Malcolm Gladwell Only Drinks Five Liquids (Reheat)

Author and podcast host Malcolm Gladwell immigrated to Canada when he was young, the child of an English father and Jamaican mother. He’s always felt like an outsider. He hated maple syrup, in a town that hosts the largest one-day maple syrup festival in the world.

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

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

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• 0:43Dan Pashman?

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• 1:23Dan Pashman?

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• 1:32Dan Pashman?

  Hey, everyone, Dan here with another Sporkful Reheat for your listening pleasure. This is when we reach all the way to the back of the Sporkful deep freezer and pull out a classic episode to defrost and share with you. And this one features Malcolm Gladwell. Now, what I love about this episode is that you're gonna see in here a different side of Malcolm Gladwell in this episode. Of course, you know him from his most recent book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, which revisits his 2,000 bestseller, The Tipping Point. You know him from his great podcast, Revisionist History, which we just recently did a collab with. So, you know that Malcolm is incredibly intelligent, articulate, thoughtful, but you may not know that he has some very strong opinions about food and drink that he is not afraid to share in pointy In terms, whether you're a longtime Malcolm Gladwell fan or newer to his work, I think you're gonna love this episode. As ever, if there's an episode of The Sporkful

• 2:17Dan Pashman?

  you want us to pull out of the deep freezer and reheat, let us know. Drop me an email or voice memo to [email protected]. Include your name, location, what episode you want us to reheat, and why. Thanks so much, and enjoy. So you grew up in Elmira, Ontario.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  I did.

• 2:35Dan Pashman?

  Elmira hosts what claims to be the world's largest one-day maple syrup festival.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  This is true.

• 2:40Dan Pashman?

  Can you tell me about that?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  For some reason that I don't know, this little town that I grew up in decided it was going to own maple syrup in the way that Los Angeles owns the Oscars. And I went through years of these, and the point of the maple syrup festival always eluded me. It's April, which is a very nasty time of year in that part of the world. It's like slushy, it could get really cold, it could be freezing rain.

• 3:11Dan Pashman?

  Did you, as a kid, did you make maple taffy in the snow?

• 3:14Speaker 01

  No.

• 3:15Dan Pashman?

  Do you know what that is?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  I am aware of it, yes. I had a general disdain for all maple-based products. I'll be honest with you.

• 3:23Dan Pashman?

  Now the truth comes out.

• 3:30Dan Pashman?

  This is The Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. I hope you're doing well. Today on the show, I'm sitting down with Malcolm Gladwell. He's a journalist and the author of many books, including The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. He also hosts the podcast Revisionist History, which reexamines the past and asks whether we got things right the first time around. Malcolm often draws on sociology and psychology in his work to explain big phenomena, but he likes to approach his subjects in new ways, looking at them from an outsider's perspective, revealing something new in the process. And he often applies this approach to food. He'll do that for us today. But first, I wanted to talk

• 4:12Dan Pashman?

  to him as an eater. So, back to Malcolm's feelings about maple syrup. It came to symbolize something bigger for him. He and his family were immigrants. He was born in England in 1963. His dad's English, his mom's Jamaican. They moved to Canada when Malcolm was six, settling in Elmira, a small rural town about 90 minutes west of Toronto.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  And at that point, the strongest memory I have as a child is showing up. In Elmira and coming to the conclusion that every Canadian ritual that I observed, I was too late for. All the boys my age had already been playing hockey for two years. So I never even learned how to skate, barely learned how to skate, which was, I mean, heresy beyond words in Southern Ontario. And I felt the same way about maple syrup, that it was a kind of, we were never going to be part of maple syrup culture. We were going to be perennially outsiders.

• 5:02Dan Pashman?

  Do you feel like that outsider's mentality was formative for you?

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. Of course. It's the most useful of all. I mean, it allows you, it gives you a little critical distance, gives you a plausible deniability for not having to go to the maple syrup festival.

• 5:18Dan Pashman?

  So you weren't really Canadian, didn't feel Canadian. You were immigrants, your father is English, your mother is Jamaican. So what was the food like in your house?

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Well, okay, so there's all kinds of complicated food things. My father is, has enormous garden, enormous. He produces so many vegetables that he has to appeal to everyone at church to come and pick their own, because otherwise we'd be swamped. His goal is never to buy a vegetable from the grocery store. So everything is canned, frozen, and he has a kind of disdain for anyone's cooking but my mother's. So we never really go out to dinner. We would eat a lot of Jamaican food, except the great Jamaican influx to Canada is really mid to late 70s.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  And so you don't get, you don't get yam, sweet potato, you don't get goat, you don't get, all the things that you would need to make real Jamaican food.

