226. Food + Science = Victory!

A kitchen wizard and a nutrition detective talk about the perfect hamburger, getting the most out of garlic, and why you should use vodka in just about everything.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:33Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:04Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  See mintmobile.com.

• 1:54Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what does it say, Kenji, that there are so many conventional wisdoms about something as basic as cooking food, which we've been doing for thousands of years, that are, if not wrong, at least kind of misguided? Isn't that sort of strange?

• 2:44Speaker 01

  It is strange, but I think it's precisely because we've been doing it for so long and because everybody does it and it's sort of an essential part of everyday life that I think it's one of those things that rarely gets a sort of a second thought.

• 2:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today, we're going to give a lot of second thoughts to what we eat and how we eat it.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  My name is Kenji Lopez-Alt. I'm the Managing Culinary Director at SeriousEats.com, and I write about the science of food.

• 3:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Uh-oh, the science of food. Doesn't that sound kind of unnatural?

• 3:15Speaker 01

  I think a lot of people think of science as sort of the opposite of tradition or the opposite of natural. And really, it's not. Science is just a method, right? It's a method about thinking about the world, and it can be used for many different ends.

• 3:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, then, I'm on board. How about you? Would you like to know whether the secret of New York pizza really is the water?

• 3:37Speaker 01

  What we basically ended up finding was that the water makes almost no difference compared to other variables in the dough.

• 3:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Would you like to know how Freakonomics Radio listeners do things in the kitchen?

• 3:47Speaker 02

  If we can pick it up with chopsticks, then that means it's completely cooked on the inside.

• 3:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  And would you like to know the true nutritional value of one of America's favorite vegetables?

• 3:57Speaker 03

  Veterinarians don't even recommend it as rabbit food.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 4:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  His full name is J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. The J is for James, his given first name. He's always gone by Kenji, but he didn't want to totally lose the James. Alt is his last name. His father is of German descent. His mother is Japanese. That's where the Kenji comes from. And the Lopez is the last name of Kenji's wife. She's Colombian. When she and Kenji got married, they both became Lopez-Alt. So J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has just published a big, beautiful doorstop of a book.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  It's almost 1,000 pages. It's pretty big.

• 5:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's called The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science. The first line? "I was never meant to be a food guy."

• 5:09Speaker 01

  I came from a family of scientists. So my father is a microbiologist and my grandfather is an organic chemist. I had a very sort of science and math-heavy childhood. I was one of those kids who would wake up at 6:30 in the morning to go and watch Mr. Wizard on Nickelodeon.

• 5:25Speaker 05

  I'm now going to illustrate evaporation. Going to go from a liquid to a gas. You watch what happens.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  It's still one of my favorite shows. And honestly, I think on a conceptual level, everything I learned about basic science all the way through college, I learned from that show.

• 5:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Really? You're not joking?

• 5:44Speaker 01

  I'm not joking. I'm not joking.

• 5:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you were way into science as a kid. Were you way into food as a kid?

• 5:49Speaker 01

  No. I mean, you know, my family liked eating. But, you know, I was one of those kids who, like, I hated fish until I was probably in my early 20s. You know, when I went to college, I had no idea how to cook.

• 6:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  What would be a typical family Sunday night meal, let's say?

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Well, so my mom is Japanese. She moved to the US when she was a teenager. And so her food was, she did all the cooking at home, for the most part. My dad would occasionally cook a special meal, you know, when he felt like cooking. He would cook a lot of Mexican or Chinese food, and those were always nice nights. But my mom cooked, you know, our daily food. It was always sort of a mix between Japanese food and Betty Crocker 1970s staples.

• 6:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  A lot of the recipes in The Food Lab, not

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Toward those 70s staples, but are improved upon through science.

• 6:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so I'm about to make an assumption. Tell me if the assumption is right or totally wrong. As a kid, you were science obsessed. You went to MIT and in the beginning studied biology. You come from a family of scientists. So my assumption is that all of that got kind of baked into you to some degree. And this kind of appreciation for at least familiarity with the scientific method. And then when you fell in love with food and cooking, that you naturally kind of parlayed the scientific method into the cooking method. Is that at all true or not?

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's very accurate, remarkably accurate. You know, I found when I was working in restaurants that I did have this sort of natural curiosity about why things work.

