transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] I founded Cook's Magazine back in 1980. In the last, well, 45 years, I've never had the chance to speak openly and frankly about the food world, recipes, travel and food celebrities. That is until now. My new sub stack allows me to speak directly to you, to home cooks, including my own personal recipes, cooking, food science, Vermont, as well as what I'm watching and reading. Plus, I will be interviewing culinary stars to find out what they are really like. Paid subscribers get exclusive recipes, some from my travels, others from my own personal repertoire. Founding members get those recipes, plus direct access to me personally, plus a tote bag and a signed copy of the Milk Street Cookbook. So go subscribe at christopherkimball.substack.com. One more time, christopherkimball.substack.com. Thanks to our friends at SHIP for sponsoring this episode. In the kitchen in the middle of a recipe, same-day delivery from a supermarket can be a beautiful thing. SHIPP offers same-day delivery and groceries, but they also deliver decor, gifts and so much more from your favorite local and national stores. Personal shoppers with SHIP shop your favorite store same day, and by the way, they know the difference between cilantro and parsley, almond milk and oat milk. You can even text one-on-one with your shopper to fulfill special requests or to get exactly what you want. Plus SHIP members can place as many orders as they want and pay zero dollars in delivery fees with orders over $35. If you love to cook and are missing a key ingredient, you run out of flour or maybe cocoa powder, SHIP can get it to you the same day so you don't have to run to the store. With SHIP, it's never just a delivery order, it's shopped same day in the same way you would. Use code PODCAST to get a year of SHIPPED for only $49. That's half off the regular $99 price at SHIPPEDCOM slash offer. That's SHIPPEDCOM slash offer, term supply.

Speaker 2:
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Speaker 1:
[02:34] This is Milk Street Radio from PRX. I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. How do we create a food system that feeds the world and keeps us healthy? Well, for the last few years, all we've heard is that processed foods are the problem. But our guests today say that processed foods may actually be the answer.

Speaker 3:
[02:53] Rather than shunning all of this industrial processed food and saying that it's all evil, you got to start from scratch, throw it all out. We want to say, actually, are there policy levers to improving processed food? If there are, it seems to us in aggregate that's a much better way to go.

Speaker 1:
[03:10] Can industrial farming save us? That's coming up later in the show. But first, we'll learn about the hidden cookies of Italy with cookbook author Domenica Marchetti. Domenica, welcome to Milk Street.

Speaker 4:
[03:23] Hi, Chris. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1:
[03:26] So, the first thing that struck me is that Italian cookies have a past, they have a history, they have cultural references, they're regional. Whereas American cookies tend to be something you just eat. They don't really have much of a story. Is that right?

Speaker 4:
[03:45] Yes. I mean, I'm sure there are American cookies that have a story. But in Italy, this is the case for the majority of cookies. And it is one of the reasons I fell down this rabbit hole and decided to pursue the book. Because I was chasing down a cookie in Liguria, a butter cookie that I really enjoyed. And being the reporter that I am, I drove up to the town where this cookie, the Canestraletto di Toriglia, originated. And I found out that it dated to the 15th century. And there's a festival around it in the town. There are at least eight bakeries that are devoted to producing this cookie. And then the more I looked into things, the more I learned that there are many towns across Italy, and especially there's a swath of the north from Liguria, through Piedmont and Lombardy and on to the Veneto, where there are so many towns that are associated with a cookie, or cookies associated with towns. And I really wanted to find out their stories.

Speaker 1:
[04:54] So let's get to some of the cookies with the stories. So the Eyes of St. Lucie. These are pretty brutal beginnings. You want to just talk about that?

Speaker 4:
[05:06] Yeah. So these are cookies that are baked to celebrate the Festa di Santa Lucia. So Occhi di Santa Lucia means the Eyes of St. Lucie. And so her story is rather gruesome. She was, I think, a fourth century saint and one of the first early Christian martyrs, according to some versions of her story. During the Diocletian persecutions, she had her eyes gouged out as punishment for refusing to renounce her Christian faith. Another version holds that she gouged out her own eyes to avoid being distracted from her devotion to her faith by would-be suitors. At any rate, the cookies are maybe the size of a quarter. They're these very small little taralli, little rings. And the cookie is a very old-fashioned dough. There's no sugar in it, just olive oil, wine, flour, and anise seed, and a little touch of cinnamon.

Speaker 1:
[06:09] Why would someone add wine to dough? Is this wine that's been simmered down into a thicker syrup, or what's the point of adding wine to dough?

Speaker 4:
[06:20] I really love wine cookies. You know, rather than milk, which has fat in it, wine contributes to a nice crispiness. I'm thinking of the ciambellini di vino, which are very popular. And they're just great crunchy cookies that are good for dipping in more wine. And so you see those all across the south. But it's just, I think, probably the fact that wine is produced in these regions. And so if you're celebrating the harvest or whatever, you kind of use what you have on you.

Speaker 1:
[07:00] Brutti ma buoni, ugly but good. What are those?

Speaker 4:
[07:04] You know, their origins are a little bit murky. But what I love about these cookies is the interesting technique used to make them, which is you make this billowy meringue with with egg whites and sugar. Then you transfer it to a saucepan and you cook it down until it's this gooey, thready, sticky mixture. And you think, I've completely ruined these. I don't know what I've done. But you press on. And what you end up with is these beautiful sort of, they're not ugly. First of all, I was going to say, they're not ugly. I find they're beautiful.

Speaker 1:
[07:42] Then why do they call Brutti?

Speaker 4:
[07:46] Because they're sort of bumpy. They've got bumps from the nuts. They've got cracks in them. But they also have this lovely sheen and this kind of carapace and they're crunchy on the outside and a little bit airy and tender on the inside. And they have this lovely fragrance and spice to them. It makes them kind of beguiling. I really love those.

