Pod Insights Search Engine The Stupid Little Yogurt Question About this episode A high school teacher has a question, but he wants his skeptical teenage students to answer it. Reporter Garrott Graham rides along as they investigate the motives of an international yogurt brand.
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Transcript 12,494 words · 12 speakers
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2:39 PJ Vogt? I don't miss much about being a teenager, but one thing I do sometimes miss is just how fun it was to be a teenage zealot. The world, at the turn of the millennium, seemed to my eyes so deserving of skepticism. The war on terror, bullshit. The oil companies, they were bad. My suburb, maybe worse than both of them. George W. Bush was obviously the worst president America was ever going to have, assuming it even survived him. I think I thought then that most of the adults I knew had just been compromised somehow. It almost felt like maybe adulthood itself corrupted you. Something about corporate jobs, or paying taxes, or maybe an actual invisible toxin in the suburban air muddied your vision.
3:23 PJ Vogt? So you lost the x-ray teenage clarity me and my friends all had.
3:31 PJ Vogt? That's how I saw it then. Today, in theory, I think both sides have a piece of the truth, the young and the not-so-young. But when I meet actual teenagers, I will admit I'm kind of astounded by their withering skepticism, their oracular pronouncements about what's bullshit and what's cringe. Was I really like this? Is it possible they see me as out of touch? Corny?
3:58 PJ Vogt? But I think that's why every year I become a little more astonished by high school teachers. These people who stand up in front of a somewhat hostile audience, day after day, and just try to convince them to care about whatever the evolving adult agenda is. This week, reporter Garrett Graham has a story from one of those classrooms about a teacher who had a question and who had the audacity to try to make his students curious about its answer. Garrett was there to watch, to see if such a thing could ever really happen.
4:29 Speaker 01 Okay, shall we? Mm-hmm.
4:32 PJ Vogt? Where do you want to start the story?
4:33 Speaker 01 So, I'm gonna start the story almost two years ago, actually. October 2023. I don't know if you remember this, but you get a tweet from a guy named David.
4:42 PJ Vogt? And what was David saying?
4:43 Speaker 01 I'm just gonna get you to read that tweet. I'm gonna put it in your Slack.
4:46 PJ Vogt? All right. Sorry, I have a notification from Domino's Pizza saying I have 80 Domino's points.
4:52 PJ Vogt? A currency I never won.
4:53 Speaker 01 You live in New York and regularly order Domino's. It's...
4:56 PJ Vogt? It's different. Okay. This is from Dfree86, at PJvote.
5:02 PJ Vogt? "Hi PJ, I'm a high school English teacher and I teach a class called Knowledge of the World that asks students to pose big and small questions for research projects they'll eventually pursue and present on. I've turned them on to search engine and we're currently obsessed with the question, why is La Fermier..."
5:19 Speaker 01 Is that how you say it? La fermier?
5:21 PJ Vogt? La fermier, la fermier. "The only yogurt that comes in a clay pot. We're deep in the throes of our investigation. Can you help us?"
5:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, so, that was the question we received on Twitter. Small question about a specific yogurt brand and why it came in a clay pot rather than a plastic one. Okay. Check, check, check. And it turned out, the school that this question was coming from was just a few subway stops away from our office, so Shruti and I figured we would investigate their investigation.
5:50 Speaker 01 The story we found, I'm gonna tell it to you in chapters. So, chapter one, the school.
5:56 Speaker 02 You're gonna tell me where we're going?
5:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, we are on 75th and New York, and we are headed to L'Isé de New York, too. By this point, I'd already traded some emails with Dfree86. His real name turned out to be David Freeman. And he explained that he was a teacher at this French school in Manhattan. And one of the classes he teaches is basically a French school version of search engine. Like, that's kind of what he seems to be doing here.
6:18 PJ Vogt? Sacre bleu. I'm gonna do that seven more times. I'm so sorry.
6:23 Speaker 01 What does that mean, sacre bleu? I have no idea. It could be super rude. It means sacred solving.
6:27 PJ Vogt? Sacred blue.
6:28 Speaker 01 Sacred blue.
6:32 Speaker 03 Hey David. Hey Garrett, how you doing? Doing great, how are you? Yeah, nice to see you, thank you for coming. Nice to meet you, thanks for meeting us down. Absolutely, um, I think we got a sign.
6:39 Speaker 01 David greets us, and I want you to imagine like the prototypical high school English teacher. Which prototype? Youngish, tasteful glasses, sharp haircut. Yeah.
6:49 Speaker 03 That way, uh, up the staircase. There's a sort of adjacent building.
6:53 Speaker 01 So, the Lycée Français de New York, it's a bilingual school, mostly kids from France and the US, so there are students from all over, and it's an old school, started in 1935.
7:02 Speaker 03 This was before my time, um, but it was in these big, sort of old New York City walk-up buildings and...
7:07 Speaker 01 David's been at the school for the last 14 years, and he teaches two subjects, English and also the class that we're here to see, a class all about curiosity.
7:16 Speaker 03 Um, guys, grab a seat.
7:17 Speaker 04 What time does the class usually start?
7:19 Speaker 03 The class starts at 10:00. And I did recommend that they be on time.
7:22 Speaker 01 The students start streaming in, it's about 15 students in total, and as the final stragglers take their seats, David just launches into his lesson for the day.
7:30 Speaker 03 Alright guys, are you ready? Yes, good, hi, by the way. Hello. Happy Thursday. Alright, so, I want to talk a little bit about the course in general, um, and then the nature of the sort of question asking in it, and then we're gonna make our way to a specific example question, which I hope will stimulate you as much as it stimulates me.
7:48 Speaker 01 And David, I should say at this point, avid podcast listener, maybe a bit of a podcast producer at heart, and so with a bit of a flair for the dramatic, he begins to recreate the question that brought us here.
8:00 Speaker 03 The question that has been obsessing me, the question that I keep finding myself affronted by, uh, is to do with the cafeteria in the school, and walking through the cafeteria line and looking at all the things available for purchase, and every time I walk by, I see the same thing that you see, which is...
8:19 Speaker 03 This thing.
8:21 Speaker 01 The students start giggling here because David has very theatrically revealed a pot of yogurt.
8:26 Speaker 03 Alright, what are we looking at? La fermier yogurt. La fermier yogurt, can you...
8:30 Speaker 01 La Fermeère is a small artisan French yogurt brand. Have you, do you know this brand?
8:35 PJ Vogt? I really despise yogurt. So I historically have not known it because of this question. And now when I'm in like a fancier corner store, I notice this brand.
8:47 Speaker 01 You'll see, yeah. So La Fermeère yogurt stands out from the other brands in the grocery store because instead of the plastic packaging, you typically see yogurt come in. La Fermeère comes in these cutely colored, often lavender clay pots. It's a premium yogurt, definitely more expensive than your Chobani's and your Yoplait's. They have like premium sounding flavors, rose, lavender, orange blossom honey.
9:10 Speaker 03 So I walk by this thing and, you know, I'm, I would say I'm a yogurt consumer. I like to eat a yogurt. And every time I walk by it, I ask myself this question. Why is this the only yogurt in the entire world that comes in a clay pot? Now, I get, there's an asterisk. It's not the only yogurt in the whole world. But it's the only one that I see in my everyday life that comes in a clay pot. None of, none of the other ones do.
9:34 Speaker 03 So my question is, why?
