This podcast is brought to you by the Albany public library main branch and the generosity of listeners like you. What is a podcast?
God daddy, these people talk as much as you do.
Razib Khan’s, Unsupervised Learning.
Hey everybody. This is Razib with the Unsupervised Learning podcast, and today I am here with a returning guest, Megan McArdle, who is still a columnist for the Washington Post. I believe right,
That is correct.
So Jeff hasn't gotten rid of you?
Not so far, you know, we'll find out.
Okay, so we are recording after the election, and we will be talking mostly about food culture in the US. I saw some interesting tweets from you, and also we've talked about this before, because I know that you were doing research about this. You've been doing this for several years. Actually you're bit of a home economist.
Yeah, it's kind of a weird hobby of mine. You know, politics, fiscal policy, Business Economics and food. And actually, it turns out that often those things are more connected than you would think.
Yeah, I mean that's totally true. I mean, that's why there are books about how coffee created the industrial revolution or something, right?
I have not seen that, but I definitely trade has always been a major part of food culture, cultural diffusion. The Industrial Revolution created a lot of the food and the techniques for cooking food that we now think of as normal. For example, my favorite example, I read a long essay on this for The Washington Post, which I recommend. Also, I should mention that subscriptions are very affordable right now. Just arguing that, in fact, the the invention of modern cake was what killed pie, which used to be the the normal, the most common dessert that people would make. Also obviously a savory food if you're in a lot of countries and that that's actually we think of these as cultural stories. It's actually a technology story.
Yeah, yeah. I mean technology is culture. I think there's a magazine - But so, you know, we are right now. We're recording - actually, because I'm gonna post this actually, I'm not gonna wait months, like I do sometimes, just break forth wall or whatever, with the listener. So, Donald J Trump has won the election, and he is nominating some very interesting figures. But I was wondering more about the economics, because you do write about economics, the tariff stuff, just, you know, brass tacks, like, How seriously do you take it? Just for the non American listeners or people that are under a rock. He's thinking about slapping, like, really high tariffs on everyone.
I think it's not clear whether to take him seriously or literally. So there are a lot of ways this could go. And if you think about, in his first campaign, he said he was going to renegotiate NAFTA, and then he renegotiated NAFTA, and it was like, I changed three commas. It's the best trade deal ever. Not much actually changed from that. Partly, I think because his advisors told him that would be a bad idea, partly because negotiating trade deals, it turns out, is harder than it looks. And so the question here is, how is he viewing tariffs, and how seriously is he going to pursue the across the board tariffs? So what I mean by how is he viewing tariffs? There are different ways you can think about tariffs. One is as a way to raise tax revenue. That is a very bad way to think about tariffs. By the way, last year, total net imports were about $3 trillion and to replace the federal income tax, you would need like a 70% tariff, which is, of course, doesn't even help, because if you slap a 70% tariff on everything, you're gonna lose a lot of revenue as people switch away from imports. So it's mathematically, probably impossible to replace the income tax, it's most likely impossible even to pay for some of the new tax cuts that he would, that he has promised, which would cost almost a trillion dollars a year and which would require roughly a 30% tariff. But again, you have those dynamic effects. So you raise your tariff, your revenue goes down, you raise it more, it goes down further. So also probably mathematically impossible to do that. So I don't think that you should think of tariffs as a good way to raise revenue. Second way you can think about tariffs is as a way to improve American manufacturing. So let me try to give the best possible version of that or. Argument, which is that manufacturing isn't just about having a factory. It is about having a network of people who know how to run factories, of machinists, of having this deep, rich, robust labor market, a set of suppliers, your supply chain on shored and that when you have those things, the economy gets better at manufacturing. You move down the cost chain. I think this is also a bad way to think about tariffs, for a bunch of reasons. So number one, we actually, you know, people talk about China has taken all the manufacturing from us. We're nowhere. This is not true. Now we are second in the world in manufacturing, admittedly a distant second. If you look at how much China their gross output, they produce, about a third of the world's manufacturing. We produce about 16% sorry, 12% however, if you look at value add, which is when we have netted out those intermediate goods, like steel parts, and all of that, it's actually much closer. We produce about 16% of the world's value add, and China produces about 29% but then you also have to think about population, right? They have many, many times more people than we do. They employ a lot of them in manufacturing. The very reason that we employ so few people in manufacturing is that our manufacturing is super productive. We are producing high value, high value add things, while China is lower on the value chain. And so thinking about on shoring that stuff, are we going to bring back our lower value manufacturing? By the way, our labor markets are quite tight, especially for low skilled labor, so if we do that, we're gonna have to take people out of other things and employ them in manufacturing, or we could raise immigration. It's probably not a good idea. So the idea that, or I should say, I don't think it's probably a bad idea, but I think that Trump thinks it's probably a bad idea to increase the number of lower skilled migrants that we're bringing in to do factory work, which, by the way, he loves talking about McKinley and 19th century tariffs. You know, the economic consensus is that that story about 19th century tariffs, where they help create America's manufacturing center help make us a more productive and growing economy. Most economists think that that's wrong. But even if you think it's right, do you know how that was fueled? It's by hog wild immigration from abroad, which is bringing in all these lower skilled workers who are working in the factories. So I think this is probably also not a good way to think about it. The last thing we should say is that, look, when you are slapping tariffs on everything, you are raising the price of those intermediate goods, of all those inputs that go into manufacturing, and that makes manufacturing less productive. It makes our exports especially less competitive. And so this whole idea of export led growth. That's something that I think you can argue, I think this story is kind of weak, but I think you can at least argue that tariffs, along with other industrial policy, can help an economy that is, you know, very poor do catch up growth where they're essentially just copying what's happening abroad. America, as we said, are manufacturing super productive. We're at the technology frontier already. I'm not saying we are in every single good look. You know, Taiwan is better at semiconductors than we are, but in general, and right now, Airbus, sadly, is better at airframe than we are, because Boeing is having so many, many problems. But we can't copy some other country in general. We brought TSMC, which is the big Taiwanese semi semiconductor plant. We brought that here to do manufacturing. They're They're up, up and running, and somewhat to my surprise, they are as productive as their, as their Taiwanese plants. But in general, we can't do catch up growth. There's no one for us to copy, for us to learn, for us to protect our infant industries while they figure out how to do what people are already doing. We're already at that frontier where we need to do to get better, to grow, to make our economy more productive, to provide the jobs everyone wants, is to push the frontier farther, and that's not something you can do by closing yourself in, trying to limit your input, your inputs from abroad, especially because, you know, supply chains. Now look, if you're going to go, if you're going to be good at semiconductors, for example, you are going to need to buy high end photolithography machines from the one company that makes basically all of the high end photolithography machines, which is Dutch. And so I think when you look at this, either they're going to start carving out exceptions to get those inputs in, or our manufacturing productivity is more likely to drop than to rise, especially because you're now going to have a bunch of manufacturers who protected behind these tariff walls, who don't need to compete as hard as they do now. And that's going to actually sort of incentivize them to just cater to that sheltered market. And that's not again, how an economy grows and gets richer. The third way you can think about tariffs is as a bargaining chip, is as a way to force other companies to open up, to stop subsidizing their companies, to do various favors for our exports. If that's how he's thinking about it, I think there's on the margin, probably some potential there. But the question is, A, how do you negotiate it? B, what do you do about retaliatory tariffs, which, by the way, we are definitely 100% gonna get if we slap tariffs on everything. So if you are looking at export industries, those export industries, are going to be hurt by this. And also, who do you want to open up? You want to force China Open? Because that's not happening. I mean, you'll get you could get some gains on the margin, maybe, but very unclear to me that they would be offset by the losses. And also, if you're going to do that, you don't want to do across the board tariffs. When you do targeted tariffs that are giving you that negotiating advantage, so that when you can go in, you have the ability to say, look, you've got this tariff on you because you are doing X to me. I wish you to stop doing X to me. So a lot of this depends on how he's thinking about this. There are a couple of bad stories and one marginally better story, and then if you're doing the marginally better story, this is not going to be as big a deal as if he's trying to actually raise tax revenue or actually somehow Jump Start our manufacturing back to where it was in 1950 and I think no one at this point really knows what the answer. And that is and because it's hard to tell at any given point how serious Trump is about anything, or how long he will be serious about it. He is incredibly mercurial. He gets an idea in his head. The idea drops out of his head 10, months later, I think at the moment or 10 minutes later, really, I think he does really believe very hardcore and tariffs, so we're going to get something, but I don't think we know what.