Speaker 1:
[08:08] Central Italy, you say this is in a renaissance spices, ancient grains, olive oil, wine, almonds. So what would be a good example? The spiced honeydew?

Speaker 4:
[08:21] Yeah, the Pupazze Frascatane, definitely an interesting cookie. This is from another town in the Castelli Romani outside of Rome, from Frascati, which is better known for its wine. This is a cookie shaped as a buxom woman, but her most distinctive feature is that she's got three breasts. So she is meant to symbolize women called mammane, who traditionally they would watch over babies while the mothers went to work in the vineyards harvesting grapes in the fall. And so the three breasts are supposed to symbolize, well, obviously two for milk. And the third one was for wine, because the babies were allegedly given little nips of wine with milk to keep them sleepy while their mothers worked.

Speaker 1:
[09:14] That has to be the best piece of quasi-Roman mythology of all time.

Speaker 4:
[09:19] Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1:
[09:20] Two milk, one for wine.

Speaker 4:
[09:21] But I will tell you, they are not very good. And they're not really meant to be. They're actually, they give them to babies for teething. I rejiggered the recipe because I wanted to make them edible and pleasant. So it's a very basic dough with honey in place of sugar, extra virgin olive oil, all-purpose flour and then some spices.

Speaker 1:
[09:45] This is a rather indelicate question. But how do you know she has three breasts?

Speaker 4:
[09:50] Oh yeah, the cookie has three little balls of dough right on her chest. Yes, they're right there, prominent. My mother used to cover the ones she made with a little strip of dough, so they looked like they had a little bousdié on. And I have further made them a little more, I don't know, anatomical by sticking little cloves in them. So that's optional.

Speaker 1:
[10:17] So you had mentioned many of these little bakeries are sometimes hundreds of years old. Three or four generations or more have been making the cookies and other things there. Is that changing now or can you still go to small towns and find those little bakeries that have been around forever?

Speaker 4:
[10:36] You can really still go to small towns and find these bakeries. And that was one of the things that I found so surprising. I went to Casale Monferrato, it's the name of the town, and the cookies are crunchy butter cookies that are kind of U-shaped. I found the bakery where the cookies were invented in the late 1800s by a man named Domenico Rossi. And the story behind these cookies is he created them one night on the fly to serve his friends who had stopped by his cafe. And their U-shape is supposed to refer to either as an homage or a spoof of the big bushy mustaches of Umberto I, who was king of the recently unified Italy. And when I went there, I expected to see this big kind of state of the art operation. Instead of, it's this little jewel of a shop with dark wood paneling, and the current owner, whose grandparents bought the bakery back in 1953, she's now elderly herself. And she took me to the back room where the baking happens. And it's just a couple of bakers back there. And one of them was standing over a baking sheet of these one by one, turning them into this moustache-shaped U by hand. And I just couldn't believe that they were still doing this manually. So to me, one of the most beautiful things about this book was, I realized how much the human touch is still so important to these cookies, and so much a part of the cookie baking tradition in Italy.

Speaker 1:
[12:23] Domenica, thank you so much. I'm craving to go back to Italy and visit some of the places you've talked about in your book. It's been a pleasure.

Speaker 4:
[12:31] Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[12:35] That was Domenica Marchetti, author of Italian Cookies. Now it's time to answer your cooking questions with my co-host, Sara Moulton. Sara is, of course, the star of Sara's Weeknight Meals on Public Television, also author of Home Cooking 101.

Speaker 5:
[12:51] So, Chris, before we take a call, I recently learned something that was fascinating. I took a wine tasting class and the woman who ran the class had like eight different little containers with different things to smell aromas. You could see if you found that aroma in the wines we were tasting. But she started the whole class by saying, our sense of smell is one of our strongest and best senses that we have. She asked us, what is the creature on the earth that has the strongest sense of smell? Do you know?

Speaker 1:
[13:25] Is there a money prize, cash prize here?

Speaker 5:
[13:27] Who knows? Who knows? A bottle of limoncello just for you. No, just joking.

Speaker 1:
[13:32] Well, I do know that like a bloodhound or whatever, their sense of smell is 10,000 times more sensitive than ours or something like that. It's probably the wrong answer. It's going to be something like some three cell animal that lives in the ocean or something. But I would say a dog of some kind.

Speaker 5:
[13:50] Dog is two. One, and you were getting there with something that lives in the ocean. Shark can smell a teaspoon of blood two miles away. Then number three, best sense of smell is us humans. Essentially, what she was saying is you could end up at the end of your life deaf, dumb and blind, but you will still have your sense of smell.

Speaker 1:
[14:12] I think the problem is, and the scientists I've talked to have said, that the problem is not smelling, the problem is recognizing odors.

Speaker 5:
[14:22] Because we have so many.

Speaker 1:
[14:23] And people have a terrible time recognizing. I've had people actually with cinnamon and nutmeg on stage, blindfolded with it, and they can't tell you what it is.

Speaker 5:
[14:35] I get that.

Speaker 1:
[14:35] And so I think humans, that's why if you do a lot of tastings over time, you get better at it because you need practice. I think we're terrible at identifying odors. Maybe we're good at sensing them. You have to connect it in your brain with what it is.

Speaker 5:
[14:53] The problem is as we grow, we smell way too many things, so it all gets confused. But I mean, essentially what she was saying is at least you will have that. And sometimes some of it, you know, like back to the Madelins and Proust, does make an impression and it brings back all sorts of memories in a very interesting way. I don't know. I love the whole conversation. The wine tasting itself, yeah, was interesting, but that whole thing about you'll still have your sense of smell, I thought was pretty cool.

Speaker 1:
[15:21] So that's what I look forward to. I'm going to be blind. I can't hear. I can't walk, but I can still smell coffee in the morning.

Speaker 5:
[15:27] Hey, that's something.

Speaker 1:
[15:29] That's an upbeat note. Let's take a call.

