm not gonna lie about you know, f discovering some like solutions to huge pro macro economic problems. Right.
But I think you know, part of the thing that I enjoy about it is, you know, I don't know, I'm just gonna get deep fast, I guess, but like uh you're not even mad at people who virtue signal by by like not buying Thai slave shrimp, even though at the same time you're like, yo, do you think that uh shrimp in Honduras are being produced in any better way? You know what I mean? Uh they're just they're not, you know what I mean? They just don't have the spotlight on them. And so you're like, it it's one hand, you're like, listen, you're not necessarily a bad person.
The system is designed to try to make you feel okay about the purchases you're making. And it's so complicated that I don't know how you would even come to an opinion you could gel at the end of the book, because if it seems to me, and I don't know, that what I got away, and I I re-skimmed it yesterday again. Again, like I said, I got it as a Christmas present, and uh my wife was like, You like this kind of subject, and it was uh McNally Jackson's uh what's you know, staff pick or whatever. And uh and I support local I support local booksellers, although McNally Jackson. Although I love McNally.
I love McNally Jackson. However, you should buy this book at Kitchen Arts and Letters, and Quinn is gonna try to. I love Kitchen Arts and Letters too. Um they come on the show periodically and talk about it. They're an institution, they're great.
Yeah. I mean, um, yeah, like, you know, anyway, I'll leave me that you explain. Like, like it's just if you don't come away from it being like, oh, this is this is so hard, then you have missed the point of the book, right? Yes. I I mean, so when I was doing a ton of media when this book first came out, and it's like everyone would ask, like, well, what should I buy?
Just tell me what I should buy. Like, that would be like the last question. And I'd be like, well, you've missed the you've missed the point of the book. Like I I think I grew up with that ethos, the Eric Schlosser kind of like he ends fast food nation with like make it your own way, Burger King subverted, but like vote with your dollars, and by voting with your dollars, we're gonna create this better system. And it's like uh I I love that ethos.
I grew up with it, but I think this book really points to the end of that as a as a way of creating change. Like that book was when, like 98, 99? Exactly, exactly. And uh it was it was a great book, but even at the time, I love that deeply troubling though in that way. I mean, like, I don't think the average person who wasn't studying this stuff pretty deeply kind of realized, even until after Pollen kind of became Food Jesus, not to harp on him, you know what I mean, but uh you know, even after that happened, I don't think a lot of people really kind of realized how troubling an elitist these kinds of like uh that's right prescriptions for the future of the world.
Well, I think it's not an accident. I mean, I think they're intentionally elitist. You know, in the book, we get I one of the big things I go into is like trying to figure out why we buy like I was really interested in the rise of the grocery store. Like, you know, growing up in the 80s, the grocery store was this like definitionally banal chore of an activity, just like long, looming linoleum floors, and it was just a boring place you'd go out of obligation. And then somewhere, you know, one of the triggers for this book was going to my first Trader Joe's uh with a bunch of yogis for this book, yoga book I was writing, and just watching them run through this store like kids at Disneyland, and they were just so excited by the Trader Joe's, which I'd never been in, and I couldn't quite understand how a grocery store.
That was the first time you were in a Trader Joe's? First time I was in a Trader Joe's. Uh and it was mind-blowing. I was like, these are these are grown adults who are like think that this is a this is a playground. Um I mean, uh it's funny, like so.
In the book, you talk about Trader Joe's specifically marketing to a certain kind of person. Uh over what was it? Over overeducated. What was it? Overeducated?
Uh underpaid, overeducated, underpaid, kind of Volvo driving professor. That's that's yoga. That's yoga too, though. That's yoga. Oh, that was a conscious kind of pivot.
I was like, I don't, I didn't want to become yoga Jesus. That was actually in my mind. I was like, I finished that book and I thought I was kind of set up. I could go on like a tour of yoga studios and talk my little uh insights uh on how corrupt and and narcissistic the Bickram world was, and people would love that. But I just didn't want to be the yoga guy.
I didn't, I just didn't want to do that. I wanted to be a the pop nonfiction writer. So, but I was like, okay, but I do have a a little audience that I carved out in that world. Uh uh that book landed really heavy with the Bickram community for for understandable reasons. And uh and like who else is like what where is something similar?
And like the the Trader Joe's, it same same as like using that as a microcosm for understanding the larger grocery industry um in the same way that Bickram could stand in for like the the larger American uh romanticization and a kind of obsession with yoga. So it was it was I was super conscious of that like parallel. Yeah. Uh all right. So if you pick up the book, it opens with the most first of all, you you get a feeling for kind of your style, which I want to talk about in a minute.