• 7:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  He first found his way into the kitchen during college. It happened by accident and also, important life lesson here, by lying.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  The summer after my sophomore year, I decided I wanted to take the summer off from any kind of academic work because I was kind of getting burned out on biology. So I decided to go get a job as a waiter. You know, so I walked around Boston trying to find a job as a waiter and nobody wanted to hire me. And then when one of the restaurants I walked into, they said they didn't have any waiter positions available, but one of their prep cooks didn't show up that morning. And if I could hold the knife, that I could have a job as a cook. And so I lied and I said, yeah, I know, I know how to use a knife. And I, and I like literally had, I don't think I'd ever cut anything with a chef's knife in my life before.

• 7:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  He was hooked.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  So yeah, from the moment I stepped into the kitchen, I was like, this is the life for me. This is, this is great.

• 8:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  He did graduate from MIT.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  I switched majors to architecture. So I finished with a degree in architecture, structural engineering.

• 8:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  But then he spent the next eight years working in a bunch of different Boston restaurants.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  That first restaurant job was at a, one of those Mongolian grill type places. It was a night of the round grill. I would do things like flip shrimp behind my back and stuff like that. From there to like sort of big chain restaurants, a Mexican place, pizza place, work my way up the chain. I started working full time. I could get a job at one of the, you know, the nicest restaurants in town. Barbara Lynch was my first really great chef. I worked at, at her restaurant, Number Nine Park, Angie Oysters, and a butcher shop doing charcuterie. Ken Oranger, who also has a number of really good Boston restaurants.

• 8:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Modern restaurants.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Spanish place and a sort of modern sashimi bar.

• 8:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  But as Lopez Alt writes in The Food Lab, "I discovered that in many cases, even in the best restaurants in the world, the methods that traditional cooking knowledge teaches us are not only outdated, but occasionally, flat-out wrong." This was, of course, his science background talking.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  You know, why are we cooking it this way? Would it be better to cook it this way? You know, why are we doing this? And that's something that is actually not very easy to work with when you're in a restaurant, because it's such a fast-paced environment. You don't really have time to sort of ask those questions or investigate them or answer them. So that was also one of the reasons why I felt this desire to get out of restaurants and go into writing, because I thought it would give me more time to actually think about these things and answer these questions that have been building up for so many years.

• 9:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  His first writing job was at Cook's Illustrated magazine.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  So they have a big kitchen in Brookline, Massachusetts. So it has like 30 ovens, 25 burners. It's a big test kitchen. And I mean, that was pretty much perfect for me, because they make a... They sell magazines by doing just that very same thing, with asking questions and spending the money and the time to answer them.

• 9:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  First at Cook's Illustrated, later at Serious Eats, Lopez Alt began to refine a methodology.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  The first step is always research. So what I'll do is I'll go and look up the... Look to as many sources as I can for the history of the dish, many different recipes, to see how different people are making it.

• 10:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Then he starts to reinvent a recipe, or at least rethink it.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  I try and find areas where I think it might be problems for home cooks, or areas where I think it could be improved in efficiency.

• 10:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Often, this means taking a step backward, not thinking just in terms of ingredients and texture and flavor, but scientific basics like temperature.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  There's a difference between temperature and energy. And that's a concept that I think a lot of people have a difficult time wrapping their heads around. But the really quick and easy way to demonstrate it is that if you think about a pot of water that's boiling, the temperature of that water is 212 degrees Fahrenheit, 100 degrees Celsius. And if you stick your hand in there, you're going to burn your hand. At the same time, you can have an oven at 212 degrees Fahrenheit or 100 degrees Celsius, and you could stick your hand in there for like a minute and you won't... You'll barely feel... It'll feel hot, but you're not going to burn yourself. And the way that this could bear itself out in cooking is... For instance, if you've been used to cooking your pizzas on a baking stone, you know, which a lot of people have in their ovens. A stone is not particularly dense compared to, say, solid metal. There are now things called baking steels,

• 11:07Speaker 01

  which are solid sheets of steel that you heat up in your oven, and they transfer energy to your pizza much, much faster than a stone can, even if they're at the same temperature. So, you know, you can have a steel at 450 degrees and a stone at like 550 degrees, and the pizza that's placed on the steel will actually cook faster than the one that's placed on the stone.