• 6:20Dan Pashman?

  Can you get Scotch bonnet peppers?

• 6:22Speaker 01

  I think Scotch bonnet's a 90s phenomenon by the time, you know, it's like, so my mother had a very limited Jamaican food palate. She would mix that up with very English kind of things, like jerk chicken and shepherd's pie. That kind of thing.

• 6:39Dan Pashman?

  The region of Canada where Malcolm grew up was home to a lot of fairly recent German immigrants, as well as many Mennonites who spoke German but were from Eastern Europe. Malcolm says the area had 14 churches for 4,000 people. Eventually, the Gladwells became Mennonite themselves. Now, the term Mennonite covers a range of beliefs and practices. There's old order Mennonites who live similarly to the Amish, not using certain technology and dressing distinctively. Then there are mainline Mennonites, like Malcolm's family. They dress in more modern styles and use technology. Church was a big part of Malcolm's childhood, which meant lots of church potlucks.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  What was eaten everywhere you went was this very heavy, essentially Eastern European peasant food. You know, casseroles, shufly pie. I can't tell you what that is, but it was a very big deal.

• 7:28Dan Pashman?

  I looked it up. It's a pie with filling made out of brown sugar, cinnamon, and molasses, usually with a crumb topping. In some ways, it's similar to chess pie or sugar cream pie. They're all very simple, sweet, custardy fillings. But the molasses in shufly pie makes the filling dark and a little smoky in flavor.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  You know, Mennonites, if your barn burned down, they would have a barn raising, and they would put up a new barn in a day. And hundreds of people would descend on their neighbor. And my dad decided to join in one day. So understand that he's a math professor.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  And he just, he gets in his Volvo, drives to this Mennonite farm, an old order Mennonite farm.

• 8:07Dan Pashman?

  Oh, those ones were more similar to Amish?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Yes, they're essentially Amish without beards.

• 8:11Dan Pashman?

  Okay.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  So everyone had shown up in a horse and buggy. He shows up driving a Volvo in a beard with his three boys, wearing a tie, because he always wore a tie. And he just volunteered. And of course, they welcomed, you know, the Mennonites are totally welcoming. So everyone would have brought a dish. And it was the kind of apotheosis of... Of Eastern European peasant food, all the stuff that like, you know, salads with jello in them and.

• 8:40Dan Pashman?

  Talking like ham and pea type salads?

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Lots of ham.

• 8:43Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  And pea, yes, yes, that kind of.

• 8:45Dan Pashman?

  Right. And I'm picturing like sausages and sauerkraut? Or is that wrong?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. We do know. You're absolutely right.

• 8:49Dan Pashman?

  Okay, a lot of sausage.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Lot of sausage, a ton of sauerkraut. Dessert would have been this shufi pie. Lot of molasses, I feel like, going on. My dad, by the way, just thought the whole thing was fantastic. There could not have been greater cultural distance between him and the people of barn raising, and he could not have been more comfortable.

• 9:15Dan Pashman?

  So, fast forward to today. I understand that when it comes to food today, you have some rules for yourself. Tell me about the rules for drinks.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Well, it strikes me that an enormous amount of unnecessary effort is expended by people in making decisions about what to eat and drink. Right? So you go out to dinner. Maybe you're one of these people who do this. I don't know. You go out to some restaurant. The waiter comes around and someone at the table is agonizing about what to order. And like, I, if you can't decode a menu in an acceptable period of time, how do you fare with life? Where, where, where the choices are infinite. So years and years and years of observing this just left me really filled with a kind of quiet rage.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Why can't you make up your mind?

• 10:06Dan Pashman?

  I decided I wouldn't tell Malcolm that before I go out to eat, I plan out multiple meals in advance. I don't want to duplicate flavors. And I also want to optimize my hunger level. I also typically review the menu multiple times before arriving. And despite all this preparation, in a recent Sporkful episode taped in a restaurant, I had a minor breakdown trying to figure out what to order. But we'll keep that between us. Anyway, back to Malcolm's approach to drinks.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  And simultaneously, it occurred to me that as a society, as a culture, human beings have enormous problems with alcohol. So drinking struck me as something that you really do need rules. So I decided I want to have some conventions to make sure I'm never that annoying person who's like agonizing about the menu. So I decided my rules would be around what I drink, and they would govern both alcohol and everything, really. So my drinking rules were I will only ever consume one of five liquids, water in its various forms. So I'll have sparkling, love sparkling.