Speaker 5:
[15:31] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[15:32] Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling?

Speaker 6:
[15:34] This is Stephen from Dedham, Massachusetts.

Speaker 1:
[15:36] How are you?

Speaker 6:
[15:38] I'm well. Thanks for taking my call.

Speaker 1:
[15:40] Yeah. Pleasure. Pleasure. How can we help you?

Speaker 6:
[15:42] So I come from an Italian-American family. We do the tomatoes every summer, and I finally convinced my dad to make our own wine. We get the wine from the same place we get the tomatoes. There's a big debate because some of the old school guys get the grapes and crush them themselves, but other guys get just the juice. So they crush it on-site in California, put it in six-gallon food-safe buckets, and then we buy the buckets. So I'm wondering if there's actually a qualitative difference and is the difference related to sulfites, which I never really understood, but I think it gives me a headache, but I'm not sure exactly. I have those two related questions.

Speaker 1:
[16:24] Well, when you crush grape, the juice sits on the skins and you get all sorts of wonderful things happening. So just the juice, depending on how they got the juice, probably is going to give you a thinner wine with less body and interest, I would think, but it would depend on the process. Sulfites are just there to make sure that the wine doesn't spoil after ferments. And naturally speaking, the yeast in the wine does produce sulfur dioxide, so there's always going to be some there, but it's a safety issue. You don't want it to go bad. I agree with you, however, I remember years and years and years ago, I went to Paris and had a long lunch with a great deal of red wine. And normally, more than a glass or two would give me a real headache, and I had no bad effects whatsoever. And I found that to be true. I don't know what the answer is, but there is a difference.

Speaker 6:
[17:16] One of the reasons why I wanted to make our own wine is because I have the same experience. When I go to Italy or Greece, especially if you get like the house wine, I don't know if it's less alcoholic, but it has less of that bite than the bottle stuff. And it never seems to give me a headache. I mean, part of it could be done in Italy or Greece, and so the stress is much lower, but...

Speaker 7:
[17:34] That could be it.

Speaker 5:
[17:35] Something about the location.

Speaker 6:
[17:37] Well, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[17:38] I mean, you can buy natural wines, right? You have to kind of get used to them because I think they tend to not have the depth sometimes of non-natural wines. But it also depends how the grapes are grown and what they're putting on the fields and everything else that may also affect the chemicals used in growing the grapes. But I agree with you. I have much less of a bad effect when I'm in Europe, it's true.

Speaker 6:
[18:02] Well, we made it back in October. So I will admit when I siphon it off, I do take a taste. And it does taste pretty good. It tastes more similar to the kind of house, you know, trattoria stuff that I'm used to in Italy.

Speaker 1:
[18:16] I just want to say in support of what you're doing, this idea of connoisseurship around wine and spending all this money. I mean, that's fine. But most people in the world, in Europe, drink relatively inexpensive wines and they're quite good. And I think there's nothing wrong with that. And the fact that you guys did it yourselves is phenomenal. So good for you. Sara, do you have any?

Speaker 5:
[18:35] No, I don't have much. I've never made wine. And, you know, maybe you need to plan a trip to Italy to go to a winery and see if you could spend like a week there and see what they do.

Speaker 6:
[18:46] That sounds like a perfect idea.

Speaker 1:
[18:47] I do have one recommendation, though, a neighbor of mine. He used to make dandelion wine. So if you ever get the urge to make dandelion wine, please don't because I've never had it.

Speaker 5:
[18:58] What does it taste like?

Speaker 1:
[18:59] Oh my God. It's almost like a liqueur. It's very sweet.

Speaker 5:
[19:02] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[19:03] And it will give you the worst hangover.

Speaker 5:
[19:05] Well, tie in alcohol, I'm sure.

Speaker 1:
[19:07] It's just awful.

Speaker 5:
[19:08] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[19:08] But anyway, it sounds like it sounds like you're way ahead of it. Like a limoncello. Yeah, like limoncello. Could someone? Okay. Now I'm going to irritate everyone. Don't worry. Everyone in Malfi is going to hate me. I don't get limoncello. I just don't understand it.

Speaker 5:
[19:21] You don't get any sweet drinks.

Speaker 1:
[19:23] It's a syrupy sweet.

Speaker 6:
[19:25] It's very sweet. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[19:26] I mean, do you like it? Stephen, come on. Help me out here.

Speaker 6:
[19:29] I like the idea of it, but it does give you a good headache. Oh, yeah. If you weren't already on the way to a headache, it'll get you there.

Speaker 1:
[19:36] It'll get you to the finish line.

Speaker 5:
[19:37] High in alcohol. Anyway, I say go to Chianti and learn from them.

Speaker 6:
[19:41] That sounds perfect. Yeah. And how about cooking with the homemade stuff? Why not?

Speaker 5:
[19:47] No, I don't see any difference.

Speaker 1:
[19:48] Just be sure to always cook it down, like 80% before you use it.

Speaker 5:
[19:52] To get rid of the raw alcohol. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[19:54] Just make sure you do that.

Speaker 6:
[19:55] All right. All right.

Speaker 1:
[19:56] Best of luck.

Speaker 6:
[19:57] I love the show and I listen every week, so I really appreciate you taking my call so much.

Speaker 5:
[20:01] Thank you. That was a fun question.

Speaker 1:
[20:02] Take care.

Speaker 6:
[20:03] Thank you. Thank you. Take it easy. Bye bye.

Speaker 1:
[20:06] This is Milk Street Radio. If you have a cooking question, please ring us anytime 855-426-9843. One more time, 855-426-9843, or email us at questions at milkstreetradio.com.

Speaker 5:
[20:23] Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling?

Speaker 8:
[20:25] Conn and Griffin. Hi.

Speaker 5:
[20:27] Where are you calling from?

Speaker 8:
[20:28] I'm calling from Fort Myers, Florida.