9:38 Speaker 01 David asks his students for theories, like, why would this one company choose to use clay pots when pretty much no other company does?
9:45 Speaker 03 Anybody have any theories? Come on, be honest. Mario?
9:50 Speaker 01 Is it good for the environment?
9:53 Speaker 03 Anu?
9:54 Speaker 05 Is it cheaper to produce than plastic pots?
9:57 Speaker 03 Right. Romy?
9:59 Speaker 06 Is it some type of marketing thing where it's, oh, I'm not eating yogurt out of a plastic pot. I'm eating it out of a clay pot. You know, it's like comes some type of image.
10:08 Speaker 03 Good. If this were the small question we were starting with, as a small question to start with, what are some things that we could do to try and figure out the answer to this question? Estha?
10:18 Speaker 07 We could contact the brand to see if they had any specific reasons when they first produced the yogurt.
10:24 Speaker 03 Specific reasons for packaging it the way that they do? Okay.
10:28 PJ Vogt? Is it strange for you at all, like observing a sort of search engine style inquiry unfold in the real world?
10:34 Speaker 01 It's weird seeing this teacher do the thing that we do in pitch meetings, which is just to start to wonder at the possible explanations for these strange questions we encounter.
10:43 PJ Vogt? Yes.
10:44 Speaker 03 Other ideas? Anouk?
10:46 Speaker 05 Just go on their website and see if they have anything about it.
10:48 Speaker 03 Go on their website, see if they have anything about it. Here's why we do this thing. Olivia?
10:52 Speaker 08 Ask people that buy these yogurts, so like the cafeteria or others, why they want to buy this type of yogurt.
11:01 Speaker 03 So in other words, if it sells, if it's popular, if it... Okay. I think we're gonna stop there. Good job, guys.
11:08 Speaker 01 So David wraps up the class discussion, and he pulls me and Trithi aside. He had told us earlier that he'd chosen two students for this yogurt question to try to figure out why, like why La Famille was using clay pots for their yogurt.
11:20 Speaker 03 And they are my intrepid student volunteers for this particular project.
11:24 Speaker 01 I don't know if that's good luck or bad luck, but thank you all the same.
11:28 Speaker 03 So we're gonna start at cafeteria.
11:29 Speaker 01 Chapter two. The students. Okay, for the record, can I just get you to say your name?
11:35 Speaker 06 My name is Romi.
11:36 Speaker 05 My name is Anouk.
11:37 Speaker 01 Romi and Anouk, both 11th graders at the school.
11:40 Speaker 06 Juniors, so juniors, yep.
11:41 Speaker 03 All right, and which in French is what it's called?
11:43 Speaker 06 Première.
11:44 Speaker 03 Première.
11:44 Speaker 01 I'd get to know Romi and Anouk much better in the many months that would follow. Romi, I would learn, grew up in New York. She's one of those teenagers who almost seems like a fully-formed professional somehow. Yes, yes. Anouk's family is from France, and she's a more laid-back type. Like, she seemed to have the kind of curiosity that chases all sorts of things, just not necessarily the stuff that shows up on a syllabus. Yeah. And of course, anytime we're trying to help somebody answer a question, one thing we want to know is, why do they specifically care about it? Well, first of all, do you guys, do you eat yogurt?
12:14 Speaker 06 I mean, you see more yogurt than now, but yeah, I would say some yogurt.
12:18 Speaker 05 And yes, on a daily basis, probably.
12:21 Speaker 01 And what about La Famille?
12:23 Speaker 05 No, I don't really eat La Famille yogurt, except when I want yogurt at school, because it's the one they sell, but usually not.
12:29 Speaker 01 And what do you usually eat?
12:30 Speaker 05 Trader Joe's Greek yogurt. Very good, recommend.
12:34 Speaker 01 So Romi and Anouk, a little more blasé about La Famille than their teacher. Okay. Enough so that Trithi and I are beginning to wonder, like, are these two student investigators even interested in this question? Like, is this something they're excited about? Or is this just a homework assignment?
12:49 Speaker 04 So I do have one question, though, and everyone has to be honest here. Whose question is this really? Is it your question, David, that you have sent your students off to investigate? Or do you... Does either of you have, like, is this something you're thinking about?
13:05 Speaker 03 I'm curious how you would answer this.
13:07 Speaker 05 It was, it was your question.
13:08 Speaker 01 It was your question, yeah. Both of them sort of say immediately, "It was your question, David, not our question." Mm-hmm. And then David replies in what I can only describe as fluent teacher.
13:18 Speaker 03 I would say it was my question in a pedagogical, demonstrative, educationally effective capacity, which was, because when we first had the conversation, it was a couple of months ago, right? And it's a brand-new course, it's a little nebulous to them and to me. And so when we were thinking about how you find a research question, you know, big, small, small, big, I wanted an example that I could be honest and earnest about for how you start with a small question and turn it into something that can be big enough to encompass a research project, right? So where this thing ends up, where it lands, in terms of the various reasons why this thing is, is itself a kind of representative of the sort of process that the kids are going through, right? They themselves have to...
14:01 Speaker 01 I will admit, PJ, in this moment, my faith in this yogurt question was getting kind of low. Reasonably. I was like more with the students here and their seeming ambivalence than I was with their teacher. But also, it turned out I was underestimating him because by the time this was all over, this question would become interesting. Actually interesting. Yeah, not in a pedagogical, demonstrative, educationally effective way, like, properly interesting. Okay.
14:30 Speaker 01 But on that day, we all just sort of dutifully get into the elevator. We're heading to the school cafeteria, which is the first stop in our investigation. And on our way there, I started talking to Anouk about her relationship to dairy products back when she was growing up in France.
14:43 Speaker 05 So I would say just consuming milk and milk-based products is something that's very advertised in France. For example, in my, like, my childhood TV show and everything, they would say at every, like, ad break, "Oh, you have to consume five, like, vegetables a day, also three different milk-based products a day." So it's definitely like a big part of, especially children's lives, because there's this thing of like, you're gonna grow taller if you eat yogurt and all of that.
15:08 Speaker 01 I didn't really think about this at the time when I first showed up to the Lise, but one of the reasons this question was coming from this place is just that French people are extraordinarily precious about their dairy products.
15:18 PJ Vogt? Oh, right, they like cheese.
15:21 Speaker 01 They take, and just food in general, they take the quality and craft of food far more seriously than we do. It felt unintuitive for me as a kid who grew up on Easy Cheese and Country Crock. I know you don't like yogurt, but if you've ever had a fancy cheese or a traditional French butter and then gone back to the mass-produced American versions.
15:41 PJ Vogt? Oh, totally, yeah, yeah, yeah.
15:42 Speaker 01 And they just eat way more of it than we do, too. The average French person eats something like 60 pounds of cheese and 45 pounds of yogurt every year.
15:49 PJ Vogt? Wait, sorry, what?
15:51 Speaker 01 Which is a lot more than Americans consume either.
15:53 PJ Vogt? With 60 pounds of cheese?
15:55 Speaker 01 And 45 pounds of yogurt every year.
15:57 PJ Vogt? The thing that's so funny about that, besides everything, is it's an average. So, like, there's lactose intolerant people in France and other people are eating enough to make the average go up to that number.
16:08 Speaker 01 The upper end of that bell curve is probably very upsetting.
16:11 PJ Vogt? Yes.
16:12 Speaker 01 But back at the school, our little yogurt investigation squad walked into the cafeteria. Classic high school lunchroom with those long tables with the little attached stools, food serving stations in the back. The cafeteria is empty at this point, except for two adults who were seated at this one table.