That's true for a lot of things. I think in terms of the the upcoming Trump administration. Tariffs are interesting to me because, you've been on the economic scenefor a while. And, you know, my own instinct on
For years, Razib
Don't even, don't even, wow, yeah, I think I've been reading - I've been like, so I have a, I have a seven year old - he's like, he just has does this thing where he's like, could you just not talk about things before I remember? And I'm like, Bro, that's like, 2021
It's really terrifying when young people just don't remember things that are so key to you. I mean, the worst experience, I think, for me, was I was teaching a class on op ed writing. And I did this presentation that I've been doing for a long time, and, by the way, stole it from my husband, who is a better writer and editor than I am, called ‘How an op ed is like Star Wars’ And so I go through and the whole presentation relies on you having seen original Star Wars, and no one in the class had seen original Star Wars. So the next year I taught that class, I had to first assign them to watch the movies so that I could walk through and show them how this thing is constructed, and what the key points I wanted to communicate were.
Well, I mean, my most recent story about that is I said something about O.J Simpson to a friend of mine who has just turned 30, and she asked me, oh, is he black? My gosh. Okay, so in terms of tariffs, obviously, that's a little alarming from standard economic theory, which is the kind of, you know, way you think about things, because you are an economically oriented thinker. But I like to think that I am too, and I honestly was a little alarmed. So here's to hoping that common sense prevails here.
We should do like that, definitely like a little hope when you're dealing with the Trump administration.
Okay well, so you were talking about immigration and I'm thinking about it partly because the food, because that's what we really want to talk about. But one thing about immigration that's interesting to me is - So I know a lot of people of various political stripes. I have friends who are very pro MAGA. I have friends who complain about the cost of labor in terms of yard work or their cleaners but they also want to cut down immigration. And one of the issues that I am really concerned about, as listeners knows, is the number of children Americans have. Back in my day teenagers mowed lawns. They worked at McDonald's. And just looking at the numbers, there just aren't as many teenagers now. And so I think we just have a numbers problem in this country. And this was not, this was not what it was like, or this was not my thinking 25 years ago, when I first started writing on the internet or whatever. You know, I didn't feel that way. But class sizes are getting smaller. I mean, millennials are, I think, the largest generation now. So they had not, like, come through the pipeline yet like in like the year 2000 totally. And so it feels like we're not making enough Americans. And the fertility rate is dropping in Mexico and other places as well, actually, and people are complaining about immigration because we do have an out of control border, which I think that needs to get I think everyone - okay 80% of people agree that that needs to get under control. Okay, but Americans have come to expect a certain like cost for certain types of services, and that's not just going to happen magically. And immigration restrictionists, like my friends, Mark Krekorian and others, they've always promoted tight labor markets as a way to raise wages for the laboring class, so to speak. Well, where is that coming from? That's going to come out of, well, the the pockets of people like me and you and so I think that there's a there's a lot of asks and wants here, and Americans want it all like, I don't really want to talk about the debt right now. But, I think we're of an age where we remember that it's, we can't, like, keep spending it. Definitely the bond markets notice. I think there's a lot of warning signs here. And, I do feel that our current political moment is like, don't worry. You know, we got this. We got this. You know, I feel like that's kind of a vibe that's going on both on the Democrats and the Republicans. When it comes to the fiscal matters. That's just my my general impression.
Yeah, I think we had, we had this really weird period after the global financial crisis, where for from about 2008 to 2020, 12 years, you could just borrow infinite amounts of money and nothing happened. You could run the deficits huge. You could have easy, like pretty easy monetary policy and everything. Inflation didn't show up. The bond markets didn't care. The currency markets were fine. And if you're of a certain age, that just seems like a law of nature. And I think one kind of telling thing is that in the Obama administration, the people you had, and then in the Biden administration, you had young people who said, You're not running the labor market hot enough. We should be doing more deficit spending. And there were two arguments to that. And one was the argument that I made was like, Look, this is not the fact that our interest rates are low now does not mean that they will be interest. They will be low forever. And the thing about interest on government debt is the government debt is not like your mortgage. It's not like most of the kinds of debt that normal people have, where you have to amortize some of the principal every month, even your credit card, you have to make a minimum payment that is slightly more than the interest cost. It will take you forever to pay off, but you are slowly paying it down. What the US government does when it borrows is that it just pays interest, and then it pays off the face value when the bond comes due after whatever term it is, say, 30 years. And the problem with that is that when they have to roll that debt, they don't actually pay it off. What they do is they roll it over into new debt. And this actually, by the way, used to be how mortgages worked, and the 30 year self amortizing mortgage that we all think of as completely normal, and what a mortgage looks like was actually an invention in the 1930s because during the Great Depression, you had all of these people who the value of their house had dropped. They couldn't refinance because all the banks were failing, and so they lost their house. And so instead, we structured a mortgage that would slowly pay the house off so that you wouldn't get stuck in that position when you had to roll over your debt. But the United States Government still does, and we're already seeing this effect. When interest rates rise, you suddenly have this mass amount of debt that all has to be refinanced at higher rates. And so what I was saying is like, look, yes, interest rates are low now, and you can make an argument for running, you know, for borrowing more money, running the economy a little hotter, the problem with that is that if you run the economy a little hotter and interest rates rise, you're going to be sitting on a mountain of debt. That is just that is as you have to roll it over, and we roll over a pretty big chunk every year. I think the average duration on treasuries is now like, I want to say, 6.7 Seven years. But that could be wrong, because I haven't looked at it in a while, but you know, it's, it's in that ballpark of every six or seven years, most of our debt matures. So you have, if you have a sustained period of high interest rates, you can get into a world of hurt. So that was one argument. The other argument was, this is inflationary, and you cannot even imagine how much people hate inflation. But the only the people saying that it was young people pushing them to run the economy hotter, and old people saying, No, debt dynamics, bad, inflation, bad. Let's not do this. And I think that really does go to experience, right? If you have lived through it, if you have, for example, I remember going to the grocery store with my mother once in the 70s, when I was very little, and she didn't have enough cash to pay for the groceries, and so she had to start putting things back because, not because she didn't have enough cash, because prices had gone up and like, she knew what stuff cost, but she hadn't calculated on prices having gone up between the last time she'd gone to the grocery store, and now, yeah, so she had to put things back, and she was obviously, I could tell, even as a little kid, very embarrassed about it. And that was a not uncommon experience. Or, for example, I took money and I went to buy a subway token, and then I couldn't get on the subway because the price of tokens had risen by 10, cents. That's if you remember that. You just remember how much people hate that. But if you don't, it just doesn't seem like that big a deal. And the arguments that people would make said, Oh, well, wages will rise to offset the inflation. It's just not that big a deal. Well, for people these effects are uneven. Some people wages rise, but other people so if you're in journalism, for example, the way you get a big raise is that you get another job. And if you can't get another job offer, you're not getting a big raise. That's just how the industry works. And now that our industry is contracting, no one's getting new jobs. And so in fact, it's really hard to get those those wage increases to offset your inflation, and a lot of people are in that situation. So yes, people who were moving to new jobs were getting raises that more than offset the cost of inflation, but people who weren't were just seeing their purchasing power decline. And so I think people just didn't understand, in that visceral way that you do if you've lived through it, that this was not going to be politically popular. But also, I think we are seeing some of those debt dynamic problems now. And we are seeing those problems, by the way, just as we were moving into the phase when the gaps between what Social Security and Medicare take in and what they have to pay out are really starting to bite and so, you know, I think that it's unfortunate that people didn't understand what was going to happen, but I don't think it was unpredictable.
Yeah, some of the things that I used to read from the worry warts 20 years ago, they're happening. So I guess -
There's a great quote from Rudi Dornbusch, where he says he was talking about the Mexican peso crisis, but he said the crisis takes longer to come than you can imagine. The crisis always takes longer than you expect and but when it comes, it comes faster than you can imagine. And that was basically the story of the peso crisis. It took forever, and then it took a night. And that is something that is that quote is always worth remembering in economics, because you can go for long periods where people are saying, this is a problem, this is a problem. This is going to be a problem, and nothing happens. And people start thinking, Oh, well, those people were just crying wolf, and then the wolf shows up, and it's really fast, and you don't really have much time to deal with it once it gets there. And so it's better to run kind of prudent fiscal and monetary policy all the time, rather than waiting until something bad happens as a result of the as a predictable result of the stuff you've been doing.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's, that's
It’s hard. It’s hard to convinced people,
I don't really want to turn this like into, this is basically hating on Millennials podcast right now, because we can also talk about the crime spike,
The same thing. Where I grew up, in New York in the 70s and 80s, yes. And when people would say, like, they would make these incredible clap backs where you would say crime is bad. And they were like, you know, well, if you don't like crime, don't live in a city. I said, yeah, guys, okay. I mean, a certain amount of that is true. If you are in a city, you are going to experience more crime than in most small places for a bunch of reasons, mostly just because there's a bunch of strangers around, and it's always and criminals prefer victimizing strangers. That said, you cannot have that attitude. It is not politically sustainable. What happens is you generate a backlash that makes all of the criminal justice policy stuff you want to do less possible, not more. But again, if you lived through it, you understood it. You know, when I was growing up, I just remember all of the things that I took for granted. I wasn't allowed to ride the subway after 7pm I was always told to carry some money in my shoe, so that if I got mugged, I could give the mugger some money so that they wouldn't hurt me, but I would have enough to get home. I would take these incredible circuitous routes, because you always had to be on a lighted street. You never wanted to walk down a dark street if you could avoid it. And I was lucky enough that I lived basically just off Broadway, so there were ways to get to my house, mostly without ever walking down a dark street. If I was in a reasonably populated place, right? There were people who lived, you know, four blocks from Broadway. You're just gonna have to walk down some deserted streets. But I would have to take these routes that were like, I'm only on a major Avenue, I'm only crossing, I'm only moving on a major cross street, and it would take me an extra half hour to get home because I was always staying in the lighted places, and the places where there were always a lot of people, and people just don't think that way now, right? If you told someone who's 30, even now, if you told someone who who's 30 that, yeah, obviously you don't ride the subway after 7pm they would think you were crazy. I would think you were crazy, but that was a very normal thing for kids to be told and even for adults to do, when I was growing up in New York.