In the first kind of uh, I don't know what whether it's called, I don't remember whether it's a prologue or whatever, but the the Whole Foods Fish Counter. By the way, that's my local Whole Foods. Uh and I shopped there back in that era. Yeah, so you work there for you don't say this until later, but like you know, part of your immersive, well, we'll get into it now. So, like you you worked at Whole Foods for two months.
Sure. What the hell? Why did you need like what did like okay, a week you're there, what are you getting out of weeks two through eight of being at the Whole Foods? Oh, that's where you really start to settle in. I mean, I do think that the first like three or four days of any experience, you get like 80%.
But then you get that extra little bit. I mean, so by no means would I describe spending two months in a grocery store as getting some type of comprehensive, like it was a dil dilettante experience, no matter what. Um, but I didn't think I could write about the grocery store without having some substantial time in a grocery store on the retail floor. The the the flip side of like the way we interact with it. Uh so to me, it was just a no-brainer in terms of like I like the immersive approach in general.
I think it like it allows you to write with a lot more immediacy. It grants you some kind of unconscious permission in your audience's brain. But but also I think it just from a really profound level, it subverts a lot of cliches. Like you're walking around with these set ideas of what something is, and then you experience them in real life, and it never matches one to one. Like so in the Bickram book, like a lot of people call Bickram a cult.
I would never use the word cult because I spent so much time with these people, even if it matches up with like a lot of the descriptors of cults. I would never like I saw them as fully formed humans who are doing things for wildly complicated reasons. I, you know, Bikram the Guru, like you could call him a charismatic narcissist, but like I saw what charisma means by experiencing like the way he would dominate a room or his energy levels, right? So all of that comes from this up close and personal uh encounter with things. And and so I think there's something about writing, it really refreshes the language if you're experiencing it and not writing from a point of abstraction.
Right, right. Let's let's them be more real people. Yeah. Because I think the instant you separate yourself from something, your brain starts to just push it into categories, at least for me. Like I'm not, I don't have a great memory.
Uh and so I simplify everything as soon as I'm away from it. I I shrink it down. If I'm in the moment taking notes as it's happening, it's just a lot more blurry, it's a lot more gray. Um, it doesn't fit into these categories. So then if I do reference something like a cult or I reference something like charisma, I have to put a comma and like 17 descriptors after it to like get at all the different fract fract fractured ways that this word that we carry around actually exists in the in the world.
Right, but you do like to do that in this book. You'll like, you know, you'll throw a little word bomb in and then a footnote and then bloom. You know what I mean? It's like uh, I don't know, it's an interesting tack. Uh let's uh if you are listening live on Patreon, you can call in your questions to Benjamin at 917-410-1507.
That's 917-410-1507. And if they're not listening live, uh John, uh why don't you tell them how to join the Patreon and what they get and who's coming up uh in the future. Patreon.com slash cooking issues. We've got a whole, excuse me, a whole great uh, you know, slurry of guests coming up as always. Uh Chris Young, uh Matt Sartwell is gonna be coming up and a couple others that Quinn's working on.
It's all gonna be great. Uh awesome discounts with partners like people uh Kitchen Arts and Letters. Hopefully we'll get uh Ben's book here discounted. And yeah, just uh be part of an awesome community. Join the Discord, Google Maps for restaurant recommendations, all these awesome things.
So patreon.com slash cooking issues. Right. And next week we have uh Abraham Barons, right? It's a different day from normal. Is that true?
Yeah, one Michigan chef who has a new book on fruit. You know, I've never been to Fruit Michigan. You ever been to Fruit Michigan, Benny? I didn't even know it's place. Yeah.
So there's this like uh there's this one part of Michigan that because of the lake can grow very good fruit. So like a lot of our Concord grapes come from there. And it's in the same area where all the furniture people are. Huh. You know, like Herman Miller and all of that.
Yeah. It's weird little design and fruit. Yeah. Fruit, fruit and design. Yeah, two things that I enjoy, actually.
You know. Uh, but I've never been to that part of Michigan. I've only been to the other side, you know. I think actually my great grandfather had a farm in that area. Um I know there's a lot of tomato uh grow growing around there, and I I have no so little about it.
But uh, but I think I have been there. Uh it's only in fleeting weird memories of my dad dragging me along to on a family trip. But well, check out her book pulp. If you're you're interested in cooking with uh fruit. I I just received the book.