Speaker 5:
[20:30] How can we help you?

Speaker 8:
[20:32] My question is about quiche. I can never seem to get a reliable quiche recipe, so I was hoping if you could talk me through everything from, should I be using a glass quiche pan to just cook time and stuff?

Speaker 5:
[20:52] Well, I'll get started and then Chris will have lots to add. I would go with an all butter crust, basic pie dough with a high proportion of butter, and I would blind bake it ahead of time so that it doesn't get soggy. Make it, let it rest, roll it out, put it in the pie plate, say a nine-inch pie plate. I would go with glass. Dock it, meaning prick it all over with a fork, line it with pie weights, put it in, say, a 375-degree oven for about 15 or so minutes until it's opaque and then take it out and let it cool somewhat. Then meanwhile, beat up your eggs, I'd say about three to four eggs to one and a half cups of liquid. Do a mixture of milk and heavy cream, which is a nice mix. Make sure it's well seasoned. Also, it's a good idea to brush the bottom of the cooked crust with something to seal it a bit. Brush it with an egg wash or egg whites or I've even done Dijon mustard, which protects it from getting soggy. Add your filling, bake it at a moderate oven, 350 and take it out when it's pretty firm around the edges, but a little jiggly in the middle. Then whatever else you add, make sure it's cooked like so. Cooked bacon, cooked vegetables because you don't want additional water going in there. Now, let's see what Chris has to add.

Speaker 1:
[22:11] Oh boy. I have a few modifications. In the filling, I agree with Sara, but it creme fraiche, I've now used it in ice cream. I use it in pancakes. I use it in cheesecake. I would add about a third of the liquid as creme fraiche, which gives you a tang, but also gives you a slightly lighter texture, which is really great. And bake it until the center two inches should still wobble. So you want to underbake it, and then take it out and put it on a rack and let it cool. One last thing you can do, if you want to be a little more adventurous in the way they probably do it in France, is they don't use a pie plate. They use a circular piece of metal with no bottom to it. And you can bake it that way, and you get a higher side to it and a thicker, deeper filling. It's a little more authentic. Is there anything else you have a problem with?

Speaker 8:
[23:00] I think it's also just the ratios. Like how much other stuff am I putting in? Like if I'm adding cheese or ham?

Speaker 1:
[23:09] I do two whole eggs, maybe plus a yolk per cup of liquid. That's Julia Child's formula. It's pretty much true of any custard. And then I would, as I said, switch out some of the dairy for creme fraiche. I know if you're going to have four cups of liquid, maybe. I'd put in three quarters cup of cheese, something like that, you know, ballpark.

Speaker 5:
[23:31] Yeah, that sounds good.

Speaker 1:
[23:32] One thing you want to avoid, and Sara's right, I would not put broccoli in it or anything else that had liquid in it. I keep it to cheese, bacon, things like that, that are not going to mess up the custard.

Speaker 5:
[23:42] Or make sure it's precooked.

Speaker 1:
[23:44] I don't want vegetables in my quiche.

Speaker 5:
[23:46] Well, we didn't ask. Conan?

Speaker 8:
[23:48] I don't know. I love broccoli though.

Speaker 5:
[23:49] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[23:50] Oh Lord.

Speaker 5:
[23:51] Conan, that's just fine. Just make sure that you blanch it ahead of time.

Speaker 1:
[23:54] That's fine.

Speaker 5:
[23:55] Yes, it's fine.

Speaker 1:
[23:55] Well, just make some broccoli and serve it on the side.

Speaker 8:
[23:59] Hey, that's okay. My wife's going to agree with Christopher on this one because she's always like, oh my God, broccoli again?

Speaker 5:
[24:06] Broccoli is good for you. So you just keep doing you, Conan.

Speaker 8:
[24:09] And it tastes good.

Speaker 5:
[24:10] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[24:11] Okay. Thanks so much. Hopefully that's helpful.

Speaker 5:
[24:13] Yeah, that's Conan.

Speaker 3:
[24:14] All right.

Speaker 5:
[24:15] I appreciate it.

Speaker 3:
[24:16] Thank you.

Speaker 5:
[24:16] Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[24:17] Bye-bye. You're listening to Milk Street Radio, up next, an ultra-processed food fight. Wayfair is a great place to shop for furniture and decor to home improvement and outdoor essentials. The even better news is that it's all on sale during Way Day. From April 25th through the 27th, you can get the best deals in home furnishings and up to 80% off with free shipping on everything. From mid-century modern, farmhouse, contemporary and eclectic, they have the styles you really want. Plus, they offer outdoor furniture, rugs and patio decor, or you can upgrade your furniture or add accent pieces. Their team of product specialists vets everything by hand using a 10-point quality inspection. So you know you're getting a quality piece no matter your budget. I just bought a KitchenAid blender from Wayfair. My mother's Vitamix finally kicked the bucket. So now I can once again make blender cakes, Brazilian cheese puffs, soups and one of my favorites, butter chicken. Wayday is the sale to shop the best deals in home, up to 80% off with fast and free shipping on everything. Head to wayfair.com April 25th through the 27th to shop Wayday. That's Wayfair, wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. Thanks to our sponsor IQ Bar. IQ Bar protein bars, IQ Mix hydration mixes, and IQ Joe mushroom coffees provide the low sugar brain and body fuel you need every day. IQ Bar plant protein bars, my favorite as well, and IQ Joe blueberry contain lots of added fiber and no added sugar. IQ Mix is a zero sugar drink mix that hydrates with electrolytes, improves mood and boosts clarity, and IQ Joe is a jitter-free instant coffee packed with 200 milligrams of natural caffeine, comes in four different flavors. With over 20,000 five-star reviews, more and more people are fueling their busy lifestyles with IQ Bar. Their ultimate sampler pack includes all three, the protein bars, the drink mix, and the instant coffee. And right now IQ Bar is offering our special podcast listeners 20% off all IQ Bar products, including the ultimate sampler pack plus free shipping. To get your 20% off, text milk to 64,000. One more time, text milk to 64,000. That's milk to 64,000. Message and data rates may apply. See terms for details. This is Milk Street Radio. I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. The question of how to fix our food system is complex. What's the best way to provide safe, healthy food for all and at a good price? These are the questions my next two guests are going to try to answer. Gabriel Rosenberg and Jan Dutkiewicz are authors of the book Feed the People, Why Industrial Food is Good and How to Make It Even Better. Jan and Gabriel, welcome to Milk Street.