16:27 Speaker 09 Hello, how are you?
16:29 Speaker 03 And this is Romy and Anouk. They are 11th graders who are helping us with this project on yogurt.
16:36 Speaker 01 We were here to talk to the head of the cafeteria about La Fermière. He was one of the people responsible for stocking this specific yogurt in the lunchroom. He was another adult, like the teacher, who seemed enchanted by this brand. And so, Romy, one of the students, asks.
16:49 Speaker 06 So, how popular is this yogurt? Do you sell out every day? Do a lot of people eat it? Teachers, students?
16:57 Speaker 09 It's pretty popular with the staff and with the faculty. The students, unfortunately, I think, are more toward like, oh, I want a cookie or I want chips, but the adults seem to really enjoy it.
17:07 Speaker 06 Yeah, why do you think it's the only yogurt, basically the most popular yogurt that comes in a clay pot?
17:14 Speaker 09 Well, if you check out the Lethemira website, it's actually a really great website. And they do this whole promotion on reusable and sustainable. And you can take these pots and they give you all these ideas, what you can do with them.
17:27 Speaker 01 Mark didn't have much of an answer here beyond what the company was already saying on its website. That clay, sometimes they'll say terracotta or ceramic, basically the same thing. But saying it's a premium material with all kinds of reusability and sustainability benefits.
17:40 Speaker 09 It's really, you can do a lot of things with a clay pot.
17:43 Speaker 01 And honestly, we're all just kind of sitting there and nodding along. Romi and Anuk, I wouldn't say they're actively engaged at this point. We're still inside the school building, their teacher's still hovering close by. They're a little reserved. But after the cafeteria, the next stop on our investigation list was just the local cafe next to the school. A spot with what I thought was a slightly over the top French name.
18:08 Speaker 06 Okay, so we're just outside of school right now and we're gonna go in a cafe called Chiller Franchise, which is right next to the school, literally next door, the key hangout spot.
18:16 Speaker 01 How often do you come here?
18:17 Speaker 06 I don't come here that often, but a lot of people do, especially if you don't have time to go get a snack and you only have 15 minutes. And there's just, it's a lot of just French products. So if you want something French, come here.
18:28 Speaker 01 It smells like France in here.
18:29 Speaker 06 Yeah, it does smell like France.
18:31 Speaker 01 PJ, I should tell you something. I know you have teenagers in your life. I don't really like to reveal a prejudice of mine, like high school students kind of make me nervous.
18:40 PJ Vogt? They, because you feel like they're gonna humiliate you maybe?
18:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, like I have Gen Z friends, I've had Gen Z colleagues. But when you start getting to the younger parts of the generation, or like whatever we're calling the next generation, Gen Alpha, I just, I don't know. I don't know how to hang, I don't know the lingo.
18:53 PJ Vogt? Well, the thing that's hard, actually, just so you know, it's not knowing the lingo, because you're not supposed to use the lingo. And when you say like, no cap on God, it really upsets them, which is a reason to do it. It's actually that there's certain words we use that they really react to, like they're almost allergic to them.
19:11 Speaker 01 What's an example?
19:13 PJ Vogt? Sick.
19:14 Speaker 01 Sick?
19:15 PJ Vogt? Oh, it just feels like millennial cringe, or what? They wouldn't even say millennial cringe, but they're just like, it's like being like, what's up dudes? Like, they hate it, and it made me realize like, oh, right, of course the generic words for cool get generationally cycled.
19:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:30 PJ Vogt? Because there's other words for something being cool or agreeable that you can use that they won't react to. But like, say that something's sick in front of someone around 13, they will burn you to haze. And it doesn't not feel bad. It feels quite bad.
19:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, it sounds bad.
19:44 PJ Vogt? It's really bad. I think it's also just like, I think for some reason, when you become old, you expect that young people will automatically afford you respect, which I never did as a young person.
19:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:57 PJ Vogt? And they don't do either.
19:58 Speaker 01 Oh, the thing that you're describing is the thing that made me kind of nervous, walking into a high school with somewhat aloof high school kids.
20:03 PJ Vogt? I understand.
20:04 Speaker 10 I don't like to eat American yogurt.
20:06 Speaker 01 And I'm feeling that way as we talk to the owner of this cafe, learning once again that adults love this yogurt, the pots are cute, they're reusable.
20:14 Speaker 10 My medicine cabinet, I use them in my kitchen. You use them for different things.
20:17 Speaker 01 But as the hour winds by, I can slowly feel Romeo and Nuk warming to the assignment a little bit. Or maybe it's just because we're starting to get to the point where they might get to miss their next class, and that's like exciting for them. You guys owe me for letting you miss math class?
20:31 Speaker 06 I'm missing philosophy right now.
20:33 Speaker 01 Ooh, is that a good thing or a bad thing?
20:34 Speaker 06 It can, sometimes. Okay, depends on the lesson. Yeah, depends on the lesson.
20:38 Speaker 01 So, we're making small talk about class. David, the teacher, has to duck out to go teach his next class.
20:44 PJ Vogt? Yeah, thank you.
20:45 Speaker 01 And so, for the first time, Shruthi and I get a moment alone with these students.
20:51 Speaker 01 Which means I finally get to ask them what they really think about this investigation we're on.
20:56 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, that's pretty much it.
20:57 Speaker 01 Chapter three, the students' point of view.
21:01 Speaker 01 We sit down in the school library, and I just ask them to tell me about that first class when their teacher David pitched this yogurt question to them. Can you just briefly, in a few sentences, describe sort of what that class looked like on that day?
21:15 Speaker 06 So in the beginning, we were all very surprised with the question and kind of confused. Like, Mr. Freeman was, "Oh, my God, I have this really interesting question." It's, we were like, "That this is your question?"
21:26 Speaker 05 I feel like everyone was kind of annoyed at the end of this class because they were like, "Why do we have to spend so much time, like so much of our free time, homework and everything, on a yogurt question that nobody cares about?"
21:35 Speaker 01 They're like, "Look, I get it, this is school, but if we're gonna be taking a two-year research class, like, why can't we spend our time researching stuff we actually care about?"
21:42 Speaker 05 We have been told that, "Oh, you have to do a project about something you're passionate about." But we have been presented with things we're not passionate about.
21:48 Speaker 06 Yeah, especially with this class, it's like when teachers are asking you to do something and to research something you're not interested in, it's hard. But with this question, we all have kind of come up with topics that we are interested in, all of us. But then we're asked to do this about yogurt. We're just like, "Why can't we spend more time researching the things that we're actually interested in?" If that makes sense.
22:07 PJ Vogt? So what do they want to know about?
22:09 Speaker 01 Not yogurt pots. What do you wish you were spending your time on instead of thinking about yogurt?
22:14 Speaker 06 Um, so I have mostly, I've been researching, like, why is America over-medicated? And I really am interested in, like, the 19th century, the Civil War, kind of where that all started with morphine and how that's progressed to where we are now, which is this, like, cataclysmic crisis.
22:31 Speaker 01 Like, hearing her talk about this, I was like, "Oh, of course this yogurt question sounds stupid to you. Like, of course this feels like a waste of your time."
22:37 PJ Vogt? It's also so funny to hear the difference between, um, the curiosity you're asked to have versus the curiosity that you have.
22:43 Speaker 01 Right.