• 11:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Tell me something I don't know about the geometry of food. You refer to that a few times in your book. Why is that important? How should I think about it differently?

• 11:34Speaker 01

  The geometry of food is important because, you know, one of the big things is surface area to volume ratio. I like to think about it this way, where if you're looking at the edge of a piece of General Tso's chicken, and say you're looking at it from about two feet away, and you try and trace the outline of that General Tso's chicken, and you say, you know, all right, the perimeter of that piece of chicken is two inches. And then you look at it a little bit closer and you see, you know what? Like, I was just tracing a very rough outline. If I actually go in and fill in these little crags, okay, now it's more like two and a quarter inches. And if you look even closer, you'll see that, all right, maybe it's more like two and a half inches. And this is a phenomenon that people, geologists, see with coastlines, that the further away you are, the smoother they seem and the shorter they are. But it's important because with a food like fried chicken, you want it to be really, really crisp.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  And the more surface area you have, the more sort of little nooks and crannies you have, the crisper it's going to feel in your mouth, the better sauce is going to cling to it, all those things. So, you know, crispy foods, you want them to be really craggly and have a very high surface area to volume ratio.

• 12:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is there any instance, I'm sure there are, where more surface area is not better?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if you want to, say, cook like a prime rib roast, for example, or even like a tenderloin steak, you want it actually to be in as compact as either a spherical or cylindrical a shape as possible because that minimizes surface area to volume ratio. And that's important because for, you know, for things like that, the more surface area you have, the more it's going to dry out while it's cooking because there's just more surface for moisture to escape from, and the less evenly it's going to cook. So that's why if you're cooking like a tenderloin steak or you're roasting a whole tenderloin or prime rib, you generally want to tie it up a little bit so that it retains that nice cylindrical shape. And that, you know, that's about more than just aesthetics. It actually, it reduces the surface area and thus helps it retain juices and cook more evenly better.

• 13:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  The underlying component of the food lab methodology is the same underlying component of most bench science: experimentation.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  For something like General Tso's, for example, my big goal from the very beginning was to get the chicken to be as crusty and craggly as possible and to make sure that it developed a crust that would stay crispy even after you tossed it in this sort of gloopy sauce. So a lot of my testing for that recipe was with various types of breading and frying methods and how to really sort of enhance that crispness.

• 13:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can you name a few of each, the breading and methods?

• 13:54Speaker 01

  If you want to start with basics, you know, there's like I tried dipping in cornstarch. I tried dipping in a cornstarch slurry followed by dry cornstarch. I tried using various mixes of cornstarch and wheat flour. I tried potato starch. I tried tapioca starch. I tried doing sort of a southern style, like brining the chicken in Asian flavors with a little bit of buttermilk to tenderize it. I tried using eggs versus no eggs. Many different things like that. The final recipe I ended up with uses some vodka in the batter, which is a-

• 14:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're fond of vodka for battering, yes?

• 14:24Speaker 01

  I am. I mean, I use it in a few different things. Usually you use it when you want to develop crispness but also maintain lightness because, you know, vodka will help moisten a batter or a dough, but it doesn't develop gluten the way that water does, so it stays nice and light. It doesn't get tough. And the other thing that vodka does is it evaporates much faster than water does. It's more volatile than water, so when you when you put food that's been dipped into a batter made with vodka into hot oil, that sort of vodka really violently bubbles away very quickly. So that sort of lightens up the coating and it makes it much crisper.

• 14:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gotcha. Okay, so which of those coatings ended up winning?

• 15:03Speaker 01

  I believe I did a mixture of vodka, cornstarch, and a little bit of wheat flour along with some soy sauce. And then, so the chicken gets kind of dipped in that wet batter and then tossed in a dry starch mixture.

• 15:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm just curious how, I guess, rigorous your experiments are. Would they pass muster in a science lab, for instance?

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Sometimes. If there is really like a sort of deep question about cooking that people are very conflicted on, then I will actually do, you know, a really well-controlled experiment, double-blind. So, for example, like, one of the ones I did a number of years ago was to answer the question whether New York pizza is really good because of the water.