Speaker 3:
[27:17] Hi Chris, it's wonderful to be here.

Speaker 9:
[27:19] Thanks for having us.

Speaker 1:
[27:21] So we all agree modern agriculture has fed the world. I remember back in the 60s, there were those books about by the end of the century, millions of people will be starving and modern agriculture actually solved that problem which is no small thing. But let's get underneath that. So the first point you make is agribusiness is producing food better than what we had in the 19th century. So let's talk about that.

Speaker 3:
[27:51] Yeah. So absolutely. I guess we would start by saying that there are a number of incredibly important technical advances over the 19th century. First and foremost, the ability to use synthetic fertilizers, better pesticides and herbicides, incredible improvements in seed technology. But there are still major problems. A lot of the productivity of that system, unfortunately goes to things that are not particularly good for humans or humanity or the planet writ large. So the big question for everyone is like, how do we take that extraordinary productivity and make sure that it goes to the right things? Rather than to producing animal feed for factory farms or rather than producing ethanol, why aren't we able to incentivize people to produce fresh vegetables, to produce food that actually goes towards feeding people? And so what we want to do instead is shift the incentive structure overall, turning down in some senses the government incentives that we offer and also closing a lot of regulatory loopholes that make that form of agriculture so profitable and so reliably profitable.

Speaker 1:
[29:03] Changing the business of farming in this country, given the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of money flowing in to Congress, do you actually think that that is something that could actually get passed by a Congress? Because my time in those offices years ago would end, I mean, I won't mention his name, but he was a senator from one of the big ag states. And he was laughing so hard, tears came down his face when I was talking about, you know, changing how modern agriculture works. And he, you know, he just made a clear look, this is locked in, like, forget it, it's just never gonna happen. So how do you get that change?

Speaker 3:
[29:45] Yeah, you know, so, I mean, it's a great point, Chris. And I don't wanna soft-pell you on any of this. But one of the things that I know about the American subsidy regime is that it has changed substantively over its rough century of existence. And different commodities have fallen in and out of that subsidy regime. And different farmers have supported, and at other times turned around and opposed those subsidy regimes. So when a senator or somebody else turns around and says, oh, this is locked in and you can never change it, I say that that's a person who probably has a political interest in not making us think about a real problem.

Speaker 9:
[30:25] No, if I can jump in here, I think if you're looking for a particular example of very recent laws that do change how large-scale agriculture operates, you can look no further than the passage of Prop 12 in California, which was a ballot initiative on animal treatment that quite radically changes the conditions under which animals are to be raised on factory farms. If prior to the passage of Prop 12, you had asked a farm state politician, is there any way we're going to get sows out of gestation crates on factory farms given that this is the status quo way we treat animals in the system? They would have said no, there's just so much lock-in and there's very little political will in Washington or even at the state level to change these things. And yet, when these questions are put in ballot initiative form to voters, as they were in California, voters overwhelmingly vote in favor of laws that, for instance, support better animal treatment. And so clearly there is potential through different paths in very recent history for large scale legislative change.

Speaker 1:
[31:30] So in addition to your argument for policy change as a means to improve our food system, you also argue in favor of processed foods. You say research has shown that many ultra processed foods, such as yogurt, whole grain bread, or ready to eat plant-based burgers are not linked to worse health outcomes and may be beneficial. So are you seriously in favor of or think ultra processed foods are okay? Or is this on a case by case basis?

Speaker 9:
[32:03] Well, the short version of the answer is that this is on a case by case basis. But what we take issue with is the term ultra processed foods as a schema for adjudicating the healthfulness of foods. So the term UPF comes from a schema created in 2009 by a series of public health scholars in Brazil called Nova 4, which are foods that are created using industrial processes or ingredients you wouldn't find in your kitchen. And this term has taken off and become a sort of synonym for bad or unhealthful. But it's what is processed and not how much it is processed or whether it is processed that matters the most. So Nova 4 creates this huge drag net that is designed to root out Oreos and Soda and Doritos but that has all this bycatch such as, for instance, plant-based burgers and pre-prepared frozen meals and baby formula. It's quite simply a category that's too broad to be useful.

Speaker 3:
[33:10] Chris, can I give you a very good example of this? Okay, so I'm a listener to your podcast and it couldn't have been more than a couple of weeks ago that I heard an episode where a caller was asking you how to improve the texture of their homemade ice cream. And what did you tell them? You said to add alcohol. Is that right?

Speaker 1:
[33:31] Well, the first thing I said was use creme fraiche which is the best.

Speaker 3:
[33:34] Okay, but adding alcohol, right? So of course a spirit is a Nova for UPF. The highest level of processing, it is an ultra processed food. Now you gave excellent advice that people should probably follow. You may not have even known that it was a UPF. What we're trying to sort of illustrate here is that UPF is a really, really big catch all that's used as a scaremongering term. And we're in a little bit of a moral panic around food right now. We're seeing it both from the left and the right. And we think that actually responsible people ought to turn the temperature down and say, hold up a second here. If we make massive institutional changes around this overly broad category, we're gonna catch not just the bad stuff that we need to discourage people from eating, but also the good stuff that's perfectly safe, that's perfectly nutritious.