22:44 PJ Vogt? Like, people, the aliveness with which, when someone talks about a real question, they come alive.
22:49 Speaker 01 And that was the feeling I was having in this library. It was like, "Oh, these students are coming alive for the first time because they're talking about stuff that they're excited about."
22:54 PJ Vogt? Yeah.
22:55 Speaker 01 And it's not yogurt. And what do you wish you were thinking about in your yogurt-thinking time?
22:59 Speaker 05 To be completely honest, I wish I was spending this time to figure out what I want to spend it about. Like, I'm really bad at just finding specific questions or specific things that I'm interested about. So I have some, like, general themes. So I love design, I love architecture. Arts, but I just haven't been able to come up with a specific question.
23:17 Speaker 01 Anouk doesn't know what she wants her final project to be, but in what I'm learning is like kind of classic Anouk fashion. She was like, I'd rather just be using this time to figure out what I actually am interested in. And so like, again, a clay pot of yogurt, not something that was immediately attention grabbing for her.
23:33 PJ Vogt? Right. Okay. So where do you go from there when you realize your two principals are like, have other designs?
23:40 Speaker 01 Well, it's funny because this is something that like occasionally comes up for us on our show. Some weeks we spend our time thinking about small and unserious questions.
23:48 PJ Vogt? Yeah.
23:48 Speaker 01 Like, we might be trying to track down a Russian rapper and meanwhile, the economy is crashing and the president's trying to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or something. It's like, wait, how sad are the monkeys in the zoo again? And that was coming to mind as I was hearing them talk about their serious research interests bumping up against this silly yogurt question. But this is in some ways the entire point of David's class.
24:12 PJ Vogt? He's trying to teach them the disciplined form of curiosity.
24:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, he's trying to say, maybe it's a more valuable skill, or at least it's the skill that this class is trying to teach you, that you should be able to chase down answers to questions that you don't care about.
24:28 PJ Vogt? And you might learn in the process that somebody used to say to me about exercising. My friend Lilia was like, "Action precedes motivation."
24:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:36 PJ Vogt? Start doing it and you might discover something. So you're now on board. You're like, let's force these children to talk yogurt.
24:42 Speaker 01 I've kind of been like a connaissance de Mandeville, where I'm like, let's just see if this is possible.
24:54 PJ Vogt? We're going to take a short break. And then this week, search engine's Garrett Graham will embed with this pair of teenage detectives as they complete a very involved homework assignment, as accusations are hurled, as a beloved international yogurt brand becomes somewhat unsettled. All that after this publicité.
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27:55 Speaker 01 Welcome back to the show. Chapter four, Looking for Treasure.
28:02 Speaker 01 So PJ, a couple of months have passed since my first visit to the French school, and we're about to hop on a call to start our investigation for real. And the first thing-
28:11 PJ Vogt? And has the curiosity at this point, is it inside you? Like, are you like, it's not, I feel like it hasn't yet bitten you.
28:17 Speaker 01 No, the thing that I think is propelling me and motivating me at this point is the fact that I'm getting to like, investigate this alongside two high schoolers who seem bored by it. Like, the fun part for me is not, can I answer this question? It's-
28:30 PJ Vogt? Can you make them care about it?
28:31 Speaker 01 Can I get these students interested in this question?
28:33 PJ Vogt? Okay.
28:34 Speaker 01 So, I get on a Zoom with Romeo and Nuke. Can you both tell me what you had for breakfast this morning, so I can check your levels?
28:41 Speaker 06 I had cereal for breakfast.
28:43 Speaker 05 I had a child's breakfast. I had carrot cake and chocolate cake for breakfast.
28:48 Speaker 01 You had two types of cake for breakfast? That's inspirational, I have to admit. It's funny, everybody we ever interview, we ask what they had for breakfast. And then with an adult, we usually follow that up by saying, can you say your name? And what you do for a living? But for high school students who don't yet do anything for a living, I had a different introductory question that I thought might tell me something about them. So, when you guys were both younger, I'm curious, what did you want to be when you grew up? Like, the earliest answer you can remember for yourself for that question? What did you guys want to be?
29:17 Speaker 06 I think I wanted to be like, either a doctor or a scientist.
29:23 Speaker 05 I think I wanted to be an archaeologist. I was really obsessed with history and I was a super curious kid and I really wanted, like, I loved treasure hunts, stuff like that. For example, I love thrifting and I think it's the same feeling in a way. It's like, you're trying to find this treasure.
29:41 Speaker 01 That feeling that Anuke's teacher is trying to inspire in her, like, curiosity about the small things. She says it's a feeling she often has, just rarely about school.
29:49 Speaker 05 So, I don't really like school because it just takes away, like, free time from me. Like, I would much rather just spend my entire days, like, drawing and playing music, stuff like that. So, I usually find school pretty boring.
30:02 Speaker 06 Yeah, there are some classes that I do, like, enjoy. I really like to learn. I think kind of the stress of it sometimes takes away from that. Well, sometimes, a lot of the times takes away from like, the kind of- Pleasure you get from learning or like the drive that you have. Because I think I'm a very driven person when it comes to that. And it's the things I care about. But some of the classes I just cannot, I couldn't care less.
30:28 Speaker 01 And that's a little bit how these two students were feeling in their class about curiosity, with that exceptionally eager teacher, David Freeman. Like, some of the early assignments to them just felt pretty dull.
30:37 Speaker 06 We had this assignment that was like this research project about your building that you live in.
30:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, and it was still not really clear what the whole thing was about. And everybody's still a little bit confused.
30:50 Speaker 01 And then came that day that Mr. Freeman showed up with his pot of yogurt. And you know what happens from there.
30:55 Speaker 05 I mean, I feel like when we came in, we were like, oh, come on, like not another stupid project. And this time it's about yogurt too, like the most stupid one in our opinion, like just about a pot of yogurt.
31:06 Speaker 06 But then two weeks later, he said, I contacted this podcast team. Then I think that made it more exciting, at least for me, because it made it feel more real.
31:18 Speaker 01 David told his class that he had two spots available to be a part of the project. And Romy and Anouk decided to go for it.
31:25 Speaker 05 Just had to send him an email with all our arguments to how we would make the best students for the assignment. But I feel like I just have this thing of like fear of missing out. Also, I had seen that MyHawk was on the podcast.
31:36 Speaker 06 I think Anouk and I are the only people who applied.
31:40 Speaker 05 We're not the best, we're just the, yeah.
31:42 Speaker 01 You're the only.
31:43 Speaker 06 I mean, I think that's what it was.
31:45 Speaker 01 So that all brings us to today on this Zoom call, talking about how we want to tackle this yogurt question. Yeah. And we decided to start someplace easy, LaFermiere's website.
31:58 Speaker 01 Chapter five, red flags.
32:02 Speaker 01 The website, it's very artfully designed, very sleek looking photos of their yogurt. And we just navigate over to the FAQ page.
32:09 Speaker 06 Okay, should I just read it?
32:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, go for it. Where, helpfully, maybe a little anticlimactically, one of the questions there is our question.
32:20 Speaker 06 Why are you using terracotta in glass pots?
32:23 Speaker 01 And the company's answer?
32:24 Speaker 06 We believe that our all-natural yogurt deserves an all-natural packaging. Terracotta is a natural material that has been a useful tool in the kitchen for centuries. Pots, plates, platters, etc. And it still is today.