• 15:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  The water, right.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And people say it is, and, you know, people use that as an excuse a lot for why they can't make good pizza outside of New York. So, for that one, I actually, I did a full double-blind experiment where I got water, you know, starting with perfectly distilled water and then up to, you know, various levels of dissolved solids inside the water.

• 15:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  And New York is, New York has a high level, I assume, of dissolved solids?

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Pretty high, pretty high, yeah. Not the highest, but pretty high. So, I think I had six different water samples, ranging from very high to nothing. And I put them into numbered bottles, and then I had an assistant, my wife, rearrange the numbers on the bottles, and then I passed the bottles on to a pizza chef in New York. So, I didn't know what was in the numbered bottles, he didn't know what was in the numbered bottles. I also doubled a couple of them up as a control to make sure that our testing panel was on point. And then, and then I had a bunch of people, a mix of sort of amateurs and also sort of professional food writers, come and taste the pizzas blind. What we basically ended up finding was that the water makes almost no difference compared to other variables in the dough. And, yeah, I mean, that, you know, that one, it's, it's sort of silly premise, but, you know, but it, but it was a pretty rigorously controlled test.

• 16:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, and someone who lives in New York and eats pizza, I don't think that's a silly premise at all. I think that's exactly what science is for. It strikes me that everything we're talking about so far is geared toward cooking for taste, which makes perfect sense, because eating is incredibly pleasurable in addition to being necessary. But then there's a, a school of thought, small but growing, that says that one reason that we've gotten into such like nutritional trouble is because we have had the luxury to eat for taste, and that we've stopped eating kind of for nutrition. I'm just curious what your thoughts are there, because I love, I mean, your book is unapologetic. About deliciousness. And, and when you write about super creamy cheesy Ogratin potatoes,

• 17:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  it's like, we're going, it's full Monty. It's like as much cream as we can, as much butter as we can. And, and I love your celebration of that. On the other hand, you are doing this in an era when there's a lot more focus on nutrition. I'm just curious how you kind of balance that.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Well, I'm one of these people who really thinks that it's all, you know, it's all about moderation. And from the way my book is written, you might think that I eat steak and potatoes every night, but the, the reality is actually really far from that. So if I'm going to eat a hamburger, I want that to be the best damn hamburger I can make. Right? So that's where this idea that, you know, like, I'm going to try and perfect these foods, these comfort classics that people, that people love, that you shouldn't necessarily eat every day. But, you know, when you make them, you want them to be really great. So on a day to day basis, you know, my wife and I stay mostly vegetarian. We eat a lot of fish, a lot of seafood. We both exercise. So, you know, I, I think food can be delicious, but, but it, but it should also be sustaining at the end. And, and your health is not really worth that extra serving of burgers or extra serving of creamy potato casserole.

• 18:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up after the break, we go deeper into the delicious versus nutritious debate. Even a lot of the fruits and veg we eat are not very good for us. And you want to know whose fault that is? It's America's fault.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  What happened is all of these great food cultures of the countries that we came from got lost when we came here.

• 18:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  But first, a couple more kitchen tricks. Here's Kenji Lopez alt on scrambled eggs.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  The one big thing that with scrambled eggs, if you salt your eggs while they're raw, you know, a pinch of salt in the eggs while they're raw, beat them up and let them sit for about 15 minutes. They'll actually retain moisture a lot better than if you were to just cook them straight and salt them at the beginning.

• 19:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  He can also help out with your pie crust.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  If you use vodka in place of some of the water in your pie crust, it doesn't make the pie boozy, but you end up with a dough that is much flakier and much lighter.

• 19:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  We also asked you Freakonomics Radio listeners to tell us your kitchen tricks and hacks.

• 19:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  And superstitions.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Hi, my name is Jane. I'm 25 years old. Currently live in New York, but I grew up in Taiwan. A culinary trick that I learned growing up was that when boiling an egg, we can test whether or not it's fully cooked by trying to pick it up with chopsticks.

• 19:49Speaker 06

  Hi, my name is Joel. I'm from Melbourne, Australia. I've been told by my mom when prepare cucumber to cut off both ends of it and to rub it on the previously cut part and it'll somehow remove the bitterness.