I haven't read it yet, so I don't I can't say anything one way or the other. But she's gonna be on the show next week. That's what's gonna happen. Fruit's one of those universally good things. I mean, no one says a bad word about fruit.
Okay, can I can I say this? This what you're saying is almost correct in that it is literally designed for us to like it. Fruit, right? No, you know, us meaning everything, right? Sugar, right?
And we're designed to like it. Yep. There is a huge cadre of people that don't or I don't know where it comes into their mind. They don't like cooked fruit. You ever met these people?
No. But I would uh I'd have words with them. Yeah, they don't like cooked fruit sometimes. Certain glances. Sometimes it comes out as a as a distaste for pie.
And then when you burrow in, you're like, what is it that you don't like about pie? Is it that it's delicious? And they're like, no, it's not that I hate that it's delicious, it's that I don't like cooked fruit. Roast peach, like a like uh what what's up? I don't know, it's a thing.
It is a thing. If you go out and ask, right, uh, you will find eventually you'll find that person. Usually cake over pie people, they're they might just like cake more. But on the other but they might be one of those cook fruit people. Got it, got it.
That explains because there are these people who don't like pies, and I've always I grew up pie strong. Well, especially with your grandfather or great grandfather, whatever you know. Yeah, I I I don't even understand where the problem with pie would begin, but now you've solved a life mystery. No, there you go. Well, I'm here for you.
Uh where were we even talking about? How did we even get there? Or we're talking about future guests. Yes. My brain goes, Oh, another thing about Kitchen Arts and Letters, where you should buy uh the Secret Life Groceries, the dark miracle of uh the supermarket.
Is it American or not? You're American supermarket supermarket. Although really, let's be honest, aren't all supermarkets American in the end? I'm just kidding, but I'm not. They're not.
It's a very American invention, right up there with the roller coaster t-shirt. Jazz. What about what Aldi did to it after the after the war? Like well, they they put their own little spin on that model and it made it extremely efficient. Yeah.
Even even less so. Yeah, it's like the pizza effect. They perfected it and then brought it back to us. So you went to for the book to go we're gonna go in circles, but you went to one of their distribution centers in the book. Yes.
But was that for an Aldi or was that for like an Aldi district? I went to a number, so in the book, getting into distribution centers at that time was pretty tricky. I could have gone on a formal tour of a few, but it was actually hard to get some access there. So I decided I would embed with a trucker um who would make drops at these, and I could wander around and kind of poke around through that. And so I went to a number of distribution centers when I was driving around with the trucker.
Um, but Aldi was the one that's featured in the book. Yeah. Yeah. I mean those stores are Aldi's are d are depressing. The ones I've been into.
You know what I mean? Uh but uh but great value. I mean, uh literally Aldi, I mean it's it's uh they've got a great model of just like banging out some basics at low price that is you know, not the lowest quality. It they put zero money into advertising, zero money into like packaging and marketing, uh and that just straight, you know, pennies over the whatever they're making on uh in the terms of margin. All right.
So this has brought me to a a couple of things. One the trucker, you brought up the trucker, uh, who is a pseudonym I just found out. Lynn, and how do you how's the pseudonym pronounced? Pseudonym is pronounced Lynn Riles. Okay, Lynn Riles, all right.
We can really, it is a pseudonym. Uh I did there's a very few pseudonyms in the book, but that was one where I thought if I write about this woman, I could really affect her livelihood. And she didn't want a pseudonym, actually, and actually may be angry at me uh because of that. But I just thought I would not live with, I wouldn't not sleep well if I wrote something and got her fired or got her blacklisted or okay. Well, it's so interesting.
So in the with and then the book opens, it opens with uh what one of uh my uh Instagram friends described as the most metal description ever of it of the Whole Foods fish counter circa 2013 or 14, whenever you were there. And again, when I was shopping there and probably buying fish, maybe from you, who knows? Uh although, did I buy a lot of yeah, I bought a lot of fish there. Um where the it gives it kind of an overall view of what the tone is going to be, the description of the smell of this fish counter. And then within that, you're like, oh, here's one of your footnotes where you're like, bing, by the way, uh, I am, if anything, underrepresenting this smell.
So you describe how long is the case? It's like 20 feet long or something like that. Yeah, it's a right, yeah, it's right around there. It's uh, and I I will stress again that the the reason I have mixed feelings about opening that book up with that image because it is a hundred percent real. Um, it is exceedingly gross, and it is was intended as a metaphor because I think the fish that we were selling at that Whole Foods was perfectly safe.