Yeah, just, just watch Joker. That was New York of the 70s,
Indeed.
Yeah. So, well we talked a little about economics. And obviously the miracle of modern economics. Let's move it to the food stuff. So right now, I can go on Instacart or DoorDash or whatever, get all these different types of foods from all these different places. Actually, they're not from different places anymore. There's American food. I mean, I feel like tacos and burritos, for example, are actually pretty American. Burritos I think we're invented in San Francisco. So we have all of these different types of cuisines, you know, Italian food. There's also fusion, like, you know, Korean tacos. Like, I really like Korean tacos, you go to a soup dumpling place if you want. You know, we for all the there are some negative things about our current economic situation and the trajectory. On the other hand we have the internet, obviously, that's like, really useful a lot of ways. Like you have a super computer in your back pocket, your phone. We have all of these choices when it comes to food now, it's more expensive, and I think part of it has to do with, frankly, labor supply and some other issues in terms of inputs. But we do have an enormous variety that I think we take for granted. You live in DC, so that's a large city and there's a lot of types of food there. You guys famously have probably the best Ethiopian food in the country, just because you have a large Ethiopian community. Largest Ethiopian community,
It is fantastic. And if you are in DC and you are not eating Ethiopian food on at least one and preferably more of your nights out, you are missing the best opportunity. It is the one food in which the city of DC excels more than any other place. And so you should definitely go to one of the great I like, Dukem on 12th Street. And you is one great place get the huge veggie platter. Especially great if you're a vegan. Because of Ethiopian religion, they have an incredible number of fast days, and on their fast days, they don't eat any animal products. So if you're in town with a vegan, you should always go to Ethiopian, because they can get a huge platter it's amazing. And it is like completely vegan. If you are not a vegan, my favorite thing is Kitfo, which is, it's basically a raw meat. You can get it cooked. But I love raw meat. So I mean raw beef, I don't eat a lot of raw chicken, but I love raw beef, and it is a delicious get the special Kitfo which has, like they call it cottage cheese, but it is not like what you think about as cottage cheese. It's kind of a crumbly farmer cheese, and it spices, and it is incredibly delicious. So yes, sorry. Plug for Dukem
I do not, do not plug the mass of pizzas. Those are weird.
Yeah, no, the jumbo slice, I don't actually, I should look into that. I don't know what the history of the jumbo slice is, but yes, indeed, it is weird. It is very bad, extremely large, extremely cheap slices of pizza.
To be fair, you are a New Yorker, so you know, you are harsh on pizzas,
I am harsh, but I will say that. So when I moved to DC, it was really not a food town. I moved in 2007 and it was kind of grim. And I have to admit, I did sometimes have regrets, but since in the last 15 years. We have gotten really, really quite good New York style pizza like, shout out to Andy's, which is good. But also Wise Guys, two very good New York style pizza places. We've gotten good bagels. We've gotten good Chinese food. Hilariously, the best Chinese restaurant in DC, or one of the best is out in kind of industrial area in a days in it's called Panda Gourmet. Very, very good Sichuan food. And so I think that, yeah, we are, we are a good food town in a way that I did not think when I moved there. And I no longer feel like I have to go back to New York to get certain things. When I was when I first moved there, if I went through New York, I would come home with like, two pizzas that they put in the freezer with bagels. I would stop, if I was in New Jersey, and get meatball sandwiches, and they would all go in my freezer so I could have these treats. I don't do that anymore, because I don't need to
Yeah, well, I’ve got to check out PandaGourmet. First of all, when I come to DC, next that is on my list, we should go, oh, this was, that was back in 2014 Yeah. Okay, It’s been 10 years. So I gotta go to DC soon. Okay, yeah. Okay. And then, you know, I do have to say before we go to the food of the 50s of heritage Americans, as Tucker Carlson would say, you know, I feel like, even in - Well, I mean I started eating out a lot, basically in my 20s. My parents and I would go to eat out every now and then. But we weren't, I don't know. I feel like in the late 20th century, it wasn't as common even for middle class people to eat out, aside from, like, maybe McDonald's or something, some fast food, like fast casual, wasn't a real there was some high end stuff. Then there was fast food. Fast casual wasn't really a thing. So I feel like there's been some innovation going on, or just younger millennials Zoomers, they take a certain range of cuisines in anything that's like, you know, say, a medium sized city and above for granted, which, even in the 80s and 90s, I don't think was a thing.
So look, I grew up in New York, and I think there was a big range of cuisines, but it wasn't as normal to eat out. I mean, it was if you were rich. But we definitely were not rich. My mother could pinch a penny hard enough to make Lincoln scream. And we would, she would do this thing where on Sundays, and this was what her mom had done, on Sundays, there would be a big roast, and then it would show up as hash, and you would sort of move through, well, you'd have it left over. The next night, there would be sandwiches, then there would be hash, then there would be and just reusing that, trying to make that dollar go the farthest. And you know, as you went through the week, there would be less and less meat in the leftovers you were eating because you were running out of roast. And that's not a way people think about cooking now. They just take for granted, first of all, that if they don't like to cook, they don't have to. And I don't just mean eating out. They just assume, well, I could get bagged salad. I could get all of I could get one of those prepared meals from my supermarket, I could get there's stuff in the frozen food section that was way less when I was growing up, frozen food was, like, I think Swanson's lasagna was around. My mom was an avid cook, so we didn't eat much of this food, or like a TV dinner, there was not this huge freezer case full of pretty decent, although very high sodium. For those of you who have high blood pressure, as I do, so, I don't eat that stuff anymore, but you know that huge array of stuff just wasn't there. The rotisserie chickens that wasn't a thing you just bought at your grocery store. And all of that stuff has really changed how people think about food. They now think of it like a hobby, right? For most people, food is not a thing you do, because I have to eat three times a day, and that means that I have to cook. Um, it is a thing you do because you really like it, and if you don't like it, you don't do it.
I mean, also, like, you know, these TV channels, they were all on food, you know, they really, it actually like, okay, so I watched for a while. I still do. I watch Google foods, like a few of the steak channels. And I watched, like, so many steak tubes that I actually had, like, steak as my tabs
Food YouTube? I am such-
Okay. Like, look, everybody in here. Like, everyone listening. If you're into steak, check out ginger foods. Like, you know he's that's a really good one and Max the Meat Guy. Those are my two favorite steak channels. If anyone wants to know how to, I don't know, I guess, like, I know like, 50 different ways how to cook a rib eye now, but still, I keep watching.
Question for you, do you like to cook? Do you actually cook rib eyes all the time?
I do cook rib eyes all the time. I think, Okay, this is weird. I don't know. Like, I was thinking about this the other day watching, like, the Steak Channels and like, you know, also, like, you know, I spend more money on food I eat out, you know, it's like a ribeye or New York Strip, basically, like, if I could get a Piccata, although those are hard to get, but it's, you know, back in the day, I would just eat a steak. And I wouldn't even, like, think too much about what the cut was and all these things. But these steaks tubes and like, you know, just reading about steak, and also a culture of steak consumption among middle and upper, upper middle class, you know, Gen X and younger males become quite sophisticated. And it's just like if you see someone eating like a medium, you know, he's like, Oh, my God, what are you doing? And like, it's got to be medium rare or rare, and it's got to be marbled. And like, you know, like, don't get the fake wagyu. So there's all these, like, little things of this steak culture. But yeah, I like to cook a ribeye, you know, I have a cast iron pan just for that, actually. And, you know, you know, I like to
You can go ahead and use the cast iron pan for other things. It won't hurt the steak.