• 11:07Dan Pashman?

  What about sparkling with like natural flavors?

• 11:10Speaker 01

  No.

• 11:11Dan Pashman?

  Okay.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  First of all, that's an abomination. That whole thing that you, and sometimes when you go into some, you go into some gas station, all you want is a thing of sparkling water. And there's nothing except for the ones that are flavored with like cranberry flavored whey, which ramp this up, this is nuts. No.

• 11:30Dan Pashman?

  Okay, so.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Water.

• 11:31Dan Pashman?

  So still or sparkling, but not flavored?

• 11:34Speaker 01

  If I, if I wanted flavored, I would have said flavored. The convention would have specified flavor.

• 11:39Dan Pashman?

  What if you order it and it comes with a wedge of lime on the glass when you squeeze that in?

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fine.

• 11:44Dan Pashman?

  Why? What's the difference?

• 11:45Speaker 01

  No, no, because that's, that's extrinsic. And by the way, that, that is a traditional, there's, you know, to quote the Supreme Court, what is the Supreme Court like? They say that when they look for guidance as to how to deal with the most problematic issues of our time, they look for things that have some rooting in American tradition, right?

• 12:04Dan Pashman?

  Okay.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Well, the Supreme Court would say the wedge of lime is fine because the wedge of lime is deeply rooted in Culloden tradition.

• 12:12Dan Pashman?

  You're saying the framers would recognize?

• 12:14Speaker 01

  The framers would have, would have used.

• 12:15Dan Pashman?

  The wedge of lime?

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 12:17Dan Pashman?

  Okay.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  You know, they're not flavoring cranberry, putting cranberry in their water, are they?

• 12:21Dan Pashman?

  No, but you know, new, look, new interpretations arise over time, but.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  I'm a strict.

• 12:27Dan Pashman?

  You're a strict constructionist.

• 12:30Dan Pashman?

  All right. Look, that's fair. I'm a strict sandwich constructionist.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Oh, you are?

• 12:34Dan Pashman?

  Yes, I have, I have argued that a, that a hot dog is a sandwich.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 12:39Dan Pashman?

  Because I believe that, you know, a sandwich, the definition of a sandwich, generally speaking, should be like, would the Earl of Sandwich recognize it as a sandwich? Like, how would he have defined a sandwich? And like, that is where it should flow from. So water.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Water.

• 12:53Dan Pashman?

  Okay.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Tea.

• 12:54Dan Pashman?

  Okay.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  I'm born in England.

• 12:55Dan Pashman?

  Any kind of tea?

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Well, no. I don't believe in chamomile. I mean, these kind of like fecocta, you know, ridiculous, newfangled.

• 13:07Dan Pashman?

  They're like herbal infusion type things.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  It's nonsense. Black teas.

• 13:11Dan Pashman?

  Okay, caffeinated.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Caffeinated black teas. What I don't believe in is Earl Grey. Earl Grey is a bridge too far. My mother will drink Earl Grey and I just find this, I don't know what, this is an abrogation. They do something to the Earl Grey. They perfume it, right? And I find that to be increasingly problematic.

• 13:29Dan Pashman?

  Okay.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  So tea, espresso in some form.

• 13:34Dan Pashman?

  So that could be cappuccino?

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Cappuccino, generally I'll have a cappuccino.

• 13:37Dan Pashman?

  Okay.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Because number four is milk.

• 13:40Dan Pashman?

  Well, you'll just drink like a glass of milk sometimes?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  No, typically I only have milk in with espresso.

• 13:46Dan Pashman?

  You realize that if you just said that your drink was cappuccino, you could open up another space on the list. If you combine the espresso and the milk into one, you'd have a new slot.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I put milk in my tea.

• 13:55Dan Pashman?

  That just seems like tea, though. That's just like part of, that's a seasoning.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  No, no, no, there, now there. Now, my, my father, were he with us today, would have taken great umbrage at that last comment. You know, because you know the English, they're, the class thing around whether your, whether your milk goes in first or last.

• 14:13Dan Pashman?

  I don't know about that, no.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  In England, it's a class marker. If you're fancy, you add the milk after you've poured the tea. And the way that snooty English people make fun of lower class English people is they refer to them as being very M I F, milk in first.