32:35 Speaker 05 Already, from the first sentence on, they're trying to use the packaging as a way to say that their yogurts are great because they're calling it an all-natural packaging for all-natural yogurt. And those are very broad words. Like, what does "all-natural" really mean?
32:52 Speaker 01 So, finding the American website lacking in detail, we head over to the French website to see if it had any other information we could use.
32:58 Speaker 06 Contrairement to other countries, there are unfortunately not today in France, recycling containers for packaging.
33:03 Speaker 01 PJ, I'm just gonna translate this for you.
33:05 PJ Vogt? And you've been taking French classes?
33:06 Speaker 01 I have been taking French classes. The translation's roughly: "These packages remain among the most ecological because they are inert," meaning, "they do not deteriorate the materials they come into contact with in a way that could cause damage to the environment. Unlike plastic, for example, which when decomposed produces byproducts that are potentially dangerous for the environment and health." And so, when the students read the company's appeal to sustainability on this website, it was like they were just naturally wired to think that this company was trying to pull a fast one on them.
33:35 Speaker 06 I mean, certain brands have a whole page on their website where they can actually detail to you what exactly they're doing to be sustainable. You know, if you look at La Fermeure, there's only like, two sentences. Is this really giving me a full explanation as to why? Not really. It was like, "Oh, it's because we're eco-friendly." I just had the biggest eyebrow raise, ever. Like, really? I don't know. Big question mark. That's what it feels like. Big question mark.
34:08 PJ Vogt? Oh, so now, it's like, now they're curious because now they're a little paranoid.
34:11 Speaker 01 This is the first time that I start to see the flicker of real curiosity in their eyes. It's like, "This company is lying to us."
34:19 PJ Vogt? Oh, you're saying that these youngsters have a more suspicious relationship to capitalism than us oldsters?
34:24 Speaker 01 Well, it's funny. I wasn't quite sure if it was their generation, or if it was their Frenchness, but they are naturally far more skeptical of corporations than I think I was, at least in high school.
34:34 PJ Vogt? Yeah.
34:34 Speaker 01 But Romy told me this story that helped me understand where this generation is coming from, like, really how the media they've experienced has shaped their worldview.
34:41 Speaker 06 If you've ever watched Nickelodeon... In your lifetime, you know that there are a plethora of ads like and they're all so colorful and you know, bright and they have this really obnoxious music. I feel like I always embraced them as a kid. I don't ever have a memory of not. Um, but I don't know. It's interesting. You kind of grow older and you start to be a little skeptical. I think that also kind of just comes with being a teenager. I'm not gonna lie. And then, you know, I think also in quarantine, like we were all on our phones. And so you actually learn a lot, like, you know, people always like, oh, yeah, you just sit in bed and do nothing. But like, you actually learn a lot on a deep dive on some sort of TikTok or Google. Like, you kind
35:25 Speaker 06 of learn about fast fashion, what that does to the environment. And you start learning about the detriments of what companies do. I think it was specifically with fashion. I think it really was a turning point for me. You learn about how horrible, you know, the working conditions are. They're barely paid. How much they produce and how much people are buying just to wear the shirt once and never again.
35:50 Speaker 01 To me, it was interesting. I've heard parents talk about how much screen time their teenagers were getting during the pandemic, but I'd never actually heard anybody wonder about like what specific rabbit holes they were going down while looking at their screens. Yeah. Uh, and for Romeo and Duke, it seemed to be this kind of anti-consumerist rabbit hole.
36:06 Speaker 05 I know that when a brand says that they're doing something fully for their customers and fully for the environment, it's usually hiding something and it's usually they're doing it for their own profit because that's just how everything works. And we wouldn't be facing climate change and we wouldn't be having those issues if every company's first motive was to make earth and the people happy. Like, I know that in our world, everything, most things are for profit and have to be for profit.
36:32 Speaker 06 Yeah, because if it was actually the best way to make yogurt more sustainable, why are there only like two other brands here and there that do it?
36:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, I was thinking, I feel like. Maybe ceramics is better for the environment. Like it doesn't like if you discard it in nature, it's not gonna like last as long, whatever than plastic. But it's also a lot heavier. So when for transportation, that means you can't transport as much of it, like more soon to.
37:00 Speaker 01 So the students, what they seem to think was going on here was that the company knows sustainability is important to high end consumers. So if a product looks sustainable and can be marketed as sustainable, who cares if the thing is actually sustainable? Like what's important is what the consumer thinks, because what the consumer thinks will determine how much they can sell it for.
37:19 PJ Vogt? Yeah, and like, you know, there's plenty of evidence in our culture for this idea that oftentimes labeling something as ethical is a thin marketing technique. And La Fermier's CEO probably goes to bed every night not wondering if a crack team of high school skeptics is gonna descend on his terracotta plant. Or her terracotta plant.
37:39 Speaker 01 Well, to be clear, there's no evidence, at least online at this point, that anything actually fishy was going on. This is just some teenage theorizing at this point. But we decided to reach out to the company to see if anyone there was down to talk to us about their clay pods.
37:52 PJ Vogt? Like a bunch of French kids think you're lying. To want to be on our podcast.
37:55 Speaker 01 I didn't go, that was not my email to the company. And to be clear, we were going in skeptical, but also with an open mind.
38:04 Speaker 01 Chapter six. The yogurt executive. Can you hear yourself when you talk?
38:09 Speaker 05 Um, no. I can't hear anything.
38:11 Speaker 01 I can't hear anybody.
38:12 Speaker 05 I can hear a nuke. Oh, my God, I can hear my hate peoples. I can hear myself talk. Can you guys hear yourself?
38:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's, yeah.
38:17 Speaker 05 Is that normal?
38:18 Speaker 01 So I meet up with the students and their teacher, David, at Search Engine HQ. It's all very exciting. An executive at La Fermier has very generously agreed to talk to us.
38:27 Speaker 05 Okay, so, hi. Could you say maybe your name and what you do?
38:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, of course. My name is Charlotte Marchand, and I've been with La Fermier for five years now. I'm the head of sales and marketing.
38:40 Speaker 01 So as the head of sales and marketing in the US, Charlotte would be the first one to admit, like, she's not a sustainability expert, but she does know the company and its products very well. And so Romy asked her.
38:51 Speaker 06 Can you just tell me the story of the ceramic pots? And kind of how they came about? And what they mean to the company in general?
38:59 Speaker 02 In 19, around 1995, this was the appearance of the terracotta pot, actually. Because at the beginning, we were using a paper cup. But very soon after the creation of the company, a former owner wanted to give to the consumer an elevated experience. But also he wanted something new in the market, something no one did before. So he wanted like the perfect packaging for this. And the perfect packaging for this was ceramic pots.
39:29 Speaker 01 So basically, La Fermeur yogurt for many decades had come in wax-coated paper pots. And then in the 90s, Charlotte tells us that the company decided to switch to the terracotta pot, both because they wanted to stand out to their customers, but also because they were thinking about the environment.
39:46 Speaker 02 For us, it's very important to propose one of the most sustainable packaging for our product. I don't know if you know, but our ceramic pot is made of 95% of clay, which is a natural material. And then 5% are non-toxic clay. So there is like a minimal environmental impact because it's made from natural materials.
40:06 Speaker 01 And as soon as Charlotte is starting to like sing the praises of this terracotta pot for all of its ecological virtues, I can see the students kind of like squirming in their chairs. It's just making them more suspicious. They sort of get this wry smile on their face. You know, because Charlotte is more or less repeating what we found on the website. She keeps saying.