I know, I know. I do sometimes, like, I like to make sure, and other things like that. Yeah. I also feel like, you know, my friend Samo Burja, talked about this years ago, but I think it's true. There are certain things where watching a YouTube and like, you know, I think we're both text oriented people. Like, I'll put that there. But there are some things that watching a YouTube is better for in terms of the data density. So recipes are great and, like, reading is great for that sort of thing in terms of linear fashion, but watching people do it on a YouTube as they're talking also does add a lot of information, like this is a three dimensional activity. The color really matters, and the way they're holding it and grab it. It's just really difficult sometimes to visualize. Maybe I'm not enough of a shape rotator to visualize exactly how they're holding a stake and flipping it or doing all these things.
I think a lot of it is acquiring tacit knowledge, and this is something that I think a lot about. So I had a weird upbringing where my mom, every female, every generation of my mother's family, has produced exactly one avid cook. My grandmother was that cook. My mother was that cook. I am that cook in my family, no one, none of the sisters. We all had sisters, and none of our sisters like to cook, but my mother - So my mom grew up with what they used to call a good plain ook, right? I mean, she lives in a small town in the Midwest. Not well, she lives in a small town in western New York, but food, in terms of food culture, that is the Midwest, great,
The Midwest starts at Syracuse, in my opinion.
Yes. You used to be able to actually kind of trace the culinary Midwest by where the miracle whip line, where the mayonnaise line ended and the miracle whip line started. And she was definitely well into the miracle whip line.
What is, what is miracle? I mean, I thought Miracle Whip was mayonnaise, but I don't know,
So it's a relative of mayonnaise, but it's sweeter. And if you come out of a certain Scandinavian, Eastern European culture, I think there, there that taste for having sugar in your salad dressing, pre existed Miracle Whip. But anyway, it is a sweeter, Tangier version of mayonnaise. I actually like it. I think most people who didn't grow up on it prefer mayonnaise, but I don't. I don't know whether that's snobbery, that miracle whip is definitely perceived as being kind of downscale to mayonnaise. You don't make your own miracle whip. But so she she grows up on this, and then she gets married and moves to California, 3000 miles from anyone she knows, and she gets really so she has to start. First of all, my mom used to bake all the family's cakes, starting from the age of six. And if you think about how we treat kids now, versus how my mother, my grandmother, started cooking for the entire farm, which included several hired men and a lot more hired men at, you know, harvest and so forth. My grandmother started doing all of the cooking when she was 10. I did not do that, but I did grow up with my mom, who brought that kind of native interest and skill. But then, in the 60s, moves to California, gets into California food culture. This is when Alice Waters at Chez Panisse is revolutionizing West Coast cuisine by pointing out we have all of this fresh local produce. We should be using it. We shouldn't be making all of these complicated French sauces. We should be letting these raw ingredients shine. I think somewhat unfortunately, this then got imported to the east coast, where it didn't work as well, because you don't have access to that that caliber of produce, although I still do use many of her recipes. And when stuff is in season It's great. It's just there's not a lot in season in DC in November, and then she moves to New York, where it's even more so. She's taking classes with John Clancy, who is this fancy pastry chef, with Craig Claiborne. You know, they would do cooking classes, and you could sign up for them. And my mother is at home with a small child and needs a hobby, and that was her hobby. And so I grew up on this just kind of incredible amount of like, we made cakes together, we cooked together. That was what I did with my family. Every Christmas gift from my teens onward after when I was like 19, my mom got me my first KitchenAid, my first KitchenAid mixer. I'm actually now using hers because it's one of the old Hobart models. My mom died last year, so I've inherited her KitchenAid, and it's one of these are the original. This one's from 1959 I think, no 1966 it would be when they got married, and so we did all this stuff together. And what I've realized over the years, but I still like, kind of like my mom, who got out of her house knowing how to cook a lot of stuff, and then didn't know how to make a pie, because my grandmother had always done that. I had to teach myself a lot of stuff that my mother had always done. And I now, looking back over 30 years of cooking, realize how much tacit knowledge I have, and this becomes most apparent when I'm cooking with someone who's not related to me, and I have to explain stuff that's just obvious to me. I mean, the funniest example was when I was in grad school and we were baking for a bake sale with a group that I was in, and one of the people in my group said, Well, I know how to cook. What can I do? I was like, why don't you, we're making a cake - And I was like, why don't you just measure out the dry ingredients? And it turned around five minutes later, and she is staring confused at the measuring cup, because she doesn't actually know that when you are measuring dry ingredients, you have to do what's called dip, level, pour. So you scoop, and then you level it off with a knife so that it's perfectly level with the top of the measuring cup, and then you put it into your bowl. Now actually, these days, I use a scale rather than that, because it's actually a more accurate way to cook. But back then, that was what we had. It was the old days. And over the time, you acquire just a ton of tacit knowledge. For example, if you are reading a recipe for making custard, it will always say, almost always say, certainly, if it's an old recipe, that you should stir it until it coats the back of a spoon. Well, what does that mean, right? You can see, if you pull your spoon out of a thing of thin custard that hasn't set yet, you will see there is some custard on this back of the spoon, because it has been in liquid. And what it actually means, which they don't tell you, because they kind of assume you know, is that, what if you draw your finger through the custard, it should leave a line. If it doesn't leave a line, if it if it's still liquid enough to flow back in and cover the space, then it's not done yet. But you just accumulate a ton of that. And so I used to joke, you know, we rarely ate out until the last year, which has been kind of a harrowing year for my family and also an incredibly busy year professionally for both me and my husband, who cover politics, so we have, in the last year, started ordering a lot of takeout, just because we have had no time to cook. But you know, my normal life pre pandemic was that I would wake up and I would brown my meat, I would sear my vegetables, and then I would make a braise, and I would just let that go all day, and I would make my own bread, and I would do things that were my normal way of cooking, because that's how I grew up. And when the pandemic hit, and suddenly you couldn't get yeast and you couldn't get all this stuff, I was joking that, you know, the entire world was trying to adopt my lifestyle, and it was making it hard for me to live my lifestyle. What's interesting to me is that that doesn't seem to have endured, is that post pandemic, everyone seems to have basically just gone back to eating out all the time. And very few people, I don't talk to a lot of people, who say, Yeah, you know, I took up bread baking during the pandemic, and I'm still doing it. Or I started making my own pickles during the pandemic, and I'm still doing it, and that is somewhat surprising to me, but I think it speaks to the fact that this is becoming a more niche interest, that there's just some people who really love it. They love thinking about recipes. They love learning techniques. They love the activity of this very soothing activity of getting your mise en place ready and going everything through, and then most people don't, and they did it as a hobby, and they dropped the hobby when the hobby was no longer, when there were more interesting hobbies available.
Well, okay, so I have to say, you know, this whole idea that people don't cook, or they can't cook, I find it interesting, although I have met, okay, How old is she? She's just about, like, 10 years. No, maybe, like, actually, not even 10 years. Like six years. I have a friend. We're not in touch anymore, but we were friends for a while. She grew up. And I'm just gonna put it out there, she grew up very well off, like I'm saying lower upper class. That's about, that's how I describe her. You know, car dealerships rich. Let's put it that way.
Okay that it's pretty rich. Yeah, really rich. They are usually the, the richest person in smaller towns, they're usually the richest.
Yeah, exactly. And that's, that's, it's kind of her background, like, I think, like suburban St Louis, but that she's, she told me that she couldn't cook. And I was like, I just kind of shrug, because people just say that, you know, in terms of like usually people can, like, heat something up. Well, her boyfriend told me that, no no no, she really can't cook. And he told me a story where he because he did all the cooking, and he was like, because you just heat up some beans, and because he's like, you can, like, open a can, put in a saucepan and heat it up, right? Or put in a micro do whatever, and, like, he came home and she had put the can of beans on the stove. So when you're talking about tacit knowledge, like, yeah, like, you actually have to tell them, you open the can you pour it in, because they think you could heat it if she thought somehow you could heat it in the can.
I mean, I guess you could. I wouldn't recommend it. If you weren't careful, but I guess if you
Also, yes, I can cook, by the way. So my recently, well, okay, I think listeners know I've been living alone, so I've had to like, relearn certain things and get new furniture and all this stuff. But I've also been cooking for myself again. And, you know, I invited some friends over. I bought coasters and all these other you know, just I bought things that, let's just say, that I was not taking care of that aspect of my life for a couple of decades. And so I had some friends over -
That’s definitely lady thing, even my husband is actually very house proud, but I have procured all the coasters in our house.
Yeah, yeah. So just do some consulting with ladies. That is what I did. But in any case, I invited some friends over, you know, six friends over for dinner, and, like, I made all this food, and they were all, like, surprised. I'm just like, look, it's like, you know, I made some pasta, made some chicken breast, ymade some salad, you know, have some bread. Like, I mean, it's not that difficult, right? That's what I think. But people were like, pretty impressed. And, you know, I post on Instagram, they're like, Wow, I didn't know you had this in you. And I'm just like, what you think all I could do is seer steak? But, you know, I just think it's like, it seems like it's a common thing. And when my ex and I were a young couple, like we would cook together all the time, that seems like a normal thing. But maybe not today, I don't know, just because of convenience of everything.