• 20:04Speaker 07

  Hi, this is Tiffany in Cupertino, California. My baking tip is that contrary to what Martha Stewart always said, you do not need to mix your salt and your baking soda into your flour in a separate bowl before you add it to the rest of your batter.

• 20:20Speaker 08

  This is David Lyons out of Denver, Colorado. And the culinary secret I learned from my wife, who is Korean, is to always soak rice before you cook it. Once you start doing it this way, there's no going back.

• 20:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Granola. You know that moment when a meeting ends and someone says, "Let's circle back on this next week," and everyone nods, but no one writes it down? Then next week rolls around and it's radio silence? That's why Granola exists. Granola is an AI-powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. You take rough notes like you normally would, and in the background, Granola securely transcribes the meeting. Then it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes when the meeting ends. And the best part? Granola works through your device's audio, which means it integrates seamlessly into the video conferencing tools you already use. No setup, no awkward bots. It's just your normal meeting with superpowers. If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free.

• 21:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just head to granola.ai/freakonomics. That's granola.ai/freakonomics to get your time back. Try it for free at granola.ai/freakonomics.

• 21:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring. Great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it. Which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life? Like banking, for example. Well, PNC Bank did, since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely-not-yolo type. PNC Bank. Brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC.

• 22:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Hotels.com. Hotels.com helps you find and book the right stay for work faster. With business preferences, save your travel must-haves, like gym access or breakfast, just once, then get tailored results whenever you search for work travel. Plus, with a free membership, you can save up to 20% on hotels and earn rewards on every stay for future travel. Book now at Hotels.com. Visit Hotels.com for details.

• 23:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Not much is known about when humans began to cook food, although cooking is widely thought to have started long before agriculture. The earliest archaeological evidence of humans controlling fire and possibly cooking dates roughly a million years ago, but the Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that it started nearly a million years before that. He also argues that cooking is what made us human, that it allowed our prehistoric ancestors to spend less time and energy chewing raw foods, and that that energy could be directed toward growing the human brain. But that's not the only reason to appreciate cooking. It releases nutrients in raw foods and often makes them more potent and easier to digest.

• 23:49Speaker 03

  There's some foods, and kale and broccoli are two of them, that we absorb more of their cancer-fighting ingredients if we eat them raw. But most fruits and vegetables benefit from light cooking, either sauteed, maybe in olive oil at low temperature, or lightly steamed, less cooked than most people cook them. But this light steaming, or this gentle saute, breaks down cell walls, which makes more of the nutrients available to us. So we'll get three or four times more nutrients from a cooked carrot than from a raw one.

• 24:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let me introduce you to someone.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  My name is Jo Robinson, and I am an investigative journalist.

• 24:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  And she spent most of her career studying nutrition and food. Unlike Kenji Lopez Alt, Jo Robinson was destined for her career path.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  And it really came down to this amazing grandmother that I had, who had a sense about food and wholesomeness. Like in 1910, she and a group of women were critical of the agricultural department for saying that we should be eating white bread instead of whole wheat bread. And the thinking of the time, this is the food science of the time, was that all of that fiber and the bran and the germ were just roughage that we couldn't digest well, so it wasn't good for us. And this group also lobbied that Coca-Cola should not be sold.

• 25:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Her grandmother very much influenced the way the family ate.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  So more than other kids, we had whole grain. We ate nuts and seeds and brewer's yeast, and lots of fruits and vegetables. So I just grew up with that as being normal.

• 25:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  As a kid, growing up in Washington State, partly in Tacoma and partly in the Puget Sound wilderness, Jo Robinson would sometimes spend her allowance on Wonder Bread. So she wasn't the only one in school with a sandwich on homemade wheat bread. As an adult, she tries to sort out nutritional myths from reality.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  My job is to go into the scientific journals, find what I think is important for human health, and repackage it in a way that people can, first of all, understand its importance and then find what to do. What am I going to pick in this grocery store? What am I going to pick in this farmer's market? So really, it takes someone like myself to translate science into action steps.