40:23 Speaker 02 High-quality ingredients, high-quality packaging.
40:26 Speaker 01 High-quality ingredients, high-quality packaging, which is like a good slogan, but doesn't necessarily offer much of a window into how the company is actually thinking about the environmental trade-offs. And she's wandering into a room full of teenage sharpshooters. So Romy tries to press Charlotte on the topic.
40:40 Speaker 06 So one thing we've learned actually from our research is that it's really hard to measure sustainability and how something actually impacts the environment. Because there are just so many factors involved. How did La Fermeur decide that ceramics were the most sustainable option?
40:57 Speaker 02 So I would not say we will say it's the most sustainable option. I would say it's one of the most sustainable options and one of the best options we could have today. I totally agree with you, it's more complex than that because there is multiple factors. And I will not be able to answer you properly as I'm not a sustainability expert, you know. But for sure, when you take the mix of the consumer experience, the fact there is no impact on the environment if you just throw away your pots, it will not damage the environment. So that means there is no pollution on the air again, no pollution on the ocean, no pollution for animals, etc.
41:33 Speaker 01 And Charlotte's like, look, terracotta, not the villain here. The villain here is the other kinds of packaging. And the word that nobody's saying is like, plastic's the obvious villain here.
41:44 PJ Vogt? Right.
41:44 Speaker 01 Like, terracotta is obviously better for the environment than plastic.
41:47 PJ Vogt? But her, this corporate cheer and insistence is not totally playing with the teenage skeptics.
41:52 Speaker 01 No, it is not. And they're also asking these kinds of serious hardball questions, like, they're teenagers, but they just seem very well-versed in what I would think of as like adult corporate consultant lingo.
42:03 Speaker 06 Can you just describe what you want consumers to think about when they think of the brand La Fermier? Like, what does your brand identity really look like?
42:14 Speaker 02 So for us, it's like indulgent and natural. So we want people to have a treat, but a treat with like something that's not harmful to the tooth and health, you know?
42:24 Speaker 06 You said you had five ingredients. What are they?
42:27 Speaker 01 It was almost like the students had decided to go full prosecutor here.
42:30 Speaker 02 So we have milk, cream, culture, of course, on the yogurt, vanilla bean, for example, and cane sugar. So that's the only ingredient we have. So here in the US, we are manufacturing our product upstate New York. So we get our milk and cream upstate New York, like very, very close to our production facility.
42:47 Speaker 01 This is actually surprising to me. Like, I'd assumed that the French yogurt came from France, but the ingredients are actually arriving from in-state in New York, which did seem maybe more environmentally sound, although not something La Fermier is particularly bragging about. We started to wrap up the conversation and we say our awkward goodbyes. We thank Charlotte for her time. Les filles, quelque chose à ajouter en français?
43:09 Speaker 02 Non, je pense que ça va, merci beaucoup.
43:12 Speaker 01 Charlotte, thank you so much for your time. This is really helpful. We appreciate it. We'll talk soon.
43:16 Speaker 02 Thank you. Bye-bye.
43:17 PJ Vogt? Bye now.
43:17 Speaker 06 Bye, thank you.
43:19 Speaker 01 Romeo and Anouk are coming off of that call. They're just like... Positively elated. Like, I think, one, I just think they're excited to be in the same podcast studio that Maya Hawke was once inside of.
43:28 PJ Vogt? Well, yeah.
43:29 Speaker 01 But I also think that, like, they just played hardball with the company executive, and they kind of won.
43:34 PJ Vogt? Yeah, an adult fling.
43:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:36 PJ Vogt? There's no thing that makes a teenager happier than like-
43:38 Speaker 01 An adult fling. It's not like we got any answers. Like, it's not like we're actually that much closer to the real answer to our question here, which is like, is terracotta more sustainable than plastic? But Romi and Anuk at this point are just increasingly skeptical that the answers the company is giving us are anything more than just marketing speak.
44:01 Speaker 05 Like, for premium brands now, it's kind of a given that if they're gonna price it so much higher, they're gonna have to do something about the climate change, because it's like such a big concern. All brands now. Yeah. Even like food, makeup. Anything has to have a claim that, oh, we're doing this to protect the planet. Or ethical, whether it be ethics or sustainability. They're good at, like, making it show, even though it's not really true.
44:24 Speaker 01 If they were skeptical just reading LaFremiere's website, Romi and Anuk were much more skeptical, having just spoken to a person at the company.
44:34 Speaker 01 But also, like, we're two 11th graders and a podcast producer who majored in literature.
44:38 PJ Vogt? Yes.
44:39 Speaker 01 We don't actually know what we're talking about.
44:40 PJ Vogt? Well, what we're told about literature and liberal arts in general is that it's not about what it teaches you, it's about how it teaches you how to think.
44:46 Speaker 01 Well, it taught me to think that we needed to talk to an expert here, and after a break, that's exactly what we're gonna do.
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48:27 Speaker 01 Hey PJ. Yes. Welcome back to the show. Thank you. Chapter seven, A Surprising Answer. So, May of that year, nearing the end of 11th grade for Romi and Anuk, I went back to the Lise for a second time. And you know that feeling when the end of the school year is around the corner? You can just kind of feel it. Everything's a little looser, Memorial Day's around the corner. Romi's actually busy the day that I show up. She had an exam that not even Search Engine could get her out of. But I do meet up with Anuk.
48:55 Speaker 05 Basically, I have this week of school, next week of school, and then two days. And after that, it's just a full week of studying, then a French final, and then another week of studying, then another French exam, and then I'm done.
49:06 Speaker 01 So. That sounds like a lot of studying and a lot of exams. The reason Anuk and I were meeting up in the middle of exam season was, of course, we still had some more yogurt homework to do. We knew La Fermier was saying that Terracotta was a sustainable selling point for their brand, but now we wanted to talk to a scientist who could help us understand whether or not that was actually true. And so after doing some research, we landed on who we thought might be the right expert.
49:31 Speaker 05 Could you maybe say your name and what you do?
49:33 Speaker 11 Sure, I'm Shelley Miller. I'm a professor of environment sustainability at the University of Michigan.
49:38 Speaker 05 Okay, great. And how should we refer to you? Do you prefer maybe Dr. Miller?
49:42 Speaker 11 Shelley's totally right.
49:43 Speaker 05 Shelley, all right, perfect.
49:45 Speaker 01 Shelley's work is fascinating. She does something called lifecycle analysis, which means that she studies the environmental impact of products from the moment the materials are extracted from the ground to when they are manufactured, to when they're transported, to when eventually they're disposed or recycled. And so Anouk explains the class that she's taking and the question that came out of it to Shelley.
50:05 Speaker 05 So Connaissance du monde is this course we have at our school that is part of this international baccalaureate, which is this international exam that we take in France. And since we're all French, yogurt and this French brand of yogurt called La Famillie is an important part of our daily life. Especially, we go to the cafeteria and there's this yogurt. And we're all wondering, like, why is it in clay pots instead of plastic pots, like all the others? And so we started asking some other questions, especially related to sustainability, and just maybe trying to find why that was.
50:37 Speaker 11 Yeah, so first off, I'll just say this is such a great question. Things like this are a great way of starting to think about sustainability questions and analysis and, you know, really getting into the details of, all right, when we're trying to figure out environmental impacts of something, how do we even start going about doing that, knowing that there's lots of different environmental impacts and, you know, lots of different trade-offs to consider? So, you know, for someone like me, who really studies these things in a very systematic way, the first thing we do is try to figure out, well, what environmental impacts are we talking about?