So this, actually, I think, is a good lead in to our the original topic of this podcast, which we have flagrantly ignored, which is my kind of bugbear about people who post making fun of 50s or 70s food. And this is an entire genre, and it last came to my attention with there was some Trad wife who was saying she wanted to go back to the 50s. And people were saying, Don't you realize food in the 50s was terrible, but this long predates the political aspect of it. It's just a kind of reflex. And I think that you have to understand what was happening for those cooks before you can start making fun of them. And one of the big things that was happening for those cooks is you have to understand, if you were living outside of a pretty big city or a pretty big like an urban suburb, there was nowhere to get takeout. There wasn't an option. My grandfather would never eat pizza because he regarded it as a weird foreign food. I shouldn't say that he didn't regard it as a weird foreign food. He thought it was too spicy, and the only pizza in their town was a Pizza Hut. I am not talking about some sort of weird arabiata pizza but he had grown up with, not very spicy food. It disagreed with him and he didn't like it. It was strange, right? Because you have to understand, I forget whether it is Domino's or Pizza Hut, one of these two. I think it's Pizza Hut, one of these two chains. I believe it was founded in Kansas City. I watched, I watched an episode of a show that kind of tells you the story of various industries through the lens of two founding companies, and so I watched the pizza show obviously. They had read about pizza, but they had never had pizza because it was not a food that they knew where to get locally. So they decided to start a pizza restaurant, because pizza is really cheap to make, but because they've never had it, they basically just made up what pizza was like because they had no idea they'd never had one. And that, I think you have to understand that this was in I believe 1957 that that was America, in 1957 that there were all of these foods that people had just never had, but also it meant there's no takeout in your town. And so if you don't have takeout, if you don't have money to go to restaurants and food away from home, is a really new phenomenon. I mean, it's not new in that restaurants existed in 1930 but it's new as something that normal people do frequently. If you were growing up before, really, the 80s, maybe the 70s, going out to eat at a sit down restaurant was a big special occasion. This was something people did a few times a year. Maybe, right? Or they did it when they were traveling on vacation. But you did not every week go to a sit down restaurant because it was too expensive. It was a really minor part of most people's diets, especially if you're if you're taking out things like hamburger shacks, lunch counter, eating at a drug store, if you take those things out, there's just not a lot of food away from home. And that means that everyone has to cook, and everyone has to cook three meals a day, including people who don't like to cook. And there are a lot of people who don't like to cook. They certainly don't like to cook on that kind of volume and scale, right? They like to cook. Maybe they have one special dinner that they make, and they like to make that dinner for their friends, but they do not like to get up every morning and think, Okay, well, I better start chopping my vegetables, because we're having stew tonight, and then I'm gonna, you know, make some biscuits to go with it, and all the rest of it. They don't want their life to look like that. And so those women are still cooking. And one thing that has kind of dropped out of the American experience, and I've only experienced now in immigrant homes, is where there is still a norm of I cook three meals a day. Is women who do not like to cook and are not good at it still cooking. And so you get you get some pretty you know, we like to talk about the immigrant grandma and how amazing a cook she is. But there's also some immigrant grandmas who are not such amazing cooks, and they're still doing it, and you have to eat what they make, because that's the food there is. American women don't do that anymore. If you don't cook, you're doing prepared stuff. You're using high quality jarred sauce on pasta. You're doing you're not making something that's genuinely I spent - I just stewed some meat, and it's terrible. It's almost inedible. And that's a really normal experience if you read fiction from the 1930s and here is something else is, cooking was incredibly time consuming until about the 50s, for a bunch of reasons. You used to joke that a bride couldn't boil water. And funny, haha. But I mean, first of all, your can story. But second of all, think about what it meant to boil water before you had a gas stove with a thermostat or an electric stove. You have to know how to build a fire. You have to know how to keep the stove hot, right? There's all of these, like, actually technological, actually somewhat skilled labor that you have to do in just in order to boil water. And so if you read fiction from that era you will read a lot about going to the house for dinner of someone who is a terrible cook, or often having a landlady who's a terrible cook, because when cooking is that labor intensive, it is not practical to cook for yourself for a single person, right? So by one estimate, Georgia McCloskey, who is an economist who writes a lot about sort of changing living standards and so forth, estimates that in the early part of the 20th century, the average middle class household was spending 44 hours a week of labor just preparing food, and if you have to now, that is not
Razib: that's a that's a job, it's a job.
It's a full time job. Now, often the middle class households of that era would probably have a servant. So it's not necessarily that mom is doing all of that, and people who had, who didn't have a servant, we're probably making somewhat less elaborate food. That said, it is just incredibly labor intensive because all of the stuff we take for granted, from pre shelled nuts to pre sliced bread, you know, my my great grandmother, when pre sliced bread came out. When good enough commercial bakery bread became available in supermarkets in the 1920s she never baked bread again. She didn't like doing it, but you couldn't avoid it. You had to bake bread. If you did not bake bread, and again, unless you lived in a pretty big city and had access to a bakery, if you did not bake bread, you did not have bread. And so that level of labor intensity meant that one of the reasons that so many people in old novels are living in boarding houses is that it wasn't practical to get your own food until we get, first of all, more restaurants, and second of all, more technology that everything from canned soup to frozen vegetables to all of these things that we take for granted now and often look down on before those things, it's really hard. What do you make in a boarding house if it's 1850 hopefully, but eggs were really expensive. And one thing, even in 1953 a pound of eggs, a dozen eggs, cost more than a pound of ground beef.
Yeah, I saw, I think I don't know if you posted that or someone else posted that, but yeah, so eggs and chicken were luxuries
Yes and they were luxuries because basically, we're really mean to chickens now, first of all, breeding, but second of all, we're just they live in terrible conditions, and so, for example, I try to buy Certified Humane eggs, which at least give the you know, Peter Singer, the animal rights philosopher, argues that that's not good enough, that the Certified Humane label doesn't require enough humane treatment, but at least it requires some and it's and these days, it's a pretty cheap way you're going to pay, you know, five or $6 for a dozen eggs instead of $3 for a dozen eggs. And look, if that's going to break your budget, I'm not judging. I do the same for most people. If you are buying eggs already, it's a small thing, and it really does make a difference for the chickens. But anyway, these industrial farming techniques make chicken and eggs much less expensive. And so if you look even at my 1950 Betty Crocker picture cookbook, which is one of my favorite cookbooks, actually, I still cook out of it all the time. Some of the stuff is a little weird. I wouldn't eat it. But I've never dared, for example, to meet my husband at the door with a nice glass of hot clam juice, which is a thing they actually suggest you do
Okay like that literally sounds like a joke. Clam juice.
They're struggling a little bit because remember, prohibition has only been over for about 15 years. And so cookbooks before prohibition. So for the Fannie farmer cookbook, for example, which is, is probably the first - it's the first mass modern cookbook where you have standardized weights and measures, which is a really big innovation in the late 18th and late 19th and early 20th centuries. But a lot of the recipes are great, but they have these amazing so, for example, they're still talking about this is a great cake because it economizes on eggs, which is not a thought most modern bakers have. They'll also, they also have a recipe for mock drumsticks made out of veal, which, if you know the relative prices now seems totally insane, but those prices were in the 1950s chicken was expensive and beef was relatively cheap. And so those are big changes. And you just a lot of things have changed about our food supply chain. A lot of things have changed about how we cook. I haven't even gotten into kitchen technology, which has massively -
So, yeah. Speaking of that, I think one thing you know, I listened to, I know some of this, and partly it's, you just watch YouTubes about the 1950s about kitchen technology. And also, just like, the new foods and TV dinners and all these things. So things became so much easier. So much labor was saved. What we saw in the last generation, with the rise of hipsters. And the artisanal Cook is people actually reintroducing labor and time into the cooking process that people thought, you know, they were gonna abolish forever, like in the 1950s they were very excited. It was a very high class thing that you just, like heat up some pre prepared foods and like that's the future. That's what we're gonna live like in the year 2000 and then by the time we were growing up, it kind of had become, kind of like a little bit lower end, actually.