• 26:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Robinson's latest book is called Eating on the Wild Side. It's fascinating. Almost every page tells you something you don't know about food, especially fruits and veg and herbs. And a lot of it goes back to that split between delicious and nutritious.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  Well, we humans are programmed, and have always been programmed, to prefer food that is high in carbohydrates, starches, and sugar, and oil, because those kinds of nutrients were very poor in the wilderness. And we had to be motivated with these feel-good brain chemicals to go out and get them. And so, you know, just over time, we just kept picking sweeter, fatter, richer, softer, less fibrous food, never knowing what we're doing. And it is only now do we have the technology and the slowly accumulating wisdom to know how we should transform our food supply

• 27:19Speaker 03

  to make it optimum for human health.

• 27:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  In Robinson's view, America has been guiltier than others.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  I don't think Americans are stupid when it comes to food, nutrition, and health. But what happened is all of these great food cultures of the countries that we came from got lost when we came here. And everything became homogenized. And then we became leaders in industrial agriculture, which has nothing to do with nutrition. It has to do with volume and with flavor. So the vast majority of food crops in this country We're growing them because they're highly productive or disease resistant. Those are the two criteria that farmers use and agricultural schools use to determine what varieties we're going to eat. They're not looking at food value.

• 28:06Speaker 03

  So, other countries throughout the world tend to have more nutritious diets than we do. And then, we started breeding out all signs of bitterness because food manufacturers knew that about 25% of the population does not like bitter foods, and even low amounts. So, they're not going to create something that 25% of their potential sellers are going to avoid. So, just this taking away the bitterness took away a lot of the antioxidants. So, all of those trends continue. So, we have a very bland, low antioxidant, soft diet.

• 28:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Consider, for instance, one of the most popular vegetables in America.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  Overwhelmingly, people in this country eat iceberg lettuce. In fact, half the people in this country have never eaten anything other than iceberg lettuce.

• 29:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, let me clarify. It's not that half the people have never eaten anything other than iceberg lettuce, but no other lettuce. Now, why is that?

• 29:08Speaker 03

  It's a very productive lettuce, many, many tons of lettuce per acre, and it's also a very mild tasting lettuce. And, as a culture, we are pretty bitter adverse. And so, we like the fact that iceberg lettuce is like, kind of, a watery crunch and doesn't have a lot of flavor. So, it's everywhere.

• 29:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so maybe iceberg isn't one of those classy salad greens, arugula, or mizuna, or even just a romaine. But hey, it's still a vegetable, right? Which means, it's still got a lot of nutritional value, right?

• 29:47Speaker 03

  Iceberg lettuce has fewer nutrients than any other lettuce in the store. In fact, veterinarians don't even recommend it as rabbit food, because there's not enough nutrients to support the health of rabbits.

• 30:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  To think productively about our nutritional present and future, Robinson began by looking to the past.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  I began to compare the food that we're eating today with the wild diet that sustained us for about 98% of our evolution. And it was so very clear that, over time, we have greatly diminished the nutrient content of our animal products and all of, everything that we grow. For example, the antioxidant content of wild plants varies from 200 to 400 times greater than the domesticated counterparts that we eat today.

• 30:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Robinson believes powerfully in the value of antioxidants.

• 30:46Speaker 03

  Well, the word antioxidant can tell a lot of the story. It's against oxidation. And oxidation is just this chemical process where a molecule grabs an electron from another molecule, which sets up this chain reaction, which can cause all kinds of destruction in every cell in our body.

• 31:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  As Robinson writes, "Plants can't fight their enemies or hide from them, so they protect them by producing an arsenal of chemical compounds that protect them, from insects, disease, harsh weather, and sunlight." And many of those compounds function for us when we eat them as antioxidants. The problem is that, as a result of many years of breeding food for taste and productivity, we've created a menu of modern fruits and vegetables that aren't necessarily good for us.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  There are some fruits in particular that may be bad for our health, and that's something that a lot of people just can't believe. But there was this interesting study where some Italian researchers took people, men, actually overweight men, who were at high risk for heart disease. And they decided to add a fruit a day to their diet, thinking that that would reduce their risk. And so they chose apples. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. So these overweight men, prone to heart disease, divided into two groups. One continued their normal diet, one had their normal diet plus a golden delicious apple a day. And at the end of the study, those men who were eating the golden delicious

• 32:22Speaker 03

  apple had higher levels of triglycerides, which are an independent predictor of heart disease, and the worst kind of cholesterol. And the problem with this particular variety of apple, it's very high in fruit sugars, and it's lower in antioxidants than many other varieties. So the health benefits in that variety are low, the sugar is high.