• 14:30Dan Pashman?

  Oh, ouch.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Disgusting. So my father, who was firmly middle class and as a, as a result, I think appropriately, had a chip on his shoulder towards fancy English people, firmly embraced milk in first. In fact, referred to himself not as an M I F-er, but as a pre-lactarian.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  And he would say, if you put the milk in first, it's much easier to calibrate the amount of milk you're putting in.

• 14:56Dan Pashman?

  I have argued that when you're low on milk for cereal, that it's good to add the milk first before you pour the cereal in, because that way you can get the correct ratio.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:05Dan Pashman?

  Because you're only...

• 15:06Speaker 01

  You're a pre-lectarian.

• 15:07Dan Pashman?

  Yes, when it comes to... Only in specific circumstances.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  You're a pre-lectarian.

• 15:10Dan Pashman?

  All right, so water, tea, milk.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Espresso.

• 15:15Dan Pashman?

  Espresso.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Not, by the way, I never have a straight cup of coffee.

• 15:19Dan Pashman?

  Okay.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Only espresso.

• 15:21Dan Pashman?

  All right.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  And the last one is red wine. I saw, I resolved the great human conundrum around alcohol by saying, I'm only doing one kind of alcohol, ever. And I even get more specific in that, that I will only drink red wine that is below 13 and 1/2% alcohol.

• 15:39Dan Pashman?

  So, these are your five drinks. You remind me of that, you probably read that years ago, there was a Michael Lewis wrote a piece in Vanity Fair, a profile of Obama, and he talked about how he had read research, Obama had read research, that you, if you have to make a lot of decisions in a day, over the course of the day, your ability to make decisions is degraded. This is why like going shopping can be very stressful and tiring to people, because you have to make so many decisions. So Obama said, I'm not gonna make any decisions about what I wear or what I eat. I'm saving my decisions for the important stuff. Like, this is why I would not be a good president, though. Because I'd be like, you know, I don't know what to do about Ukraine. I would use up all my decisions on lunch.

• 16:18Dan Pashman?

  But isn't it really, Malcolm, isn't it really a question of priorities? Because there must be some decisions that you do agonize over.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Not an agonizer.

• 16:27Dan Pashman?

  Really?

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Not an agonizer.

• 16:29Dan Pashman?

  Even in your creative work? When you write, when you put a podcast together? You don't take a lot of time, you're not very conscientious with all the decisions that need to be made in the course of putting something together?

• 16:39Speaker 01

  They don't feel like decisions, in the same way that decoding a menu does. So, the thing about a menu, or the list of drinks you get at a bar, is that you're presented with a finite list of options, and you have to pick one. That's not what the creative process is. Creative process is not, I got six things I can do with this story at this point, I'm gonna pick number four. That's not what it is.

• 17:04Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  There are no options, you have to dream them up yourself. And, so that does, it seems, that seems like a very, very different kind of cognitive work to me.

• 17:15Dan Pashman?

  Just so I understand, the list of five liquids.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:20Dan Pashman?

  Do you ever deviate from it?

• 17:22Speaker 01

  It's funny you say that. I reserve the right to occasionally experiment outside of my... So if you had seen me last Friday night at a restaurant, and you would have said, Malcolm, what are you drinking? I would have said, oh, that's vodka and tonic.

• 17:40Dan Pashman?

  Record scratch.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  It was the exception that proves the rule. One of my favorite aphorisms of all time. The exception that proves the rule implies that a rule is never absolute, right? The reason we make rules is to try and generalize about a vast array of phenomenon. And we accept when we enter into rulemaking that the rules we come up with are not 100% inclusive of all experience, right? So the fact that I was willing to venture for that one night out in the direction of vodka and tonic was the exception that proved my rule. I was adhering to my rules by my very recognition that I was breaking them.

• 18:22Dan Pashman?

  But like, if you came over to my house for a barbecue, you were in my backyard, it's 95 degrees out. And I was like, hey, Malcolm, can I get you a nice cold tall glass of lemonade? I made it to my grandmother's recipe, fresh squeezed. How about a lemonade?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  No.

• 18:40Dan Pashman?

  Or are you drinking milk? It's 95 degrees out.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Water.

• 18:44Dan Pashman?

  And you don't feel any tinge of regret? Or you don't feel like you're missing something in life?

• 18:49Speaker 01

  I walked away from those options a long time ago.