And that is actually a normal cycle in food, although I would say, I don't know if I would call TV dinners high class ever, but what they were was, again, imagine that you don't have a restaurant, you don't have takeout, and your kid has a pageant tonight at school well, and you've got a busy day running around, doing a bunch of stuff. What are you going to feed them? Right? For a woman in 1920 you always have to think, what are we going to feed them? There are not a lot of options. Sandwiches are basically the fast thing that you can feed them, but you can feed them, but you need to have something to put in the sandwiches, because, again, peanut butter is actually not that really. You know, it was a fairly late innovation, although was certainly around by the 1930s but having a dinner, you just pop into the oven, or you can tell the kids, I have to go to my club meeting. I'm going to play bridge, you just make yourself a TV dinner. That was a major improvement. We were lives. But there is this cycle where foods basically they start at the top, and then they move to the bottom, and then they become déclassé at the top. And the best example of this is jello. So if you look at a 19th century cookbook, gelatins are the bomb. And the reason that the people love them is the really hard to make in the 19th century. So think about what it takes to make gelatin. First of all, first commercial powder, gelatin is not introduced until late in the 19th century. So before that, what do you do? You have to make it from calves foot jelly, and which is a very laborious process and disgusting, because you got to strain it. You strain the scum off. It's a multi step process, and then you have to set it on ice, which not everyone had, because they didn't have refrigerators. So you had to have an ice box, or you had to have at least ice that you could put the mold on to set it, because otherwise it wouldn't set. And so there's other things you don't have to use capsule jelly. You can also use Irish Moss, or which there's a bunch of different -
I will say - Would it be correct for me to say jello was the molecular gastronomy of the 19th century?
It was a little bit. There were a bunch of things like that. So there were baking powder does not come until I want to say It's mid 19th century. I don't want to put a date on it. I can't - I think 1858 is Rumsfeld's first commercial baking powder. But I could be wrong about that. And actually that itself is major. So one of the interesting things, and I mentioned this at the beginning of the podcast. If you look at cookbooks from the 19th century, pie is way more dominant. And if you think about the phrase ‘as easy as pie’ now, if you ever tried to make a pie, and most people don't, because it's hard, and also because, if you don't do it right, it's bad. It's really bad. So the thing about pie crust is it's a very delicate thing, and if you overwork it, you're going to activate the gluten, and which is the protein and wheat. That protein and wheat, by the way, is what makes breadwise. So that's why you need it. You want to activate the gluten. When you add water to wheat, that you activate that protein, and then it forms these lattices. And the more you work it, the tighter the lattice gets, which is great if you are trying to make bread and you want that lattice to rise and fill with air as the yeast work in the oven. It's not so great if you want a delicate pastry. And so unless - and there's kind of a vicious cycle. Most people have never had good pie crust, and that is more and more apparent to me every year. They've never had it. You can't get it commercially. It's not economical to make good pie crust commercially, or it hasn't been. And so unless you have a good pie maker in your family, you don't even know what you're shooting for. So when they try, they don't do it right. Because, by the way, almost everyone screws up the first few times they make pie crust. Although, if you are interested, I recommend you can find on the serious eats website the cooks illustrated vodka pie crust recipe. It is nearly foolproof. Rolls out like Play Doh. It's great. It's a it's a wonderful beginner crust. And if you are interested in trying pie, that is where you should start. But so pie used to be the dominant form of dessert, because, and then, before the invention of baking powder, a cake is a something like a fruit cake, that's the that's the main form of cake, because the only way to get something to rise before baking powder, they had baking soda before that, it doesn't work all that well without help, so you get something like gingerbread, but you're not getting that super light, airy cake that we now think of as normal. The normal cake in the early 19th century is like a fruit cake, and it's only with baking powder that these or it is something like a babka. It's bread, basically, right? It’s a sweet bread that has been elaborate, yeasted cake. And then baking powder comes in, and new things become possible. Light cake becomes easy. Before that the only real kind of light cake is basically the way you get it is that you whip up egg whites and then you fold, gently, gently, gently fold flour into it. And the problem with that is it's before the rotary egg beater, which comes in in the late 19th century, that is really painfully labor intensive. It takes a long time, even with a copper bowl, like the French use will use a whisk in a copper bowl. Most people did not have copper bowls. So it's super super labor intensive. You have to be careful. It can screw up. And again, remember, ovens don't have thermostats, right? They used to make something called the try cake to see if the, which is just a little cake, to see if the oven is the right temperature. And little kids would get the try cake. And you know, these are fond memories from the 19th century. But all of that to say is cake was really hard, the kind of cake that we now think of as you just buy a mix, and it's great. That was actually really difficult before that technology came in. And so these, this series of inventions. First you have the baking powder. You have the rotary egg beater, the patented rotary egg beater, and then you start getting stand mixers, and that is a huge improvement. So suddenly you've got this huge technology shift where pi is also getting a little easier. For example, I make my crust in a food processor, and that recipe I recommended is also made in a food processor, but it's not getting easy as fast as cake is and so cake just starts to overtake pie. And now the phrase Easy as pie sounds crazy. Pie is hard for us. Cake is I can teach anyone with a stand mixer to make a decent cake in 15 minutes, um, almost come out correctly. I mean, even with it, with a hand mixer, it's a little bit more of a pain in the ass. But with a hand mixer, I can teach you to make a decent cake in a very short period of time. But pie, I really had to train with my mom to get my pie crust right, because it's just, it's it's more difficult. And so that technology shift has meant that everyone eats cake, and almost no one ever eats really good homemade pie.
Yeah, so, you know this whole stuff about pie I probably, I don't know if I've it, but what you're saying, I don't know if I really had a good pie crust then, because, you know, my family's from Bangladesh, and it's not a big baking culture, so my mom did not, she made some cookies before but like, really, she's not much of a baker, yeah.
Next time you’re in DC Razib, come by, and I'll make some pie.
So some of the things you're talking about, it's interesting in terms of technology, and also, just like, in terms of agricultural economics. So chicken used to be luxury good, you know, now it's cheaper. And actually, like, I don't like, I'm not gonna lie, I don't like chicken too much. Like, I mostly eat red meat, you know, that's just, that's, that's how I roll. But, you know, back in the day, it would be like, jello it would be like, this, this, ooh, this, like, exotic treat. And that's kind of like, you know, our palette is like, oh, like, we don't get this very often. And, like, what with cake, yeah, like, cakes are cheap to buy. It's, like, incredible. Like, my youngest, actually, he's really into carbs and breads and all these other things. And we asked him what he wanted to eat when he was, yeah, and he was, he said that, you know, he wanted to just eat cake. You know, just cake.
I am a big fan of cake. So the Gelatin, like to go back to jello. So jello follows a cycle where we get good powder gelatin, which is invented by Knox, and then we very quickly get jello which is flavored gelatin. You don't even have to bother like juicing something to flavor your gelatin, and you can just flavor it, and then people go wild with it. And I think it's a little bit like spices now, where there are a lot of people who just want more and more spice, because it's kind of a it's almost a prestige thing. How spicy food do I like et cetera. And I confess I am of a certain age and can no longer tolerate the capsaicin that I loved when I was younger, that people just go overboard. They have so many spices available now that would not have been available. They have so many mixes and so forth. And then you will eat sometimes at someone's house, and they're clearly like a teenage boy with Ax body spray, where they think, if a little is good, more is better, and they're just wildly overspicing things because they can, because they can afford to, first of all, spices used to be really expensive relative to incomes. And second of all, because it's a little, there's novelty there. And when something's novel, you tend to go wild with it. Well, the thing is that the more Midwestern potlucks have 90 jello salads on them, the more Dick Class A they get for wealthy people. And so now we look on jello as being this lower middle class, low status food. And I think that I'm going to actually argue that that's a mistake. I think there is a lot to be said for gelatin. For example, I will proudly stand for the ginger ale, orange jello, shredded carrot and crushed pineapple salad that I grew up on. It is a delicious, refreshing summer treat. It's easy to make, and it's fun. And I think that, you know, just saying, oh, jello salad. There are some bad jello salads. I would not eat jello salads that involve, like, chicken, and that was actually a thing that happened, unfortunately, in the 1950s but there are actually delicious jello salads out there and people, and they're easy, and you can just keep them in the fridge, and they're there you can they're convenient to have. It's got a little bit of protein. It's good for your nails. So I would like to see a jello resurgence. I think it deserves a comeback.
You know what would be great? You would be great like a book or a guide. So, okay, so for example, if I have a burger at Shake Shack, that is going to be a better burger than a burger and McDonald's, okay? And I think that that's just objective in terms of the quality of the meat. And I say, like -
Well what is the metric of better, right? If price, for example, is included, you might say McDonald's. I'm just
I’m gonna put out there that that Shake Shack isn’t expensive for me, like, I'll just say, do it, right? So, yeah, like, but, I mean, it's just, it's on the margin, it's like, for the prices, it's definitely like, that's what I'm gonna go for, right? But there are other things, like, I think jello. I actually haven't had jello in a very long time, but I did have a lot when I was a kid, this jello salad that you're talking about, you know, I think there are foods that are cheap, that are still good, but we don't eat them as adults, because they had some sort of weird class association or something kids eat. I think there needs to be kind of just a list of foods where, if you're not, like, if you don't want to be subject to social pressure, like, you should just eat these foods, because even though they're not prestigious, they're actually very good foods.