Speaker 1:
[34:26] Here's why I think that sounds good, but I'm not sure it's gonna work. I think two things. First of all, to make money in the food business, processing is the golden key, right? I'd rather be selling corn flakes than corn. There's better margins, etc. Number two, and this seems to me the real problem we haven't talked about yet is, consumers like the stuff. So the problem is, it's not about regulating the industry as much as it is getting people to making healthier choices.

Speaker 9:
[35:05] The point is, the villain in this story is not the processing or the level of processing. The villain in the story is that there are business interests who are interested in getting people eating more sugar and more fat and more red meat and more salt. And that's true whether we have ultra processing or not. And collapsing all foods that undergo industrial processing into one category that we demonize does not actually move us forward in addressing nutritional deficiencies.

Speaker 1:
[35:42] I agree with you that agribusiness has done a lot of good. I agree with you that it needs regulation to have it focus on healthier products. I agree with that. I agree with you that not all processed foods are terrible. I agree with that too. But the current health crisis in America is almost out of control. And that is primarily because of the availability of really bad choices in your menu. However you want to find bad choice.

Speaker 3:
[36:17] So, what is the actual best way to get people to eat more nutritious diets? Now, you note that people like fast food. They like food that's convenient. And they want food that's affordable. Our position is this. That if you set yourself up by saying, look folks, you got to throw all of that stuff away. And you've got to grow your own food. And you got to cook it all from scratch. That is literally the position of Wendell Berry and Michael Pollen, right? And Alice Waters. Our perspective is that you're much better served by improving the average fast food meal and making it more nutritious. That rather than like shunning all of this industrial processed food and saying that it's all evil, it's all bad, you got to start from scratch, throw it all out. We want to say, actually, are there policy levers to improving processed food? It seems to us in aggregate, that's a much better way to go.

Speaker 9:
[37:18] A huge health victory that's sort of forgotten as we banned trans fats?

Speaker 1:
[37:22] No, that's a good point.

Speaker 9:
[37:23] So now companies try to remain profitable without using trans fats and most do.

Speaker 1:
[37:30] If you put eating into a larger life context, you know, the Omnivore's Dilemma would be, you know, he's one of those guys, but he talks about food as being more than just eating. Don't you think that actually elevates the decisions about what to eat in a way that makes it slightly more possible? You can inspire people to think differently about food choices or not.

Speaker 3:
[37:57] We definitely don't think that eating is just about eating. Something that ties us in with other people. Preparing food for other people is an act of love. We recognize that. We also recognize, of course, the degree to which people are interested in doing that and have the time and the money to do that is quite variable. We're pluralists about this. So I think that the point would be that the Wendell Berries and the Michael Pollens went too far in one direction, which is that they said that there's only one way to take pleasure in food.

Speaker 1:
[38:27] At the end of the day, I think we have to take food more seriously as part of our culture. And I think your approach, to some extent, is top-down, which is part of the solution. I don't disagree. And the bottom up is food's important. Food's important to me, it's important to my family, it's important to my community, it's important to my health, it's very important to my happiness, and therefore I want to eat better. Like in Portland, Maine, in the summer, they have a great market and they have lots of farms. And sure, you know, not everybody in Portland, Maine shops there, but it is part of the food system in Portland, Maine. So it's a tiny part, but it's an important part.

Speaker 3:
[39:13] Farm to Fork really does have a lot to recommend it. There's plenty of good in the Alice Waterses of the world, that's a great food aesthetic, but there's also a lot of good out there that doesn't look like it.

Speaker 1:
[39:25] Jan, Gabriel, thank you so much. I think we agreed on more things than we disagreed on, but I certainly take most of your points and thank you.

Speaker 9:
[39:33] Yeah, I know we really appreciate the conversation and the challenges.

Speaker 3:
[39:36] Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having us. This was a real pleasure.

Speaker 1:
[39:40] That was Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg, authors of Feed the People, Why Industrial Food is Good and How to Make It Even Better. You know, I grew up in a small family farm, at least in summers. We raised pigs in Angus. I also milked cows and shoveled a lot of manure. Good life training. Rural towns were built on family farms. Today, with many farms abandoned, weeds are overtaking silos, barns are collapsing, and the lifeblood of our communities is weakening. Yeah, industrial farming feeds the world. Without it, millions would starve. And yes, again, making processed foods healthier is a worthy enterprise. Years ago, a Vermont neighbor reclaimed an old dairy farm to grow sweet potatoes. He repaired the farmhouse, the outbuildings, and most of all, he helped rebuild the community. Is big ag necessary? Are processed foods here to stay? Sure. But local farms provide the ties that bind, the strong sinews of a healthy community. You're listening to Milk Street Radio. Coming up, restaurant critics tell all. Hi, this is Christopher Kimball. You know, Shipt makes recipe testing at Milk Street of Breeze, with same day delivery on everything we need to get our recipes just right. Now here's Milk Street recipe developer, Rose Hadaba, with a new take on a classic breakfast sponsored by Shipt.

Speaker 10:
[41:10] Hi, this is Rose. Let's talk about French toast. Our recipe team here at Milk Street decided to take your favorite weekend breakfast and make it absolutely perfect. We wanted a French toast that ticked all of the boxes. Crispy exterior, custardy interior, not too soft and never soggy. Here's the secret, semolina flour. Our recipe test found that a couple of tablespoons of semolina lightly thicken the custard, helping it to cling to the bread instead of soaking straight in. So you get crisp edges and a creamy center. After testing several different bread options, here's what we suggest. Use either a rustic Italian loaf or challah bread sliced about an inch thick. The Italian bread will be a little sturdier and the challah will be a little bit more tender. And if you're looking for the perfect bite, sprinkle a little bit of sugar onto your soaked bread slices just before you fry them in the pan. The sugar will melt with the butter in the pan and lightly caramelize the outside of the bread. That trick will take your French toast to a whole new level.

