Ruby Tandoh, the World's Best Lasagna,and how the internet is collectively changing what we all want to eat

The internet decides what's for dinner. Ruby Tandoh is the author of the new book, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now. A stint on the Great British Bake Off when she was in college launched her into the world of cookbooks — increasingly irrelevant in a world where we're more likely to turn to Google for a recipe than turn to our bookshelves — and provided her an education in how pop culture stokes our cravings. She takes Ben and Amory on a journey from the surprising history of AllRecipes and the "world's best lasagna," to the TikTok food trends of today. (Spoiler: they don't always taste particularly good.) Show notes: All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/805767/all-consuming-by-ruby-tandoh/ Credits: This episode was produced by Grace Tatter and hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. It was edited by Meg Cramer. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:17Speaker 01

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• 0:47Speaker 02

  Ugh, I hate Mondays.

• 0:48Speaker 03

  King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Swirl Bite?

• 0:50Speaker 02

  Uh, Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 0:56Speaker 04

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites.

• 1:02Speaker 04

  Taylor Hansen? Nice. Try one. Mmm.

• 1:09Speaker 05

  King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites. There's nothing like it.

• 1:18Speaker 06

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 1:28Amory Sivertson?

  Pandemics, political unrest in America, the onset of winter. Whatever you are trying to escape completely, for a certain set of people, there's really only one go-to show.

• 1:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  With its own culture, its own delightful contestants and judges, and its own catchphrases.

• 1:47Amory Sivertson?

  No soggy bottom.

• 1:48Speaker 05

  No soggy bottom. A soggy bottom.

• 1:51Amory Sivertson?

  For the uninitiated, that is not necessarily what it sounds like. It is food television icon Mary Berry, former judge of the show The Great British Bake Off, or for us Americans, The Great British Baking Show.

• 2:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  A show that is as politely British and rated G as you might imagine.

• 2:12Amory Sivertson?

  And about as massively popular as you can imagine. The show's finale episodes have pulled over 10 million viewers.

• 2:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  But that doesn't mean the most proper presentation of pralines and bund cakes from across the pond is without controversy, including controversy swirling around its contestants before and after they go on the show.

• 2:34Amory Sivertson?

  Ruby Tandoh, contestant from way back in 2013, was a favorite at the time, maybe because she was kind of funny.

• 2:42Speaker 09

  I'm making a rebarb and custard cake, just because I really like rebarb. And I was like, I'm gonna, I need to put it into one recipe. So I'll get it over and done with while I can, before I get kicked out.

• 2:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Of course, popularity can be fickle, and Ruby is a woman. So she did get some extra attention online. There were suggestions that she only got as far as she did because she was attractive.

• 3:07Amory Sivertson?

  But when online trolls attacked her, she attacked back. She called one person coming for her on Twitter a, quote, bitter old witch.

• 3:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  After she made it to the semifinals, Tandoh wrote an essay for The Guardian that put those spicy responses into well-appointed long form.

• 3:25Amory Sivertson?

  Writing, quote, "As the series went on, I noticed an increasing degree of personal vitriol and misogyny. We female finalists are supposedly too meek, too confident, too thin, too domestic, too smiley, too taciturn. If I see one more person use the hackneyed dough-eyed pun," Baker's dough, not like the deer dough, "I will personally go to their house and force-feed them an entire Charlotte Royale."

• 3:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, we got good news and bad news. No, Ruby did not force-feed us an entire Charlotte Royale.

• 3:58Amory Sivertson?

  I confess, I don't even know what that is. But she did agree to talk to us because Tandoh's combination of sharp writing and being unafraid, nay, interested in the impact of the internet on our food choices, has resulted in a decade-long, post-bake-off career of cookbooks and essays.

• 4:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  She's written about everything from why we eat what we eat to the dangers of food and wellness industries and her own struggles with disordered eating. Her latest collection of hot takes is fresh out the oven. It's called All Consuming: Why We Eat What We Eat Now.