It was clean. The fact that the bottom of the case was dredged with like rotten shrimp and entrails of cleaned fish that we that that hadn't been cleaned in a month and a half or two months. That there was a separation there. But to me, that metaphor of like clean and downy on the surface with this fresh ice that we lay down every day and the fish sparkling, and then you just start digging through with that to this muck. That was irresistible.
Um, but but I also I don't know how representative I don't have tons of experience with fish counters. Maybe they're all as gross. Although uh caveat, I have I talked to some uh other Whole Foods employees uh after the book came out, and they were like, yeah, that was a particularly gross fish counter. Um right, but you'd take a lot of pains to say, hey, listen, you know, so what what it describes in the book, John, you'll you'll this is gonna make you kind of queasy as a you know current chef. They they would stand up on metal like stands and then chip down into it to cut like two by two blocks of the ice that was two months of ice accumulated of crush that was accumulated and like kind of glacier compacted into the top into like solid ice, but the freezer was on the fritz, so the bottom was kind of watery, and they would take these two by two blocks out, and after the first block comes out, you start seeing the filth and the smell permeating out of it, like is apparently worse than uh when you went to Thailand to a trash fish processing unit, which you describe as having a smell that is wait for it, deafening.
A smell that is deafening. You can't hear what people are saying because it smells so bad in front of this uh trash fish uh disgusting. 90 degrees trash fish up to your like mid-ankle. Yeah, like wading through rotting fish on the, you know, right off the dock. But it's not only 90 degrees, there's also a literally a furnace in front of you.
Yeah, you know what I mean? Uh and so like you're like, yeah, but that smell is somehow not as disturbing as this smell from the Bowery Whole Foods, which they've replaced people. They have replaced. Anyway, so it's uh it's an interesting way to start the book. But what it leads me to, I don't know whether you're gonna take this as a as an insult or a compliment, but um you don't put yourself as front and center and don't do drugs in the book, but it is uh specifically you say that you're not stoned in in one or two occasions.
But uh it seems to me to be kind of almost gonzo in a way, that journalism, you know what I mean? Like uh Yeah, I have an affection for the for big writers for guys who are not afraid to throw around some big, you know, like I would shy away from Hunter S. Thompson. I love him. I grew up with him.
I don't want to, I don't want anyone thinking that I'm trying to be Hunter S. Thompson because he's there's only one Hunter S. Thompson, and they we, you know, leave him where he is. Um but yeah, I have a lot of affection for those guys. And I I think, you know, I I love whoever said that the opening is metal, um, I think you got it's just like a punk song almost.
Like, you gotta get people from the first chord in a book. There are so many reasons not to read in our culture or to read just like two-second snippets on Twitter. So if you're gonna go, you gotta go hard. Like you're they're there gonna slow down. There was a time when you could have a slow burn of a book, and I love those books, but I don't know where America's attention is now for the slow burn grocery book.
Like, okay, let's save that for something else. That's most of them, but uh I have to read a lot of these kinds of things. Um, but so then that brings me, so you know, you unlike a lot of other books, you're present in the book. Unlike a lot of other nonfiction books about this kind of subject that, like I say, I have to read on the regular, you're extremely present in this book and judging your own judgments, criticizing your own criticisms the whole time, but clearly a character. And you've given yourself permission to be, and this is the one thing that kind of stuck with a little bit on me, like kind of brutal to some of your uh people.
So this person with a pseudonym who I can't believe she was mad that you used a pseudonym, you're unbelievably brutal in your description of her cough, like how gross, like the fact that she incessantly talks to you about crap that you don't want to hear. I mean, it's pretty hardcore and unusual. So, like, what is that? I mean, I can't believe she was cool with it and wanted her real name used, even despite that. That's a tribute to her, by the way.
Well, one, yes, yes. I think I am hard on characters. I think that really came from the Bickram book, where I was I really wanted to just do like a warts in all portrait of people. And I think I want to be in that book, I was much more of a present character. Um this book, like you said, I'm present, but it's not really about me introspecting.
Maybe I'm reacting to things to give you a contour, but I I'm I'm less present. But I want to be harder on myself than anyone else. But I I do think there's a lot of bad writing that just kind of hagiography at the end of the day, and uh yeah, if you we can't call it call spade a spade, you know. It's I I like I think it it also dignifies this woman Lynn, or who I call Lynn, um, a little bit to know she has an enormously difficult life. And I think anyone who reads that chapter cannot come away with uh an appreciation of how hard the life of a trucker is, how hard the life of a female trucker is, and then in particular the work that she's putting in and the and the and the care that she's putting into that.