Speaker 1:
[42:18] With Shipt, it's never just a delivery order. It's shopped same day in the same way you would. Use code PODCAST to get a year of Shipt for only $49. That's half off the regular $99 price at shipt.com/offer. That's shipt.com/offertermsapply. In my Vermont farmhouse, I noticed that the bed was, well, not really comfortable. The bottom sheet was always slipping off the corners, the pillows felt like they just went 15 rounds with Mike Tyson, and the comforter is lumpy and it droops. Now, most people think they need a new mattress for better sleep, but the biggest difference usually comes from replacing everything else. That's why I upgraded my bed with bowl and branch. They make everything your bed needs. Their signature organic cotton sheets, pillows, blankets and comforters are all designed to be breathable, soft and get better over time. The moment you get into bed, you notice the difference. It's a whole new experience, one that I look forward to every night. Upgrade your sleep with bowl and branch. Get 15 percent off your first order plus free shipping at bowlandbranch.com/milkstreet. Use code MILKSTREET. That's bowlandbranch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D, branch.com/milkstreet. Get 15 percent off your first order plus free shipping. Exclusions apply. I'm Christopher Kimball. You're listening to Milk Street Radio. Now it's time to hear from two food critics. We invited Elazar Sontag and Lyndsay C. Green to have a go about the state of food criticism in America. Elazar is the food critic at the Washington Post, and Lyndsay is the dining and restaurant critic at the Detroit Free Press.

Speaker 11:
[44:15] Hey, Elazar.

Speaker 7:
[44:16] Hi, Lyndsay.

Speaker 11:
[44:18] I'm so happy we get to talk today.

Speaker 7:
[44:20] I'm so excited. So let's talk about our jobs. What is the role of a critic? What does it look like for you? What does it mean for you?

Speaker 11:
[44:31] So my job is that I'm the dining and restaurant critic at the Detroit Free Press. So that's a hybrid role. I'm a restaurant critic, I also cover the dining scene overall. So I have this sort of broad purview over Detroit's food scene. I am the first black restaurant critic here in Detroit. And so it really does mean a lot to be able to say that my experiences up to this point have kind of given me an opportunity to represent our reader in a way that they've not been able to sort of see themselves before. But what would you say? What do you think criticism is for you?

Speaker 7:
[45:08] Well, I mean, it's a very traditional critic's role. And my predecessor did it for almost 26 years. And so there are really clear notions, not just within the Washington Post, but readers in this region also have a really, really particular idea of what restaurant criticism looks like here. And part of, I think, how I kind of understand criticism is people understanding that I'm just one voice and giving people all of the information in the context to decide whether I'm the voice that they want to listen to.

Speaker 11:
[45:45] Right?

Speaker 7:
[45:46] Like, I'm not for everybody. But what I'm trying to do since I moved here, because I'm also new to DC, is I'm really writing about restaurants as a newcomer. And I'm trying to offer perspective of what it's like to see DC for the first time. And then, of course, you know, the big one is telling people where to eat dinner. And that has been, there's something gratifying about that always being what I come back to. You know, I might have a really big idea about the story I want to tell. And it always has to simmer back down to, okay, but would I tell someone to go here?

Speaker 11:
[46:26] When I think about recommending a restaurant, so much of the conversation is special occasion. I don't want to make it seem as though the Detroiters are not going out to eat. But there is, the culture is just a little different and maybe unique to sort of Midwest. But a lot of our restaurants aren't open until Wednesday or Thursday. You know, they're a Thursday to Sunday kind of business now. And I'm wondering if that's different for you. No, I'm wondering if it's like, this might be a place that people are eating in this restaurant for dinner, you know, on a Wednesday or whatever it is.

Speaker 7:
[47:00] I love that question. I mean, one of the things that I'm trying to re-imagine is what can feel special. That for me means, you know, really encouraging people to go to, you know, a long-standing Korean restaurant sort of out in the burbs, just because I do think they're going to have a special meal there. It's not fancy. It's, you know, very casual service. It's very affordable. And, you know, not but, and I think that that is a special place. And if it is a fine dining restaurant, I'm going to tell you it's a fine dining restaurant. But not letting that be the only criteria for whether a meal is special.

Speaker 11:
[47:43] I think I could probably count on one hand how many fine dining restaurants there are in Detroit. So I think keeping that in mind that a restaurant can be special and not even be, you know, fine dining is a nice way to frame it.

Speaker 7:
[47:57] You know, DC is kind of on the other end of the spectrum. There's a lot of Michelin, a lot of Michelin fervor. There's a real kind of steakhouse culture here and that's great. But I really just want to start to build for people my portrait of the city. I'm going to a low-key tofu house for a special occasion because that feels special to me. If that doesn't feel special to you, that's okay. You can go to a steakhouse that I reviewed.

Speaker 11:
[48:20] That's actually a great point because I think that there's this perception that critics are supposed to be this neutral palette that is just here to tell me what's great and tell me what's not. But we do have preferences. I think you saying that people are learning who you are, and how you are, and what your preference is. I don't know, for some reason, that's hitting me that I don't know if I've given myself that space to say, hey, I prefer hearty Caribbean cuisines. Give me a plate of rice, and plantains, and ox tail all the time, anytime. I don't know if I've given myself the latitude to say that, because I don't want to pigeonhole myself, or I don't want people to think, well, that's her preference, so that means she's not going to like this French restaurant. I would be curious if our predecessors had those same hesitations. Probably not.

Speaker 7:
[49:21] Related to this is sort of the big thing that I think readers think about when they think about restaurant critics, which is anonymity.

Speaker 11:
[49:33] Yeah.

Speaker 7:
[49:33] I think when people think of us, they think of this mysterious looming figure with a shadowy mask.

Speaker 11:
[49:42] Yeah.

Speaker 7:
[49:43] Is that you? Because it's not me.