Or they're just gone out of fashion. So when citrus, when California citrus becomes available, a big thing that people would do that seems strange to modern ears is they would broil grapefruit. They would cut a grapefruit in half, and they would sprinkle it with sugar, and then they would stick it under the broiler. And this sounds really weird. It's also actually kind of good. You can put a little brandy on it. You can get fancy stick a little maraschino cherry in the center. But again, this, this became a kind of ubiquitous, sort of like raspberry vinaigrette. Does anyone remember raspberry vinaigrette? If you were old enough, you will have gone through America's great raspberry vinaigrette phase. Now, because I lived in Manhattan, I went through it earlier than most people, because a lot of food things start either in California or Manhattan, and then they kind of percolate out through smaller cities, places a little farther from the coasts. Although that cycle has really sped up. It used to be like a 20 year cycle, and now it's more like a five year cycle, I think, in part, food, TV, books, et cetera. But so, you know, raspberry vinaigrette, it was fine. It wasn't nearly as good as everyone when it was totally ubiquitous. It was like, Could I have a salad that does not have raspberry vinaigrette on it? But now you look at that and you're like, Oh, I'm an Applebee's and that that kind of cycle just has always happened with food, just as it does with clothes, because food is a way that we express our individuality. It's also a way that we connect to our past, right? But certainly, since the advent of cookbooks and the advent of travel, food is a way, you know, you go on vacation, you come back home with a new recipe. One of my favorite books is a book called Victorian cakes. It was written in 1940 and it is by a woman who grew up in Chicago in the 1880s and she also, by the way, wrote the book that gave rise to meet me in St Louis, the movie, and she just talks about her childhood with her sisters and all the cakes they made. And one of the things, one of the stories in the book, is about the time that someone else came back from, I don't know, New York with a recipe for cream puffs. And no one had ever heard of choux pastry, which is the kind of pastry that cream puffs are made out of, and and by the way, choux pastry is a really, really, really weird thing. You mix it up, you put water in, and then you let it sit, and then you pipe it. And if you've never done it, you look at this recipe, you're like, This is not possibly going to work. And it does. It's a very eggy recipe, and the food science is interesting of why this works, but so, of course, she does it wrong, because she's got, first of all, no standardized measures. The the recipe is just a list of ingredients. But that was a common experience. People going on vacation somewhere, which they didn't do that often, but when they did, they would bring back, oh, I got Mrs. Whatever's recipe for biscuits or whatever. And that is how that diffusion, it is a status thing. And so we're always kind of seeking something new that will make us the best cook around, that will wow our friends, like your chicken and pasta. And so you're always going to get some of these cycles of new things come out, everyone wants to try them. They overdo them, and then, you know, 10 years later, everyone's sick of it. Beef Stroganoff is a good example of this. It was once the most ubiquitous thing. Fondue was another one. Fondue was delicious, yeah, never delicious, but somehow it gets really big in the 60s and 70s, and then no one does it for 30 years, and then it comes back. But, I mean, this is a good reason to read old cookbooks, because there's a bunch of stuff in there that you can mine that for whatever reason didn't come back, not because it wasn't delicious, it just didn't catch on again. And you should definitely be on the lookout for those things. There's a lot of neat stuff that was happening. I agree that there was a lot of stuff that looks really weird to mine. And eyes that wasn't so good. I myself, really do not like anything made with canned soup mix, or canned soup or, sorry, Lipton soup mix.
You can't have sodium. You can't even have it now, right? With the blood pressure,
And I then have to offset by, mostly, how I try to manage my sodium is not by never eating anything high sodium. I'm in a hotel right now, I'm traveling. I am not going down to the restaurant in the hotel and saying, you know, do you have anything that you haven't put too much salt? No, Is the answer. Everything has too much salt in it. I can't. I never liked it. I didn't like it before my blood pressure got high that I don't like the taste of it. There's some undertaste to all of these, like the McCormick slow cooker mixes all of that stuff. I think it's MSG, which I don't object to from some sort of theoretical but I think they use too much of it, and I don't like it. So I wouldn't - but you know what, if you like chicken breast cooked in canned cream of mushroom soup, you should make that, and you should and if it is better than what you could produce, because you're not necessarily a huge cook. Great. Use it. I'm a big fan of people just making stuff they like to eat and eating it. I frequent. A thing that I will frequently do is, if I left ever rice, I will have cheesy rice for dinner, which is literally, I put cheese on top of the rice, I put it in the microwave, I put some salsa on it, and that is my dinner. Everyone has simple comfort food that they like, and there's nothing wrong with that. I think they the whole idea of food as being as sort of saying something about who you are, or being a way to impress people. That's not the way you should think about food. You shouldn't think about what does this thing say about me as you're eating it? You should eat it because it's delicious and you're enjoying it. And if what you think is not what I think is delicious, that's fine. I like, I have no judgment. Gustibus non est disputandum
So, a lot of this discussion has kind of, like gone over - has like, alluded to choice and just like the kind of the plenitude and the diversity that we live in the world that we live in, actually, like I just out of curiosity, I've never done this before, but I put in chat GPT create a recipe that mixes Cantonese as a Swedish cuisine. And they created a recipe for Cantonese, Swedish Swedish fusion, steamed meatballs with lingonberry glaze. So I think
Although I will say I've actually played around with trying to get GPT to create recipes. And let us just say that it’s very fast and loose. I tried to get it to make me I was trying to make I had an idea for something that there is no existing recipe for, and it was a Charlotte Russe is Bavarian cream inside a kind of circle of ladyfingers, often on a base of ladyfingers. And I wanted to make a chocolate passion fruit one for New Year's a couple years ago. And so I tried to get GPT to come up with the recipe for the chocolate layer. So Bavarian Cream is a it's a custard, but it has gelatin in it. So I looked at the amount of gelatin, I was like, boy, that seems high but let's give it a try. It was like, rubber. I had made chocolate rubber. So the recipe is, it's weird, because it kind of, sometimes they're fine, and sometimes there is something critically off, and you should be careful before you - but I think like a berry glaze does sound delicious.
This could be like, you know, those images with, like six fingers.
Exactly. You can very easily get a six fingered recipe from GPT.
Well. So one thing, let me just ask you, because I've wondered about this, you know, I've had, friends over like, I have, like, a space my dining table for six, comfortably, six people. And so I've had like, six people over quite often. And one thing that maybe this is a modern thing, so we have this diversity of things we can cook, you know, and I have a bunch of actually, haven't used all of my food processors and all these other things. I haven't used all them because I mostly don't. I don't like bake and I don't like cook complicated things, but just in case, I have them, you know, okay, but the dietary restrictions that people have today, I mean, I'm not thinking that this was a thing 100 years ago, right? In terms of like, Oh, I'm a vegan, oh, this or that, I can't eat spicy. I can't. I only eat spice, I don't know, whatever,
I mean, look, there were always people who they couldn't eat onions because they disagreed with them, right? Or they didn't like them. There were always people like that. But I think the perfusion of special diets, it starts on the it seems to start on the left - gluten, well before that vegetarianism, right, which was seen as weird in the United States, to be clear, not obviously, like in India, but that it starts on the left. Well, actually, I shouldn't say that. It really starts with Kellogg. So the people who make your cereal that was actually started by a dude who founded a sanitarium and had some strange ideas about food. And there's a whole movement of these people. So graham crackers are made with graham flour, which is another thing invented by one of these food guy named Graham he's a food reformer. He thinks, for whatever reason, that you should roast wheat before you cook with it. This, I mean, it makes it taste interesting. It does not have health benefits. So, and the funniest part is that somehow this got hooked into the temperance movement, and the temperance movement decides that - there's a wonderful graphic I just saw recently - that if you are eating too much rich food, you're going to become an alcoholic. I have no idea how this got started. And for all I know, a taste for sweets is correlated with being alcohol. It doesn't seem entirely crazy that there might be some marginal propensity there of like people who like sugar also like the sugar in alcohol, but I think it is obviously not but it was great. It showed a mother standing at the top of the stairs with her child, and each stare is labeled with like, um, snacks between meals, excessively rich pastry, coffee and tea drinking. And then at the bottom is, you know, drunkenness and despair. And that was real. They really thought that way. So, um, there were, there were a few health nuts who had these things going on even then, obviously, if you're staying in a sanitarium, you're pretty rich. But it really gets going partly in the 60s, because we do start putting people on medical diets that make sense. Now, most people's blood pressure is not salt sensitive, and unfortunately, mine is. I tested this. I basically started, I basically took all the salt out of my diet. If you have hypertension, this is a good thing to do, because if your hypertension is not salt sensitive, there's not really much reason to cut your salt out. But I took, I basically took all of the salty foods out of my cooking. So by the way, most salt that we eat comes from prepared and processed foods, especially soups, salty snacks or something, but like, shockingly, Fritos have less sodium than, like, a frozen meal. So if you're going to choose between one of the two, eat a bag of Fritos. So I tried this, my blood pressure dropped, and I was like, This is sad, but I'm going to have to start cooking more and and really cut back on the salty processed foods. But so people start going on low salt diets, because it helps their risk of stroke and heart attack. People start going on low fat diets. They are dieting more because food abundance means that more people are gaining weight. And so it really kicks off then, and yeah, now the problem, I think partly, is the internet. It used to be you would get one fat at a time, right? So one person was on Atkins, or a lot of people were on Atkins, and for a few years, you just had to serve steak. But now all the corners of the internet have different stuff that you could have a dietary thing about, and it has really caused it's also the level of allergies really has risen. So I have a dear friend who is, for example, allergic to nuts, and I remember racing through a party when she arrived, when I belatedly realized I'd put a little almond extract in my pound cake, and be like, don't eat the pound cake. Yeah. But a lot of it is, it's not clear to me that the that most people who think they're gluten intolerant are, there's a lot of self diagnosis of these things
Well, so now I'm like - you're talking about the political aspect of it, you know, MAHA make seed oils bad. So there's a whole - I'm from Oregon. It used to be a thing. Well, actually, I'm vegan, because ethical, you know. So it used to be more my, okay, liberal, you know, socially or whatever, conscious friends. And now I have issues where, like, you know, right wingers are just like, well, you know, seed oils, what you know, micro plastics, you know this, and now that eating like Gwyneth Paltrow was eating 20 years ago, yeah, macrobiotics, Whole Foods only.