But if I just write that in a glowing way and I don't include some like obvious, honest um reactions to who she is, it that it loses its luster. It just becomes another thing in airport magazine of just like this like saintly female trucker that I that I followed. Um, and that's not real. Right. So it is hard.
It's a hard balance though. Um I've I nobody likes what I write about them uh when they first read it. And some of them don't like it ever. Uh and it's hard because you spend a lot of time with these people. I always share it pre-publication because I want I don't want anyone to feel blinded.
But no, I'm I mean, everyone thinks they're gonna like it. And sometimes I'll write things that I think are like um verging on hagiography and I'm sure they're gonna love, and then they read it and they like the the description sticks on them, or the some representation of what they said with my own editorial next to it sticks. And it's it's definitely one of those things you gotta have a strong stomach for. Yeah. Well, the trucking one, I think, because of that description and like kind of this weird thing where you're like, I can't wait to get out of this truck with this.
Oh, I was just done. I mean, I was oh I I was ready to bolt from that chapter. I thought it was gonna be fun. I thought I was gonna be living my childhood dreams of a true truck driving, Mercy America, like you know, Dharma Bums on the road, but no. Um it was one, it's a grueling life that deregulation has completely changed the nature of the job from the kind of um, you know, more middle class 1970s.
Um but also this difficult movies you hate, by the way, I love. Smokey and the bandit. I don't know, I don't mind dual. Um there's there's some good trucking movies out there. Um, but but more she was a tough cookie.
Like she was not, she we would never be BFFs in real life. Uh and I guess there's something fundamentally weird about me writing that up as if we were gonna be BFFs. And and I think something that would shrink her as a as a truly remarkable person. I mean, I and I have a lot of respect for her. Right.
Well, I yeah, that does come through, especially when she comes back in later. And uh, but I think one of the most shocking things, because I had, you know, heard about slave slave uh and shrimp um, you know, uh boats in Thailand, and you know, I knew some of the history, not the personal stuff, uh, with you know, uh Trader Joe's, which is one of the main subjects of the book. But um, and I knew that uh, you know, as part of the museum, that you know, everything we get comes by truck, yeah, right. And you know, you what's interesting is that you would expect that this is going to be a story about, and it's mentioned, right? How much gas is burned, and you know, because those reefer trucks are going a hundred percent of the time and they're getting they're poorly maintained, they're getting zero.
Well, not poorly maintained, but they're still getting much lower than what we say on their on their mileage and just the as you put it, rivers of fuel being burned every night. Yeah. But that isn't the story. And I was like, oh, because I was like, oh, that's gonna be the story. That's not even the story.
I could not believe how these uh people who work these incredibly long hours are reduced to penury. For uh for those that don't, I mean, like I'm not giving the book away. She works for $100 a week. Yes, she gets paid $100 a week for the week I'm with her and the week before I'm with her, the week before that she she was, I think taking uh she was grossing something like $120,000 and taking home something like $17,000 for the year. Um and she's working 70-hour, 80-hour weeks when she was doing that.
Uh it's no, it's uh it's unfathomable. I think I walked into this book, like I said, thinking this is gonna be a book about the grocery store, and and uh this like truly miraculous. Like I think that's the miracle in the title. Like you walk into a grocery store, we got more options than the greatest kings and emperors at our fingertips. Uh it's it's amazing.
You can decide to cook Gordon Ramsey's five spiced goose uh the night before Christmas and go to your local Whole Foods and get every ingredient you need. But there's just so you know the book I ended up writing was about all the fat power that goes into that to create that, and that is really a book about labor and a book about um the way that labor standards have been degraded, because to create that abundance at the prices we expect, um, something had to give. And the two places it gives is the environment and the way you treat your employees, because that's where you shave the pennies off. Right. And that comes up over and over and over again, with the exception of Trader Joe's.
But yeah, just the inexorable pressure, monetary and time pressure on the trucking community. And then, you know, as you bring up like culturally, it's an interesting group of people because they want, they see themselves in an entirely different light. You know, like they don't see themselves in the way that most um I think exploited classes would see themselves, which is interesting in a way that I hadn't really thought about before. Yeah, no, it's fascinating. I mean, I think first of all, trucking's so big that it that making big generalizations about the it's the uh biggest employer in the majority of the states, uh is kind of my go-to stat on it.