• 18:53Dan Pashman?

  And you're at peace with that?

• 18:54Speaker 01

  I'm at peace with that.

• 18:55Dan Pashman?

  You said that it's about decisions. Like, you like these rules because it frees you up from having to make decisions. Is there also part of you that just likes rigidity, that likes structure?

• 19:08Speaker 01

  So I think we forget how freeing certain kinds of constraints can be. You know, anyone who's ever done any creative work sooner or later comes to the... Conclusion that constraints are incredibly useful. Telling someone they only have this much to spend or this much time. You know, it has to be this long. Throughout my entire writing career, whenever I got an assignment, the absolute first question I ask is, how long is it? How long does the thing have to be? From there, everything flows.

• 19:38Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Part of this as well, you know, I'm a runner, a relatively serious runner. And serious running requires an enormous amount of self-imposed structure. Right? I had to figure out, you know, it's a Tuesday. It's five below outside. I have to do the following workout. It must be done today. When am I going to do it?

• 19:56Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  And I got 17 things that are due and I've got, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I gotta go do the grocery shopping. And there's some pleasures that you can't gain unless you're willing to be super structured.

• 20:12Dan Pashman?

  Coming up, we look into the surprising origins of chunky tomato sauce and the tragic story of McDonald's french fries. And I ask, where does pleasure fit into the structured life of Malcolm Gladwell? Stick around.

• 20:32Speaker 02

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• 23:40Dan Pashman?

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• 23:50Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to another Sporkful Reheat. I'm Dan Pashman. You ever like go to our show page in your podcasting app and you're scrolling back and you're like, "Oh, that that seems like a good episode. Why? How did I miss that?" Well, you missed it because you're probably not following our show in your podcasting app. And it's really important that you do. So please do this right now. Go to our show page in your podcasting app of choice. If it's Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you click Follow. Other apps, maybe it's a plus sign, or a heart, or a favorite, or the word subscribe, whatever it is in your app, it's really important that you click it. That way you won't miss great episodes. Super quick and easy. You can do it right now. Thank you so much.

• 24:30Dan Pashman?

  Okay, back to my conversation with Malcolm Gladwell. As you heard, Malcolm grew up feeling like an outsider in his rural Ontario town. When he began writing, he turned that outsider's eye on his subjects, which sometimes include the food industry. One of his personal heroes is a man named Howard Moskowitz. Howard's a market researcher whose legacy began in the early 70s when Pepsi asked him to figure out how much aspartame they should put in Diet Pepsi. So he ran a bunch of taste tests to see how much sweetener most people wanted. But when the data came back, it was all over the place. There was no clear favorite. Howard didn't get it.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  And one day, he was sitting in a diner and suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the answer came to him.

• 25:11Dan Pashman?

  This is Malcolm giving a TED Talk years ago about Howard Moskowitz.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  When they analyzed the Diet Pepsi data, they were asking the wrong question. They were looking for the perfect Pepsi, and they should have been looking for the perfect Pepsis.

• 25:24Dan Pashman?

  What Howard discovered was that there was no magical level of sweetness. Different people like different things. Now, that might sound obvious, but at the time, this was a revolutionary concept in the food world.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Howard confronted the notion of the platonic dish. What do I mean by that?

• 25:41Speaker 01

  For the longest time in the food industry, there was a sense that there was one way, a perfect way, to make a dish.

• 25:49Dan Pashman?

  This old idea that there was one best way to make a food product also extended to tomato sauce. For years, restaurants and food producers primarily sold blended, thin tomato sauces. So when Prego asked Howard to help them revamp their sauce, he saw his chance to confront the notion of the platonic dish. He made batches of every variation of tomato sauce you could possibly think up: thin, zesty, garlicky, spicy, chunky, creamy. And when the data came back, once again, it was all over the place. But instead of trying to identify one favorite, Howard sorted the data into groups. And what he found is that there are three primary ways people like their sauce: thin, spicy, and extra chunky.

• 26:33Dan Pashman?

  And that last one, extra chunky, that was significant because there was no extra chunky tomato sauce on the market at the time. Roughly a third of consumers craved chunky tomato sauce, but no company was making it. And what's especially fascinating to me is that consumers weren't explicitly asking for it. People didn't even realize this was a thing they wanted. But when presented with chunky tomato sauce, they went crazy for it.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  People don't know what they want, right? As Howard loves to say, "The mind knows not what the tongue wants." It's a mystery. And a critically important step in understanding our own desires and tastes is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want deep down.