• 32:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you may think that eating any fruit or vegetable is good for you.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  But that's certainly not true, because the fruits and vegetables that most people pick in this country are extremely low in antioxidants. And that includes things like melons, and sweet corn, white sweet corn, and white potatoes, and bananas, iceberg lettuce. They're at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to food values.

• 33:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what's the solution?

• 33:13Speaker 03

  We need to find out what science is now telling us about the best varieties of fruits and vegetables to eat. And this is complicated science, and it's not widely adopted at this time. You're not going to find the USDA saying eat more of the cabbage family because it has glucosinolates in it, which are cancer-fighting organisms. So we really need to go outside of mainstream nutrition and agriculture to find what's best for our health.

• 33:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's the mission Jo Robinson is on. She advocates seeking out the less sweet, less homogenized version of whatever you're already eating.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  So the best thing that you can be eating in terms of true lettuces would be a red leaf or dark green leaf lettuce, with red leaf lettuce far superior to the others.

• 34:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  A Granny Smith or Honeycrisp apple is better than a Golden Delicious, although heirloom varieties, as Robinson writes, are generally much better than supermarket varieties. The very popular Russet Burbank potato has a lot of nutrients, but also a very high glycemic index. On that front, red and blue fleshed potatoes are much better, although harder to find. And in this family of vegetables, sweet potatoes or yams are the healthier choice. Berries are great, but again, the wilder, the better.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  There's really nothing better for our health than wild berries. Wild berries tend to have, oh, from two to 10 times more health-enhancing phytonutrients than our domesticated varieties.

• 34:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  And it's not just choosing the better varieties of the foods we eat, it's when we eat them.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  I do call this "eat me now."

• 34:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Eat me now because why?

• 35:00Speaker 03

  When plants are harvested, we think that they're dead. They're not. They're actually living until we eat them or cook them. And all the time they're alive, they're burning up their own antioxidants to protect the fact that they're still inhaling oxygen. But they're not producing more antioxidants because you can't do that once you're harvested. So you need to eat them the day you buy them or the next day, ideally. So these are some of the things that you want to eat me now. Spinach, asparagus, broccoli, artichokes, kale, green onions, mushrooms, parsley, and

• 35:44Speaker 03

  cherries. And if you do that, you may get two, three, five, 10 times more antioxidants than if you push them to the back of the refrigerator and remember, you know, find them a week or two later.

• 35:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, you might infer Robinson's "eat me now" rule to also mean "eat me raw," but she says the raw food movement is misguided.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  It's difficult to find science to support the idea that we're healthier eating raw produce than lightly cooked produce.

• 36:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Where does the raw food idea come from?

• 36:18Speaker 03

  Well, one of the claims is that if you cook things, you destroy plant enzymes. And that's true. And so the thinking is, well, we need these plant enzymes in order to digest our food. They're going to make us healthier. But plant enzymes are not created for our health. They're for the plant's health.

• 36:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  What about canned vegetables? They must be less nutritious than fresh, right? In most cases, yes.

• 36:42Speaker 03

  But with tomatoes, canned tomatoes are actually better for us than a fresh, organic, locally harvested heirloom tomato. Because the nutrient in tomatoes, which is proving to be supportive of heart health, is called lycopene. And when lycopene is heated, it is transformed into a form that we find easier to absorb. And the best source of lycopene in the entire store is tomato paste. And, you know, people don't like to hear that. How could that be? But in fact, science supports it.

• 37:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  In scouring the scientific literature on what we eat and how we prepare it, Jo Robinson has come up with her own list of kitchen tricks. Now, unlike Kenji Lopez-Alt's work, which is meant to optimize taste, hers is meant to optimize nutrition. Garlic, for instance. A lot of us cook with garlic for flavor, but also because of its reported healing properties. But heat can destroy those properties. There is, however, a simple trick to prevent this. After crushing or chopping the garlic, you let it sit for at least 10 minutes before cooking it. And that allows its health-promoting compound, allison, to form. As for the best way to cook most vegetables if you want to optimize their nutrition?