It's so it's such a uh an overwhelming class of people that making big generalizations is hard. But the truckers I hung out with were, you know, right wing radio, a lot, some ex-military, um, and there was a strain of individualism in them and a belief in kind of like put your nose down, do the work, and the system will reward you. Meanwhile, they're living in this system that is like bleeding their paycheck, like deduction after deduction, pushing this notion that they're in control of their life through these lease to own agreements that never get that never pay off. They never end up owning their ships. Yeah, because how much does the truck cost?
It's oh, it's extremely expensive. I I don't know, I guess. Hundreds more right. Yeah, hundreds of, oh, absolutely. Um and that kind of confluence of that individualism and work ethic with like people who are willing to like mouth it as pieties, but also rip you off at the same time was really was really powerful.
And so you'd have people who felt like they were doing this job to be in control of their lives, and any objective observer would be like, you are not in control of your life. You are scraping by, barely making it. And like I I guess was very fascinated with that. But she didn't even have an RV. It was in storage.
She literally was literally home. Yeah, 100%. And that was that's not I like I chose her to focus on, be not because she was some crazy abnormality. Like it's so since the book came out, a number of places have picked up on that kind of trucking story. Um and they they you you swing a cat in the trucking lot, you'll find someone who's similar to Lynn.
Right. And well, and and you also take pains to say that you have no actual statistics on this, but um, well, this one you do, like five percent of the trucking uh uh force is women. That's right. And you did not speak to any of them that had not been assaulted, or had not heard like stories of like their friend being raped. Um, yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's uh it's an enormously abusive industry for women. I will say some of this may be true. I mean, trucking the pandemic happened as the book was published, and trucking got hit the hardest. Um I don't know how much of this has changed. I imagine very little, but um, yeah, female the way you train trucking is not a no-skill job.
It may be blue-collar, but you have to learn you no one's gonna just saddle up into a big rig and get behind the wheel and be able to drive it, be able to back it up. Like that's you, you have to be trained to do that. And you can't train on some um, you know, like auto autopilot video game type thing. You have to do it in a truck, and so you need to drive around with your trainer while you're doing that. And because no one's paying for training time, um, you train on the job.
And so you go off and do deliveries, live, sleep, eat, work in this truck with you and your trainer. And if you're a woman and you're partnered with a male trainer, um, who's probably only been doing trucking himself for six to eight months because that's how fast the turnover in trucking is that you can become a trainer, um, which is itself absurd. Um, that the person who's evaluating you, who is responsible for letting people know whether you're going to be promoted, is also like sitting next to you sleeping in the same, like in the same bunk beds that you're sleeping with. It's like it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out this is a situation that's ripe for abuse. And evaluating you.
And evaluating you. And plus you owe money already. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you don't get into that position unless you owe one of these quote unquote schools money, right?
But it would be a deeply uncomfortable, even if it was just uh like trucking is small, it's like a midtown elevator-sized. You're like you're sleeping, eating, driving in this thing that's not big. So even if it was just like mixed sex mixed gendered, like for like weeks at a time, like forget the evaluation part. That just adds like extra spice. It it's it would it's just a very difficult situation.
And you're you're both very frustrated because probably the job is not panning out the way you thought it was. Did uh were you able to get anything more nuanced about the coming automation, other than uh they'll pry it out, pr pry my wheel out of my cold dead hands? I, you know, I didn't I that's fascinating to me, and I didn't poke down that uh except for an amateurish ways. Like I'm I'm as interested in it as everyone else. I thought I don't think the march towards automation will be as quick as people think.
I mean, obviously it hasn't. People have been saying we're getting automated cars, you know, since since like 2016, 18. Um, but uh no, I don't know. I I I have no silver ball there, uh crystal ball silver ball. Silver ball would be nice and ball.
Yeah. Uh all right, let's get to some before I only ask questions that I'm interested in. Let's get to questions that uh people had. All right. Uh Josh Kuhn writes in any ideas why the quality of produce at my local supermarkets has tanked since the pandemic and not come back.
And uh you had a very interesting point about why Trader Joe's uh produce is spotty, and maybe it's related. I don't know. Half the garlic I buy now is spongy on the inside and has a musty flavor. I also notice this musty flavor in many apples and yams. I haven't bought fresh green beans in two years because they are simply terrible every time.