• 27:16Dan Pashman?

  Do you think that's generally true with all kinds of things beyond food?

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. So this is actually, there's a lot of literature on this in psychology. So I once, in one of my books, I think it was Blink, had a whole chapter on the problem with market research. So you have a movie, you show it to a test audience, and you record their reaction to it. And what you find is that bad movies or bad TV shows get really low scores. But so do extraordinarily good ones, groundbreaking ones, innovative ones. So all, you know, famously, Seinfeld got terrible scores from test audiences. And the problem there is that in a test, when a test audience is watching something, they, in the moment,

• 28:01Speaker 01

  you can't distinguish between dislike and unfamiliarity. So you're responding to something... And there's a chance you hate it, but there's also a chance it's just something so new that you don't know how you feel about it. So I was watching my daughter, who's one. She picked up a wedge of lemon and she put it in her mouth and she made this incredible face. She put it down again. I can't believe I'm telling baby stories. This is like how far I've sunk. And then she picked it up again and brought it back to her mouth. So this is actually a version of what I'm talking about. She can't decide whether it's new and unfamiliar and maybe that's, maybe it's something I'll learn to love, she's saying to herself, or it's just something that's horrible.

• 28:46Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  But that is a version of the mind knows not what the tongue wants.

• 28:51Dan Pashman?

  The other big takeaway from the story of chunky tomato sauce and Howard Moskowitz is the idea that different people like different things.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's really the guy who invents segmentation in food.

• 29:02Dan Pashman?

  Right. This is why there's now like 18 kinds of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's Howard. He gave us that world.

• 29:08Dan Pashman?

  The original idea of tomato sauce, of what tomato sauce should be, as you say in your piece, was the quote unquote authentic style of a thin Italian red sauce before chunky style came along. So, and I was interested in this use of this idea of authenticity. It's something you've also talked about like in your Taco Bell episode of your podcast. We all know that Taco Bell is not authentic Mexican food. But you sort of made an interesting point in that episode about Taco Bell having been accused of cultural appropriation and the role that you think it plays in culture.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Taco Bell builds off the tradition of Mexican food and also introduces Mexican food or a version of it to a broad spectrum of American society that might never have known about it. Many Americans discovered black music through Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley takes black music, makes it acceptable to a large portion of American audiences, who then get educated about it to the point when they start listening to Otis Redding or Al Green or Marvin Gaye or what have you. And they wouldn't have gotten there maybe not as quickly or maybe never at all had there not been someone to interpret the tradition for them. And my argument was that Taco Bell was doing the same thing, that they were interpreting

• 30:23Speaker 01

  a tradition in a way that made it acceptable. To the broad spectrum of American society, who could then turn around and experience the real thing? You're not going to hunt for the greatest food truck, Mexican food taco in L.A., unless you have some familiarity with Mexican food beforehand. There is such a thing as appropriation, but there is also such a thing as translation and interpretation. And those are different things. And I think it's important for us to be able to distinguish between when someone's just going in and ripping off a tradition and when someone is going in and transforming a tradition in a way that may ultimately end up benefiting the originator.

• 31:06Dan Pashman?

  I hear what you're saying. I think the part of that equation that I also note is maybe you eventually get to the point where people are going to get the quote unquote "real thing" because they started with the kind of gateway interpretation. But I think also the other thing that happens is that when you have that sort of gateway that introduces people to the cuisine, they form a certain expectation of what that cuisine is going to be. And it places pressure on the more authentic purveyors to compromise in order to attract that broader audience. And some of those compromises,

• 31:49Dan Pashman?

  once they're made, never get unmade because it becomes the prevailing way of doing things. And so, yes, something is gained in that interpretation, but also something is lost. You're going to lose some amount of vernacular in a cuisine.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  But you're assuming that vernacular is something that's static and that's wrong if it changes, as opposed to looking on things like music and food as things that are in constant evolution. It's clear to me with music. So.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Elvis comes along, takes R&B, which had been confined to the African-American community, popularizes it. And then people start discovering the very artists that Elvis is "stealing" from. Now, did those artists end up "compromising"? A little bit, but now they're making money. Now they're reaching millions of people as opposed to thousands of people. So now, maybe a better way of saying what they're doing is not compromising, but they're experimenting. They're understanding they're in a completely different market.

• 32:51Dan Pashman?