• 4:35Amory Sivertson?

  The answer to the why in the past few decades is the internet.

• 4:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm Ben Brock Johnson.

• 4:43Amory Sivertson?

  I'm Anne Marie Sivertson.

• 4:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  And coming to you from WBUR in Boston, this is Endless Bread. Just kidding, Endless Thread.

• 4:52Amory Sivertson?

  You know, we've made that joke on the show before. It still hits.

• 4:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  It still hits. Still hits.

• 4:58Amory Sivertson?

  Today, Ruby Tandoh and our endless appetites.

• 5:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  Three.

• 5:03Amory Sivertson?

  Two.

• 5:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  One.

• 5:04Amory Sivertson?

  Bang!

• 5:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Do you spend more time eating food or looking at food on screens?

• 5:17Speaker 09

  I absolutely spend more time looking at food, thinking about food, being presented with recipes and things like that without even wanting them than I do eating, like without a doubt. And I think actually that much is true for so many of us now, really, isn't it? Because, you know, it punctures every part of culture, even down to, I don't know, mainstream TV shows that end up incidentally being about restaurants, something like The Bear. Or, I mean, you only have to log on to Instagram and it's foods you're seeing a lot of the time. So it is everywhere. It's relentless.

• 5:51Amory Sivertson?

  Are you trying to push back on some of this? This, there's way too much food content online and it's changing our, you know, how deep our relationships to food can really be. Are you actively trying to push back against some of these things? Or is it more of a, I'm trying to name the thing as I see it and create more awareness that this is happening?

• 6:16Speaker 09

  I think what I really want is to, just to understand it and to understand my place in it. And in theory, to help, you know, other people to understand their place in it as well. I definitely don't think that it's inherently a bad thing, although I do think that it's an overwhelming thing. I've been part of food media for kind of a decade now and I've written cookbooks and I've done recipes online and all of this. I've been on food TV. So I've partaken in this kind of all-consuming food media landscape. And so I just wanted to take half a step back, you know, beyond the trend cycle and ask, well, how does this all work? Because once you can orient yourself a bit, then you can navigate yourself through it a little bit better.

• 6:59Amory Sivertson?

  I'm always kind of amazed when I hear about some...

• 7:04Amory Sivertson?

  Beautiful new cookbook coming out because I myself am someone who's a little afraid to collect cookbooks. Like, will I really use that? Or am I just gonna Google, you know, butter bean, whatever, what the recipe would be?

• 7:21Speaker 09

  Creamy bean, creamy.

• 7:24Amory Sivertson?

  Creamy. There you go. Yes, yes. I'm curious what cookbooks you have in your kitchen right now, or what cookbooks were kind of a staple of your upbringing, and kind of the space that those still occupy in your life in a world of Googling butter bean recipes and such.

• 7:45Speaker 09

  I mean, I grew up with, my parents had quite a lot of cookbooks. So like, some classics, like, you know, Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries, or the Moose Woods Cookbook, Nigella Lawson and stuff like this. So I loved looking through those even as a child, and I kind of carried a few of them with me into adulthood as well. And I hold on to them like these precious objects. But, I mean, do I cook from them? Absolutely not. I almost never actually crack them open to cook. I'm kind of more about reading or kind of curating the kind of cook I would like to be, but in reality, I'm not. But, you know, in the age of Google, I can search for any recipe anytime, and that kind of abundance of choice,

• 8:29Speaker 09

  unfortunately, does lead me away from cookbooks.

• 8:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  If you too have Googled a recipe, you've almost certainly encountered Allrecipes.com, which is a key ingredient to understanding how the internet has changed what's on the menu.

• 8:45Speaker 09

  Allrecipes is, you know, I would say, my favorite and least trustworthy recipe website.

• 8:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's so funny, because I used to use it all the time, and now I never use it. So that's, that tracks for me. So why is it your favorite?