Um there seems to be a big picture picture issue as it is the same at all the places I shop from Walmart to the small local grocer. Interested in any insight you might have on this. Man, I Josh, I don't know, but I've experienced it. Uh you're not alone. I don't, I mean, I writ large, it can give you the obvious answer, which you've probably deduced for yourself, which is that the supply chains are extremely tight.
And so um, you know, uh the way the market for produce uh is set up, it's extremely segmented. So there's like class A, class triple A, um, and you know, all down the line. So if you you buy almonds or you buy garlic, there's there's many different segments of quality in that. And I think the mar as the supply chain has tightened, um those margins have gotten blurrier. So what was available um at the highest grade is now includes things that are of a lower grade.
Um I'd say it is different from what I learned about Trader Joe's, which Trader Joe's has this model that in um essentially relies on high high turnover. They short code items. So it short code means they buy things that will be going expired soon, and knowing that they have such high volume of passionate customers that they will buy them off the shelf in a way that it doesn't expect the uh affect the customer experience whatsoever. Um I don't think that that's what's going on here. Well, where I think where uh where where my mind was drawing a relationship was a different thread of the book, which is about just in time.
Ah and in a similar way that like Trader Joe's is buying only what they're gonna sell today, right? Other grocers are are not buying things that are are that, but just in time during the pandemic became a little bit too late. Yes. You know what I mean? And so I think that was one of the big lessons of the pandemic.
I mean, essentially we've engineered the supply chain that was so taught and so efficient, and then any disturbance causes mega breakdowns. There just isn't the slack to absorb absorb something like a pandemic. I mean, there probably never would be a time when we could totally absorb uh you know such a disruption, but the the modern supply chain is is it's just on a hair, it's like uh a hair trigger. It it's not meant for disturbances. Um, how do you think that shakes out?
Because the the labor market had a kind of uh kind of a different trajectory. So, in you know, in our business in uh hospitality, you know, one of the things that uh I think is the worst is that you know, uh workers don't ever know how much money they're gonna make. You know what I mean? Well on the front of house, because you know, they could get caught at any time or even back of house, right? You can some people times people get cut, right?
Yeah, yeah. And so I think it's very um I think it's one of the one of the bad things about the industry is this um idea, which is probably worse the lower down the chain you get of uh people just figuring out exactly how many people they need for a particular time, and that has to do with something you talk about of the move from just in time to being just about widgets to treating people like widgets and like you know, calling them in when you want, not telling what their schedule's gonna be. Yep. But the the pandemic and this kind of rise, this need for workers all of a sudden, seemed like it was gonna bring the promise of of alleviating that a little bit, but I don't think it is. I don't know.
I just don't I don't feel I think I think it's a blip. I think that like we're gonna. You mean like hero pay? Or what do you mean? Yeah, well, or any of it.
Any of it like No, that's yeah, that was a total blip. Um no, I think I mean worker issues are I mean, I I don't know. I I have not followed it as closely as I should to be, you know, uh chattering on about it. But the here all the hero pay has been revoked at this point and gone back to business as usual. And um I think there have been some labor since so when I wrote in the book about variable scheduling, there's been some in big cities like San Francisco and New York, DC, there have been some laws that um aim to solve that.
So it may be technically illegal right now to do just in time scheduling in New York. However, the enforcement of those laws is basically non existent. Um, and I don't think there's any real effort to prevent that uh in practice. You may not be able to call it that anymore. But if your supervisor says, hey, we don't need you today, go home, you're gonna you'd be quite the empowered employee to go find a labor lawyer and dispute that.
And that's not typically the people who are working uh front end retail. So uh kind of part of the same kinds of questions, uh from uh um Yes Ezra. Uh COVID was a wild time as a grocery consumer for lots of reasons, uh, and underscored how important grocery is to our communities. I'm curious if you think the pandemic has changed the industry in any long term ways. Maybe if you write a follow-up sometime.
Uh although I I'm sure you're happy to let it let it go and do something else. But uh I now tend to shop more directly with distributors in many cases now. And two, I'm lucky to live in Oakland where we uh have uh an unfairly incredible number of local or small grocery chain stores that carry extremely high quality products. Most other places I go, it seems like everything is owned by one of the huge chains. What's the future of grocery consolidation?
How do we ensure that we're getting good products, both ethically and good quality. We talked about that a little bit what that means or doesn't mean as supply chains consolidate. Yeah. I mean look, I'd say those are two different questions. The consolidation issues huge.