  Weren't there a lot of black musicians who, around that time, a lot of them started doing covers of white hits?

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and why not? My point is, like, only good things, I think, ultimately come from cross-pollination of cultures. That's where real innovation starts to happen. So like, the stuff is circling the world so many times. It's dizzying. Who's authentic? I don't know. It's just a jumble. And that's why it's so powerful and surprising and delightful. It's like, be respectful. But if you're doing it with respect, maybe it's because I am myself, a jumble of cultural traditions, that I'm, I have nothing but enthusiasm for this kind of like, I'm like, everybody, climb in.

• 33:45Dan Pashman?

  One more food story that Malcolm's talked about in recent years is what happened to McDonald's french fries. This issue really hits home for him.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  My father did not believe in McDonald's. Never. It would prevent us to go there. And there was no McDonald's in my town. You had to go quite some distance to get to a McDonald's. So it's not until, I don't think I had McDonald's until I'm 14. And I had heard about the fries. I don't think I even had, this is gonna sound unbelievable, but I don't believe I'd had french fries, ever, until I had McDonald's french fries at the age of 14.

• 34:20Dan Pashman?

  So you're saying your father had a lot of rigid food rules?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  He would call him, he had a set of principles by which he lived his life.

• 34:31Dan Pashman?

  Okay.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  He believed.

• 34:33Dan Pashman?

  How many different liquids did he consume?

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Tea.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Never had coffee, never had wine, never had beer, never had any hard liquor. Tea, water, milk.

• 34:44Dan Pashman?

  Wow.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Three, he's a three, he's a three liquid.

• 34:46Dan Pashman?

  Wow. So see, you're really, you're psychedelic compared to him, Malcolm.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. No, no, I'm like the Frank Zappa of liquids in my family.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  So I go, I think it was after track practice.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  We go to McDonald's and-

• 35:03Dan Pashman?

  Like with a group of friends?

• 35:04Speaker 01

  With a group of other runners. And I think it's safe to say my mind was blown. I had very little fried food growing up until that day when I, when I experienced this kind of life-altering moment. Young people today don't understand that McDonald's once had the greatest fries. I mean, they were, they were the gold standard of fries. I mean, and then they ditched their fry recipe for no good reason. This is like a culinary U-turn of historic proportions. I mean, it's like-

• 35:35Dan Pashman?

  It's right up there with New Coke.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  Worse. Worse.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  And now we've been living with these sort of sodden also-rans ever since.

• 35:47Dan Pashman?

  I'll explain. Back in the late 70s, when Malcolm would have tried those fries for the first time, he was eating the original McDonald's fries, made with the recipe created by the McDonald Brothers. When businessman Ray Kroc got a taste of those fries, he said they were the number one thing that convinced him to buy McDonald's in the 60s and transform it into the multi-billion dollar company it is today. McDonald's was built on those fries, which were fried in beef tallow. That's rendered beef fat. It gives you a super crispy exterior and a soft creamy interior. But in the early 90s, that all changed, thanks to a guy named Phil Sokoloff. He was a wealthy Nebraska businessman who became a crusader against saturated fats after suffering a heart attack at age 43. Phil took out ads in newspapers decrying

• 36:31Dan Pashman?

  fast food and debated a McDonald's exec on Good Morning America. Eventually, Phil won. McDonald's caved. They changed the recipe and announced they would fry their french fries in a mixture of vegetable oils. The fries haven't been the same since. The kicker is, not only did the vegetable oil result in what Malcolm thinks is an inferior fry, but research that came out years later showed vegetable oil has its own health risks. It probably isn't any better for you than beef tallow. Malcolm made a whole episode about this on his podcast Revisionist History. Here he is, delivering his final verdict.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Now, do I hate Phil Sokoloff? I've thought a lot about this in the intervening years, and I've come to realize that I don't hate him. He could have bought a yacht and a big house in a gated community in Florida and played golf. Instead, he took on McDonald's in an attempt to make the world a healthier, better place. My hat is off to him.

• 37:30Dan Pashman?

  That seems like a very generous reading. I mean, you talk to Phil's daughter and she sort of says that he realized after the fact that the fries were not nearly as good. We now know that he didn't make them any healthier.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, he didn't know that.

• 37:42Dan Pashman?

  He didn't know that. Fair enough. Clearly, he had good intentions. All I'm saying is that if it hadn't been for him on this sort of quixotic quest, then the fries wouldn't have been changed, as your story puts forth. And so, how can you let him off the hook?