And look, I think - I, for example, do actually have some concerns about the amount of plastic in our food supply, and I now try to buy stuff in glass bottles rather than plastic, because, you know, it's probably not going to kill me. But on the margin, also, stuff tastes better when it's not in plastic. There is, I think, for example, if you drink a can of soda and then you drink a plastic bottle of soda, the can of soda tastes better to me. I think there's a level of you can be insane about it, or you can try to judiciously judge it without going overboard. I don't self diagnose myself with various disorders I could have. And I think gluten a lot of these things. The problem is that it's tied up with our cultural desire to be thin. And by the way, I totally have that same cultural desire. I'm not judging. But so people will do these restrictive diets, and they will lose weight because you've just taken a bunch of the high calorie food out of your diet, and they will attribute it to the magic of low carb or gluten free or whatever. And the thing is that would then have a cycle of this and what happens in the second stage of this cycle is like a new diet has come out, and people do lose weight on it, and then a whole industry gets busy trying to hack the diet to allow you to have all the stuff that you took out, because it's not in your diet, right? I can't have pastries. I can't have cookies because I'm on Atkins, but now there's Atkins cookies, and I can have all the ones of those I want. And then slowly, you know, over time, you have hacked it to the point where it's no longer really a diet. And it doesn't work that well because you aren't restricting foods,
Calories in, calories out.
I actually don't believe in calories in calories out. And I wish we had more time to talk, but I have to go do another interview. But I think it is very clear now from the science of human metabolism, two things, number one, that calories in, calories out is simplistic, because your body has a bunch of different ways to tune how efficiently it's using energy, and it will if you lose more weight, if you get below the the weight that your body wants to maintain
Razib: set point,
yeah, your set point. Um, it will start tuning things so that the calories that come in actually put more fat on you, because your body is trying to store fat for bad times, and it's doing what it makes sense on the African plane, uh, not so much for what makes sense amid the abundance that we have. But I think the other thing that people really down weight and then discover it when they go on certain drugs, for example, that can massively increase your appetite, is that hunger is a biological signal on par with pain. And if you think about evolution, your whole system is optimized to make sure you don't starve to death. And it has to be, because, you know, when we talk about calories in, calories out - the food that food labeling is not that accurate. And you know, within things like everything, like flour or anything else, there's natural variations in how much calories a given pound of it has. And so if you went over by just 10 calories a day, you would gain significant weight in the course of a year, and you would gain really significant weight over the course of 20 years. So if you think about how finely tuned our body has to be to keep us from starving, it's not that you just count the calories and now you're set your body is fighting to make you hungry when it feels like there's not enough food coming in, and the more you restrict, the more it gets like that. So there's a great story about POW camps, where people are being on a restricted calorie diet, German POWs in World War Two. And one of the one of the quotes about this was, if you imagine a group of 20 year old men who have all stopped talking about chasing tail and are now just all swapping recipes, right? That's what happens to you when you're food restricted, is that the only thing you can think about is food. And again, that's really evolutionarily sound. That is how we survived. But the thing about that is that if you're someone with a high set point, it means that if you try to diet to get down to a normal weight, you can do it for a few months, but your body is like, whoa, whoa. We are not safe. Go get more food. Go get more food. And then over time, it is just totally insistent. And look, I was really skinny until I hit, you know, my 40s. Now I'm just basically a normal 40 year old woman, but it was clear to me that my friends who struggled with their weight were having experiences I didn't have. So I remember a friend, we'd been out, we'd had ice cream, we'd been going around, and, you know, we'd had a big lunch. And then we got back, and I was staying with her, and she was like, oh, let's order pizza. And I said, Well, you go ahead. I'm not hungry. And so she ordered the pizza, and then she's eating. And I was sitting there talking to her, she looks at me, she's like, are you really just gonna sit here and not eat? I said, Well, I'm not hungry, and that was not an experience she'd ever had. And that's just, you know, so when you're moralizing, oh, these people just need to cut their calories. It's nearly impossible for a normal person to maintain that level of willpower for that long. And I think we're seeing this ozempic is the perfect proof, right? What ozempic is doing is changing how people's minds think about food. It is cutting down all that says we need food. We need food. We need food. Go get food. Go food, right? And so I think I'm glad to see that, just as I was, I'm glad to see people who have gone on steroids or certain psychiatric medications suddenly understand that that incessant, insistent hunger, and also the fact that their body starts just trying to hold on every calorie that all the stuff they were saying for years and moralizing at fat people was just totally unfair. What's going on this is it is not primarily about you being a good person who made that decision to eat good it is primarily about what's going on and like the deep, dark, reptilian parts of your brain that you don't have much control over
I do have to say, one of the positive aspects of the rise of trans is, you know, women that go on testosterone. Wait, why am I such a violent pervert now?
Yeah, right? That discourse has been really interesting to me, right? When people transition, and they take hormones, they suddenly understand that stuff that we have talked about as cultural is at least - cultural conditioning is at least partly no actually these hormones again, and this makes total sense, because we evolved reproduction, another one of those really important biological signals, and your body has evolved to give you very strong signals about what it wants you to do to reproduce and of both our sex hormones affect how we think, just like all our other hormones affect how we think, because that's how we think, is how we do things. And your body with all those hormones, in many cases, is trying to get you to do stuff that is Pro Evolution, pro survival, pro reproduction.
Well I have to say a lot of my friends, actually, a lot of people that I know I'm trying to lose weight right now, my pandemic weight, but they're like, trying to pressure me to do ozempic. This is the heaviest I've ever been. A lot of them are doing ozempic. There's actually a lot of, as you know, it's been reported the press, a lot of behavioral changes for people doing ozempic here's one example. I have a friend, and she has Spotify account, and she realized recently that, after she got on ozempic she hasn't listened to Spotify.
Whoa yeah. And then there are people who Stop gambling. They stopped drinking. There's all of these behavioral things because, again, you know your body evolution is not like an engineer. Evolution is this weird discovery process. And the upshot is, but it's over time. It's borrowing and refining, and so a lot of a lot of our systems have these weird interlocks where evolution, I don't want to talk about evolution, you know, as a deliberative process, but the evolutionary process borrowed something that was doing something else and repurposed it to also do something else within your body, right? Because it was already there. And it's a lot easier to evolve a system that's already - evolve, a system that's already there to do something else than it is to start de novo and evolve something from scratch, and you can tell me if I'm I'm being wrong,
I would jump in and tell you if you were wrong.
So that right? So yes, a lot of these things are cross linked, because these systems have multi purposes. They have been repurposed over and over and over again. And so I think it's going to be fascinating to watch. I have a kind of feeling that we're all going to be on GLP1s in, uh, in 10 years, just because, like, it's like, the cure for everything. It makes you live longer. I mean, the alternative is that this is the radium of the 21st century.
Yeah, I'm feeling like, how people felt about plastics. Initially there was like, oh, it's like, so miraculous. And, you know, all this stuff. And, you know, I wonder what the there's going to be big social effects and I think we’re living a big experiment. But you know with the way food is you know, that's just, that's just a reality. So it was great talking to you. Finally we got to talk to about food after our traditional thing. And I guess I will see you in DC and I catch up over Szechuan next time.
I certainly hope so. Anyway, thank you for having me, and as Always, an enormous pleasure.