• 38:13Speaker 03

  Many people are surprised to hear that steaming vegetables in the microwave is probably the best way to preserve nutrients. Because you want to destroy some of those enzymes that are getting rid of antioxidants as quickly as you can. And you want to cook the food for as short a amount of time as possible. So the microwave will do that for you. And so you just put it in a microwave steamer and cook it for just a couple of minutes, and it's done.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  If you're happy with the way you're cooking and you're happy with the food, then there's no real need to change it.

• 38:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Kenji Lopez-Alt again.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  But if you could make your food slightly better, or more efficient, or taste better by doing something a little bit different, and someone else is willing to go and do the work to figure out what that different thing is, then I don't see a reason why you wouldn't want to change it.

• 39:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  So in this regard, Lopez Alt and Joe Robinson are in precisely the same camp, using science to improve what we eat and how we eat it, wherever you fall on the spectrum of delicious versus nutritious. Now, presumably, we're all looking for some sane balance of the two. If you think about it, food is probably the single most important input that we control in terms of helping our bodies and minds function. So of course, we should try to optimize its contribution to that end. On the other hand, life is short and eating is a delight.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  I have a very deliciousness-first approach to it. If I'm going to eat a hamburger, I want that to be the best damn hamburger I can make.

• 39:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so how does Kenji Lopez Alt make the best damn hamburger? Well, he's actually got a variety of burger recipes in his book, but the recipe, as with anything, is the easy part. The hard part is getting the science right. In this case, it begins with the salt.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  So what salt does when it interacts with meat is it'll initially pull out liquid from the meat through osmosis, which we all learned that in middle school science. It'll pull out liquid and then that salt will dissolve in that liquid. And then what happens is it forms a super-concentrated brine. And that brine will actually dissolve some of the muscle proteins, particularly a protein called myosin. So this can affect meat in a couple of ways. So particularly with ground meat, if you salt your ground meat and you work the salt into it, it'll dissolve this protein myosin. And then, once that protein is dissolved, it'll cross-link to form this protein network that makes the meat tighter and helps it retain moisture better. But at the same time, it really drastically alters the texture. And any sausage maker will actually know this, that you'll salt your meat probably a day

• 40:47Speaker 01

  in advance, then the next day, you'll grind it and knead it all together like you're making dough. And in fact, it is very much like you're making dough, because you're creating this protein network that traps everything else in. And that's what gives a sausage a nice, springy, bouncy, juicy texture. But on the other hand, if you were to do this to hamburgers, you end up with burgers that are tough and rubbery. So for a hamburger, I would recommend only salting the very outside of the burger after you've formed it. And actually, recently, my colleague and I, we made this series of videos. And as part of one of these videos, we were talking about burgers and about this very effect. And we rented a baseball pitching machine. Now, we're going to fling both of these against the target using the patty-pulse here and see what happens. That would throw hamburgers at the wall at 45 miles per hour.

• 41:30Speaker 07

  Prepare patty number one.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  And so we tried it with two identical patties. One of them salted on the inside, one salted only on the outside. And then we shot the whole thing in slow motion.

• 41:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, meat sling cocked and ready.

• 41:42Speaker 07

  Fire.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  And you'll see that the salted hamburger kind of bounces off the wall like a rubber ball. Like it cracks a little bit, but it basically just bounces off.

• 41:51Speaker 07

  Prepare patty number two for launch. Fire.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Whereas the burger that has salt only on the outside kind of splatters. And you know, it's something that you can even taste it. You can very easily taste it in your mouth. Like a burger made with salted meat will be tough. And one made with salt only on the outside will be tender and juicy, which is the way I want my burger to be.

• 42:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  I really want your job, I have to say.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  It's a pretty great job.

• 42:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Today's episode was produced by Irvan Gunja. Our staff also includes Christopher Wirth, Greg Rosalsky, Jay Cowett, Merritt Jacob, Caroline English, Alison Hockenberry, and Kashima Hilevich. We also had help from Angus Chen on this episode. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find our entire podcast archive and lots of other stuff, including a blog post called "How to Make the Perfect Cup of Coffee."

• 43:17Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 43:48Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 44:52Speaker 10

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