Speaker 11:
[49:44] No, that is not me. It's never been me. I didn't come into this role anonymous at all. So not my experience.

Speaker 7:
[49:52] What has that been like?

Speaker 11:
[49:54] Well, it's been interesting because I have found where I thought that I would be recognized, and I thought that I had this appearance that be like, oh man, I'd have to figure out a way to hide my big hair. I wear these big glasses, and it's like I have all of these distinctions that I think people would say, oh, there she is, I have not, I just haven't. And I mentioned this at the start, my role is a hybrid role, so I have this public facing part of my job, and I'm finding that yeah, it's chefs that I've presented awards to, that I've had interviews with, that I've spent time with, and when I'm in their restaurants, it's like, hi, my name is Lyndsay. So it's a really interesting thing that I, yeah, I don't have to be anonymous, but somehow I'm still able to fade into the background. How about you?

Speaker 7:
[50:48] I mean, I ask in part because I think you've written about this quite eloquently, and to actually give people a sense of what it's like to be you, but also how restaurants notice and don't notice different people, and how standards of hospitality differ. I mean, am I projecting meaning? It feels like you've made real work of that.

Speaker 11:
[51:16] No, you're 100 percent right. Yeah, it is something that I wrote about, and I was able to use Ruth Reichel's example, where she would dress up in all of these costumes, and these disguises, and wear the wigs. It was in part to disguise herself, but also it was to say, yeah, how would you treat an older woman? How would you treat my mom? I lived that experience and continue to live that experience without having to do all of the pump and circumstance. But it is the reality, and it's the reality for a lot of our readers. I got so many readers from that story who had a similar experience in their older age. They were like, you have no idea how much we sort of just fade into the background once we hit like 65. No one holds doors for us anymore. We just don't exist. And so it was interesting to see also just the different communities that do experience us.

Speaker 7:
[52:14] That is one of the notes that I get most often from my readers. And it's been really meaningful to hear from those people. And also I think important to my understanding of my responsibility to pay attention to other people in the dining room. You know, I'm having the experience similar to you that there are two sides to the coin. So one is, I go to restaurants using aliases, I pay using credit cards that have alternate names. But then we're also living in an age where the best way to really have impact is also to splash yourself across social media. And so that's a very interesting balance. I think some people, when I announced to the readers that I wasn't going to be an anonymous, there were people who just thought, well, that's the end of restaurant criticism at the post then. The truth is, anonymity died with social media, it died with digital reservation platforms. But it's been very interesting to sort of adjust my dining experience based on knowing that the experience sometimes that I'm getting is so overblown. And largely, being able to see through that experience.

Speaker 11:
[53:42] Right.

Speaker 7:
[53:42] The food can't change that much.

Speaker 11:
[53:45] Exactly. That was going to be my follow-up question for you. It's like, does it even work? Do you think that the pandering and the, you know, extra dish and the, you know, try this dessert, does that work?

Speaker 7:
[53:58] Of course not.

Speaker 11:
[54:00] I agree.

Speaker 7:
[54:00] I mean, of course not. I think we both know it that great hospitality can't really be engineered. Bad food can't be made good. But it's the job of being able to see through the feeling of self-importance, right? And figure out whether it was an absence of service or a profusion of service. You know, what do I think the average is? And is it worth sending people here?

Speaker 11:
[54:30] Right.

Speaker 7:
[54:31] I'm also always asking myself, and I think critics have always asked themselves this, but it feels more urgent now. You know, what else can we tell people about how the broader restaurant scene is taking shape in our cities?

Speaker 11:
[54:44] Yeah. Right.

Speaker 7:
[54:45] Because I think, like, to be very frank, you know, in 2026, if you are a restaurant critic and you're not seriously asking yourself what distinguishes you from a food influencer, then you're not paying attention because there are so, so, so many places for people to get their recommendations. And so I think it's interesting to sort of think of the role as, you know, the anthropology of it, right, and sort of the capturing of the portrait of the city and restaurants being the primary subject, but not the only subject.

Speaker 11:
[55:27] Yeah, I also think that our role can reshape some of that narrative. You know, I think that the narrative about Detroit and the Midwest overall is that we're a meat and potato city. And that just has not been my experience. There's, you know, amazing Chinese restaurants that are out in the suburbs, or we've got huge Bengali population or Pakistani populations. I mean, and I think that that just shows that every place has this depth and diversity that should be appreciated. And I think that that's what we're here for. We're here to remind people of the breadth of a place.

Speaker 7:
[56:07] Lyndsay, I love talking to you so much. I wish we were over dinner right now, but it's such a pleasure to get to share this conversation.

Speaker 11:
[56:18] Likewise, I'm glad we were able to get together and chat about all these things.

Speaker 1:
[56:27] That was Elazar Sontag and Lyndsay C. Green. Elazar is the food critic at the Washington Post. Lyndsay is the dining and restaurant critic at the Detroit Free Press. That's it for this week's show. You can find almost 300 episodes of our show at milkstreetradio.com or wherever you find your podcasts. And now I'm on Substack. Please subscribe at christopherkimball.substack.com. One more time, christopherkimball.substack.com. You can also find us on Facebook at Christopher Kimball's Milk Street, on Instagram at 177 Milk Street. We'll be back next week. And thanks, as always, for listening.

Speaker 12:
[57:17] Christopher Kimball's Milk Street Radio is produced by Milk Street in association with GBH. Co-founder, Melissa Baldino. Executive producer, Annie Sinzabaugh. Senior editor, Melissa Allison. Senior producer, Sara Clapp. Producer, Caroline Davis. Assistant producer, Mari Orozco. Additional editing by Sydney Lewis. Audio mixing by Jay Allison at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Theme music by 2bobcrew. Additional music by George Brendel-Eggloff. Christopher Kimball's Milk Street Radio is distributed by PRX.

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