51:10 Speaker 01 The first thing that she says is that to answer a question like this, you need to know what your priorities are. Because she says that there's really no human activity that is good for the environment. Podcasting. Besides podcasting, she said? We only generate hot air. That's warming the climate, Peter. That's not good. But what this means is that this is a conversation about trade-offs. Yeah. Because different things are bad for the environment in different ways. And so we asked her to kind of compare our two materials here, terracotta and plastic. Yeah. She started with plastic and right off the bat, she's like,
51:42 Speaker 11 Plastic has terrible for the environment. Plastic causes environmental impacts throughout its entire life cycle. So plastics are made from natural gas byproducts. Making and manufacturing plastic has environmental impacts on air quality and also climate change emissions.
52:00 Speaker 01 And then there's plastics afterlife, like it clogs landfills, turtles choke on it, microplastics, et cetera, et cetera.
52:06 Speaker 11 And so we know for a fact that plastics cause environmental impact. And sometimes other materials are even worse.
52:15 Speaker 01 And this is where Shelley started to really surprise me, I think us actually, like, yes, plastic sucks. Yes. But remember, everything's a trade off here. And so like, how does plastic compare to everything else out there?
52:28 Speaker 11 We need to take a broader look of saying, all right, well, if not plastics, then what? And are those materials actually better than plastic?
52:37 Speaker 05 Yeah. So for example, how do you go about weighing a plastic against another material? Like, how does that work from a like professional standpoint?
52:45 Speaker 11 Yeah. So what we do is we really look at the entire supply chain of a material. And so when it comes to plastic, one of the things that, you know, plastic is really good technically, because it has some pretty fantastic technical characteristics that other materials don't have.
53:04 Speaker 01 Shelley says, for instance, you can use a pretty small amount of plastic to perform the same function as much heavier materials, like metal or glass or terracotta?
53:13 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's super interesting because that's exactly where we started to see kind of the fault in the image of la fermière, where we started thinking, okay, it's so much heavier that during transportation, it probably emits a lot more CO2. And so we're really wondering where does this idea that plastic is bad or is worse maybe than glass or terracotta? What, where do you think that comes from?
53:33 Speaker 11 You know, it's, so I will say that there are social scientists who can answer this question far better than I can as far as the psychology of perception and how people understand and perceive risk and impact. I think one of the things that is largely driving the conversation with plastic is that we can really see the impact of plastic in a way that we can't see the environmental impact of other materials. And so if we are able to take a picture of a beach that's strewn in microplastics, if we can take a picture of an animal that's entangled in some sort of plastic, or we see the carcass of a dead seabird whose stomach is filled with plastic, those are all heart-wrenching
54:18 Speaker 11 images. And not only that, we can make the direct connection between what we see in those environmental damaging photographs and our lifestyles. We can see our own little consumption in those environmental impacts.
54:31 Speaker 01 Just to say, Shelley is, of course, focusing on just the environmental impact here. Obviously, there's a whole other conversation to be had about the possible health impacts of plastics or microplastics that we're just not going to get into today. But when it comes to sustainability, Shelley thinks that plastics' reputation as public enemy number one kind of just boils down to how visible its environmental impacts are. Whereas with other materials like glass, metal, terracotta, a lot of these things require a ton of energy to produce and to transport, and much more than plastic, but their impacts are just more abstract and less visual.
55:08 Speaker 11 It's really hard to capture climate change in a picture. We have many, many photos of a polar bear on an ice shelf, but that doesn't give us the same connection as the stuff we see in our recycling bin every day.
55:21 Speaker 05 Wow, I actually never thought of that, honestly. It kind of goes back to this idea that if you see a yogurt in a clay pot and a yogurt in a plastic pot, you're going to think, oh yeah, plastic is bad, while clay has this idea of like, oh, it's natural, yeah, it's probably better for the environment.
55:36 Speaker 11 Yeah, so consumers often think that plastic has the greatest environmental impact of any other material. It turns out that particularly if we're looking at a climate perspective on the amount of carbon emissions that materials have, plastic generally has a lower carbon footprint than other packaging materials.
56:00 Speaker 01 And so you, as a very well-informed conscientious consumer, you're at the grocery store, you have a choice between a yogurt that comes in a plastic container and a yogurt that comes in a terracotta container. Which would you feel better about picking up on a random Tuesday?
56:18 Speaker 11 So I would say that if we're just talking about yogurt, it would be buying yogurt in bulk that you're going to eat in a plastic container. And so that both reduces the total amount of plastic per serving of yogurt and has a lower packaging impact.
56:41 PJ Vogt? Interesting.
56:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
56:43 PJ Vogt? But it's tricky if you're trying to say that your product is valuable and like considered and a delicacy, bulk plastic container is kind of working against your message.
56:54 Speaker 01 It doesn't scream up market.
56:55 PJ Vogt? Yeah.
56:56 Speaker 01 But it just turns out that if you get into the nitty gritty of the environmental trade-offs here, like the thing that doesn't look environmentally friendly, it doesn't have the aesthetic of environmentalism oftentimes can be more environmentally friendly. But.
57:11 PJ Vogt? But.
57:12 Speaker 01 This is an important but. Shelley goes on to say that this whole conversation we're having about packaging kind of misses the point entirely.
57:19 Speaker 11 When we think about things that have the greatest environmental impact, we often focus on packaging. And so that's the stuff we throw out at the end of the day. And we tend to say, oh, look at all this packaging. And that's the biggest environmental impact that I have because I have to throw out all this packaging.
57:37 Speaker 11 What people don't realize is it's the thing inside the package that has a much greater environmental impact than the package itself. Certainly in the case of food, the food that we're eating has a much greater environmental impact than the packaging it comes in.
57:51 Speaker 01 She says plastics typically less than 10% of the total environmental impact of the food product that you're consuming. The food itself far more important to whether or not you're actually making a sustainable decision.
58:02 PJ Vogt? What's the carbon footprint of yogurt?
58:04 Speaker 01 This is a good question, and this invites a whole lot of other questions on the other side of it. But what she's saying is that packaging is kind of a red herring. And also, La Fermier's marketing is kind of encouraging you to follow that red herring. Like, they're not saying, "Look how sustainable our yogurt is." They're saying, "Look how sustainable our packaging is." Which is another reason for me to at least believe that this is primarily a marketing decision.
58:25 PJ Vogt? You're with the teenagers in this one.
58:26 Speaker 01 I'm with the teenagers. And also, the funny thing is that La Fermier's yogurt, which is the thing actually driving whether or not it's a more sustainable option than its competitors, seems to be pretty environmentally friendly. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One is that the company operates on a kind of "make it where you sell it" principle, meaning the company's two biggest markets, France and the US, the dairy is produced and processed locally in both of those countries.
58:50 PJ Vogt? Okay.
58:51 Speaker 01 You're not adding a bunch of transport miles inside that part of the supply chain.
58:55 PJ Vogt? Yeah.
58:55 Speaker 01 Which is going to lower the carbon footprint that's mostly invisible to the consumer. But also, at least in France, where this data is public, La Fermier is sourcing its dairy from small, local farms with an average of only 35 cows. And farms like these, if they're using certain agricultural practices, they could be better for the environment than large-scale dairy farms.