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Because he's not a big corporation. McDonald's is the one who is charged with the public responsibility of making great french fries. They're the ones who abandoned their heritage because some guy takes out an ad in the Wall Street Journal? I mean, where's their spine? Okay, so you can say that in the moment, maybe they legitimately thought that they were peddling a unsafe product. Once we learned that vegetable oil is not, in fact, a superior cooking oil to beef tallow.

• 38:26Dan Pashman?

  And not healthier.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  And not healthier. They should have switched back.

• 38:30Dan Pashman?

  I agree with you on that.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  That they should come out and say, we blew it. We're sorry. An entire generation of Americans were denied access to a quality french fry. We will have that on our conscience for as long as we are a publicly held corporation. I want the full-on corporate apology.

• 38:48Dan Pashman?

  Do you seek out beef tallow fries today?

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny, after that episode of Original History ran, I would go into restaurants and the waiter, or sometimes the chef would come out and say, "Just so you know, we cook our fries in beef tallow." And then the, one of the major producers of beef tallow in the country, sent me a giant tub of beef tallow with our thanks.

• 39:15Dan Pashman?

  Did you do anything with it?

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Cooked with it for years. Of course I did, fantastic stuff.

• 39:22Dan Pashman?

  That moment that you had as a 13 or 14 year old, eating those McDonald's french fries, experiencing a new taste experience.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:33Dan Pashman?

  Do you still seek out that experience today?

• 39:35Speaker 01

  In food? Nothing's ever gonna be as dramatic as that first encounter with a perfectly made french fry. I don't think I'll ever be able to get back to that level.

• 39:45Dan Pashman?

  And what about liquids? You're not worried that there's some liquid out there that could give you that same experience if only you were to put it to your lips?

• 39:54Speaker 01

  No.

• 39:57Dan Pashman?

  You said in that, in that episode, "The world's a bleak place when there's no room for pleasure."

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Are you suggesting I contradict myself?

• 40:08Speaker 01

  And what's wrong with that?

• 40:14Dan Pashman?

  I mean, look, eat however you want, drink however you want.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:18Dan Pashman?

  I'm not telling anyone it's wrong. But as someone who derives a huge amount of my daily pleasure from what I eat and drink, especially eat, I want other people to get as much happiness from this thing that I get from it.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:29Dan Pashman?

  I just feel like, you don't want a lemonade?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  No, because remember, I could also bring up a whole series of pleasures that I have, which I don't think you share, and that pains me that you don't share them.

• 40:42Dan Pashman?

  Like what?

• 40:43Speaker 01

  The pleasure of a 12 mile run on a crisp fall day.

• 40:47Dan Pashman?

  Well, that's, you got me there, you have me pegged.

• 40:51Dan Pashman?

  All right, well, look, I'm gonna go have a glass of lemonade, you go for a run.

• 41:02Dan Pashman?

  That is Malcolm Gladwell. He hosts the podcast Revisionist History, which has a new season, debuting September 15. You can also go back and listen to his full episode about McDonald's fries. It's called McDonald's Broke My Heart. Malcolm is the author of many books. The latest is The Bomber Mafia: An Exploration of How Technology and Best Intentions Collide in the Heat of War. If you're new to our show, please subscribe, or favorite, or follow, whatever the thing is in your app. Maybe it's press the heart, or the plus, or the subscribe button. Please do that thing right now while you're listening. Then you won't miss future episodes. Thanks. This show is produced by me, along with senior producer- Emma Morgenstern. And producers-

• 41:41Speaker 03

  Andres O'Hara.

• 41:42Dan Pashman?

  And- Johanna Mayer. Our editor is- Tracy Samuelson. Our engineer is-

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Jared O'Connell.

• 41:47Dan Pashman?

  Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher. Our executive producers are Eric Eddings and Colin Anderson. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 41:56Speaker 04

  And I'm Dylan James from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. And I'm telling you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.

• 42:22Dan Pashman?

  This reheat was produced by- Gianna Palmer. The team that produces The Sporkful today includes me, along with managing producer-

• 42:28Speaker 05

  Emma Morgenstern.

• 42:29Dan Pashman?

  And senior producer-

• 42:30Speaker 03

  Andres O'Hara.

• 42:31Dan Pashman?

  Our engineer is-

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Jared O'Connell.

• 42:33Dan Pashman?

  The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

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