We've got Kirger Albertson's merging right now. FTC is is looking at that closely and I think we finally have an FTC that might give a sh uh might care about that. Um and uh give a hoot and holler. Give a hoot. I I I I do think they they they certainly are treating it with uh a seriousness that it deserves because this is a big deal when the American grocery industry, I think it's like the top five chains control upwards of sixty five percent of the market with this merger going through it would it shrink it more.
They get tremendous, tremendous bargaining power. So forget the fact that you consolidate that and there's synergies, which means layoffs. And so the you know your buyers get consolidated. There's it it's pretty devastating for those two chains internally because there's a lot of redundancies when they merge. And that's where the cost savings come.
But you create something that has a ton more bargaining power. And that puts a pressure on the supply chain that, like we said, is already whittled down to the bone. It's already in a very fragile place. And when the stores can dictate price like that, it forces their suppliers to take that price out of the people who either who are supplying them with raw ingredients and manufacturing plants or uh the environment or their labor force. Uh and it just get it trickles down into ways that are that are not sustainable.
And it rarely does it go back to the customer. I mean, you see, both for Kroger and Albertson's um over the course of the pandemic, they kind of spoke with their world. They gave Hero Pay, revoked it, and then gave like two separate $1 billion, or this is Kroger, not they, but Kroger gave two separate $1 billion corporate buybacks with kind of the record profits that were coming in through COVID. Because COVID, I mean, to answer the first question in that question, um, COVID changed the grocery industry tremendously in that it everyone was suddenly shopping from home. There was no more eating out at stores, so their profits went through the roof.
Um, did it change the trends and the patterns of the grocer industry? I'd say I'd argue not really. It accelerated all these existing things. So grocery was already on the march towards automation. It was already on the march towards online retailing.
And this, the pandemic was just rocket fuel for those trends, but it didn't change things. And lastly, uh, in from uh Lizzie Young Booksellers, another good bookseller where you should go buy uh books, uh, this uh dovetails into one of the people you follow, um Julie uh Boucher. It's fine. Yeah, she has this product Slossa, and you kind of talk about how uh if you start a small food company, uh you're lucky if it fails right away when you've only spent a couple of thousand dollars in uh a couple months of your life. And Nastasia and I have a story about that, which I don't have time to get into.
But Lizzie wants to know Slowza, did she make it work? And look what you brought us. I brought you some Slossa, yeah, of course. Uh not only did it, she she's making it work. Uh I don't think Julia's gone from uh had a rags to riches story, she was never in rags to begin with, so that would be impossible.
Um, but she is she is out there hustling. She was one of the most remarkable people that I encountered in the book. Um, just showing exactly how hard it is for a small entrepreneur to uh to make it. And so yeah, I wanted to bring you the fruits of her labor, which is Slossa. I've been curious to try it, and we're gonna uh I'm gonna uh pass it around here.
So describe what Slaza is. Slossa is a coleslaw uh meets a salsa. I mean, in name, but actually it's it's more than just that as a neologism. It's uh it's it's kind of like a chut, it has some chutney in it, it's some chow chow. It is very chow chow adjacent.
Yeah, it's got some But the Chow Chow had a bigger piece like corn pieces in it, right? Yeah, so it's it it's a relish at heart, and it's a jail. It's a pretty it's a healthy alternative, it's a healthy alternative to uh, you know, just dousing it in ketchup and um but I I was more interested in it because if you look at this, it is I thought I this is just such a lost puppy dog of a product. I tasted it, I really liked it. I or decided I would never do uh something on a product that I didn't want to feature a product that I didn't like.
That's just that's just mean. Um and so then how taking this product that doesn't look like it fits into the venture funded uh marketplace and like seeing how it what it takes to to make it that I was interested in. All right. Well, we are out of time, Benjamin, but uh I didn't get to talk to you about eye stalk ablation, which I thought was a fantastic story. I only know about it with lobsters, but like you know, learning to rub a shrimp's eyeball off so that it becomes pregnant real quick.
Great, great story. No that we know of. No. Uh and no one's tested it yet. True.
True. Good point. There science out there. Like, you know, you need to go get the book uh so that you can, you know, read about uh, you know, your trip to the CAFO and how you don't know you don't know where to be after the KFO happens. And I didn't get to ask you how the heck you afforded to write this book for five years, you know, on what I'm assuming was never a large enough advance because they never are.
But if you ever write a food adjacent book again, come back and see us. Thanks. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a total pleasure. Cooking issues.
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