59:16 PJ Vogt? Although, what I've always been told is that if you wanted to put a huge dent in climate change, just like our reliance on cows as a food input, because of the methane they produce is hugely bad for the environment. And so, the fact that they're using cows at all is kind of a problem. Although, it's a yogurt company, they're going to use cows.
59:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, you could eat non-dairy yogurt. And this is kind of the quality of this sustainability conversation. It's a hall of mirrors. Like, being human is bad for the environment, and all sorts of decisions we make inside of being human are also bad for the environment. So like, yes, you could say, "I no longer eat full-dairy yogurt. I eat oat milk yogurt," or whatever else is out there. And that would be better for the environment, and you wouldn't have to have this conversation at all.
59:58 PJ Vogt? But this is the conversation we've chosen.
1:00:00 Speaker 01 But this is the thing I hadn't understood when the teacher, David, first posed the question. Like, he wasn't just asking about the packaging. He was asking about all the difficult ethical choices involved.
1:00:09 PJ Vogt? Right.
1:00:09 Speaker 01 Which is actually something that teenagers like thinking through. And I think as Remy and Anu grasped that, this question had become their question, too.
1:00:17 Speaker 05 Thank you so much for your time again. Honestly, you have no idea how far this has taken us from just a stupid little yogurt question. So, thank you so much for your help.
1:00:26 Speaker 11 No, it is an absolutely fantastic question, and you guys are asking exactly the right questions.
1:00:34 Speaker 03 Okay, skeleton crew. Hello, sorry.
1:00:38 Speaker 03 Alright, so I'm gonna ask for about 10 minutes of your attention.
1:00:43 Speaker 01 Again, here's the teacher David Freeman.
1:00:45 Speaker 03 We have something of an answer to the great yogurt question of 2024. Romy and Anuk are gonna tell you a little bit about what we've been up to. You guys wanna come up front? And, yes?
1:00:58 Speaker 03 Oh, applause!
1:01:01 Speaker 01 We were in the same classroom, Trithi and I visited months prior.
1:01:05 Speaker 01 Romy and Anuk seemed, and I'd never actually seen the side of them, a little nervous to speak in front of the class.
1:01:10 Speaker 05 So, and now we are back to the last CDM class of the year, ever. Not, well, not ever, just next year. And, so yeah, I think this has confirmed a lot of our initial theories, so on how...
1:01:22 Speaker 06 It's a brand thing.
1:01:23 Speaker 05 It's a brand thing, it's a brand DNA thing, and also a marketing decision over sustainably, maybe. And, yeah.
1:01:30 Speaker 01 And Romy and Anuk just walked the class through the steps of their reporting, everything we had done along the way.
1:01:35 Speaker 06 So, Mr. Freeman brought us this question back in like, November, December.
1:01:41 Speaker 01 They talked about all the people we interviewed.
1:01:43 Speaker 05 Head of sales and marketing at FNR US.
1:01:45 Speaker 01 They broke down all the complicated conclusions we had drawn.
1:01:48 Speaker 05 But she also mentioned a very important point, which was that what's inside the packaging matters much more than what, than the packaging itself.
1:01:53 Speaker 01 And, of course, they shared their marketing advice for LaFerme Air.
1:01:57 Speaker 05 I feel like they're kind of missing the point in a way, because they're really advertising the sustainability aspect of their pots, when really they should be doing the same thing but for the yogurt.
1:02:05 Speaker 06 Yogurt is.
1:02:06 Speaker 05 Because we just not proved, but we're able to question the fact that clay pots are not maybe sustainable. But we all know that locally-produced food, which is what they do,
1:02:16 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:02:16 Speaker 05 is good for the environment, so if they wanted to kind of pitch this climate aspect of it, they should probably focus on the yogurt.
1:02:23 Speaker 03 Any, uh, anybody else have any follow-up questions, just while, while we're here? This is your last, last chance to interrogate a dairy product. Good?
1:02:32 Speaker 06 Cool.
1:02:32 Speaker 03 Alright, excellent.
1:02:38 Speaker 01 And with that, homework assignment complete, the stupid little yogurt question was officially done.
1:02:50 Speaker 01 Chapter Eight: Graduation. So I should say, as sometimes happens on the show, months passed while we slowly worked on the story. And months in the life of an adult, not such a big deal, but for these teenagers, it meant that we would meet up occasionally as their life was speeding up pretty quickly, in this case, towards graduation and the life that followed after.
1:03:13 Speaker 01 Romi did end up finishing her big research project on morphine addiction. She's about to head to the L'Uns School of Economics in the fall. Anouk's finishing up high school in Paris and is gonna head to a French university in the fall.
1:03:24 Speaker 06 The engraving on the side.
1:03:25 Speaker 05 It's very difficult to open.
1:03:26 Speaker 06 Yeah, it is.
1:03:27 Speaker 01 But the last time we got together in person in New York, I brought in a couple pots of La Frumiere for them to taste.
1:03:32 Speaker 05 I mean, orange blossom. Does that mean orange? I think there's a kind of honey that's orange blossom on it. Oh, shit. Yeah, there's no orange on it. My bad.
1:03:39 Speaker 06 Still, if this was American, it would be like yellow.
1:03:41 Speaker 05 That was super well.
1:03:42 Speaker 06 Yeah, so we just opened the yogurt. There is indeed yogurt in there.
1:03:46 Speaker 01 This is the final step in the investigation. Do you guys have anything else to say about yogurt?
1:03:52 Speaker 05 Nope, just enjoy.
1:03:53 Speaker 06 Pretty good.
1:03:54 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:03:54 Speaker 06 It's actually, it's good. It's good.
1:03:57 Speaker 05 I agree, unfortunately.
1:03:59 Speaker 01 What do you mean unfortunately?
1:04:00 Speaker 05 I don't know. I want it to be more like, not like, completely convinced. You know, I don't want to be convinced by it, but like...
1:04:05 Speaker 06 It's not amazing.
1:04:07 Speaker 05 I mean, the texture is amazing.
1:04:08 Speaker 06 It's, yeah, I don't think, the flavor's really good. I mean, I'm not a big yogurt person, so maybe that's just me. But for a yogurt enthusiast, it would probably be good.
1:04:23 Speaker 01 Garrett Graham, he's Search Engine's senior producer. Big thanks this week to David Freeman and the L'Isée Francaise de New York for inviting us into their classroom.
1:04:41 Speaker 01 Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pennamanani. This episode was fact-checked by Claire Hyman. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Additional production support on this episode from Hazel May Bryan and Sean Merchant. Our intern is Oscar Knoxen. If you'd like to support our show and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and some additional audio, please consider signing up for incognito mode. You can learn more about incognito mode at searchengine.show.
1:05:12 PJ Vogt? Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis, and thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schaaf. Our agent is Orin Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.
1:05:55 PJ Vogt? This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vistaprint. As a small business owner running a podcast, I'm always looking for authentic ways to connect with listeners, which makes Vistaprint such a valued expert partner for us. I was on their site the other day, brainstorming new things we could make for our show, and the creative momentum took over. I ended up designing search engine stickers, and I tried to make a sign for our office. When your physical branding looks this sharp and professional, it immediately communicates credibility and shows your audience that you mean business. Vistaprint truly helps every dollar go further, delivering premium quality and design support that make your company look established without breaking the bank. Whether you need your design tweaked or a total rebrand, Vistaprint has you covered with the expert service small businesses deserve.
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