• 9:01Speaker 09

  I just think it's it's absolutely fascinating. So it's one of the earlier recipe websites online. It was developed in the late nineties by just some guys in in Seattle. And what I love about it is that it is almost entirely user generated. And it has been from the start. So you had this early democracy of recipe content.

• 9:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hmm.

• 9:23Speaker 09

  And obviously, without editorial intervention, what this tends towards is some recipes that are kind of great and, you know, become almost like folk hero recipes. And other recipes, a great many of them are just terrible or, you know, at best, kind of derivative copies of things that are already on there and so on.

• 9:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, uninspired.

• 9:45Speaker 09

  Exactly. But I love it as an archive of American food culture because it captures a kind of largely ignored middle ground of just home cooking by people who have to cook more or less every day, usually for families. And I think so much of food media at the time when all recipes was becoming a thing was kind of divided between the coasts. So you've got the kind of big media groups kind of producing food media stars or, you know, somewhere like New York Times doing their cooking section. It launched around the same time as an independent thing. So in between the coastal things, you've got a distinctly midwestern, middle American,

• 10:30Speaker 09

  middle level of cooking expertise platform that was actually the biggest cookbook effectively in America. It had so, so, so many recipes on it. And I think that's fascinating.

• 10:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's kind of like Wikipedia for recipes, it felt like, right? You still end up, if you Google like how to make blah, blah, blah, like it will, all recipes will be way up there. Um, but it might have, for instance, um, a 4.5 star mac and cheese recipe posted under the username God Loves Ugly.

• 11:03Speaker 09

  Exactly. And that's why I like what's not to love about that. I think it's fantastic that you could have logged on to the internet in like, I don't know, 1999, posted that recipe under God Loves Ugly and it lives on. It has dedicated followers even now. I think that's beautiful. And I think that was, it's such a relic. I think that's why I love it of a time when internet food content was truly the novice's game.

• 11:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  I love the phrase that you used a minute ago here. You said something like folk hero recipes. What did you mean when you say that? Or what do you think of when you you hear that phrase folk hero recipe?

• 11:41Speaker 09

  I mean, there's one on Allrecipes by this guy called John Chandler, who has passed away now, but he uploaded the recipe in something like 2000 or 2001. I'm not exactly sure when. It's called World's Best Lasagna. And that has got to be, I would, I would put money on it, the most made lasagna recipe in the world. I I'm, I'm certain of it, you know? It has tens of thousands of written reviews, even more star reviews. So you can only imagine how many people have made it. And that's just some guy, just some guy called John. And I think, you know, what a wonderful legacy for him to have left. Just like this, this

• 12:22Speaker 09

  lasagna, which I'm sure is good, but I would suspect benefited from being the first lasagna recipe on the early internet to call itself world's best.

• 12:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  Put it on his gravestone. Put it on his gravestone.

• 12:40Amory Sivertson?

  These days, a lot of people are more likely to peruse, say, the New York Times Cooking app than a book on their shelves, or even Allrecipes.com. And often, we find our way to these digital recipe collections through visual first platforms like Instagram and TikTok. The democracy of Allrecipes is giving way to the supremacy of who knows how to take a good picture.

• 13:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  One of the most popular recipe platforms in the UK is Mob Kitchen. Its homepage is filled with well-lit images of brightly colored pastas and simmering beans. To Ruby, Mob is emblematic of how social media is changing recipes.

• 13:21Speaker 09

  Basically, what they do is just to develop recipe after recipe after recipe with social media in mind. So obviously, lots of recipe developers are already doing this on platforms like Instagram, but kind of Mob consolidates so many of them in one place. So you have this platform, and you know, it's huge in the UK. They've got so many paying subscribers and millions of followers on like Instagram and TikTok that is churning out these recipes that are so intensely craveable because they've kind of clocked the formula that makes a recipe go viral online. So they're really, really working that. And I think they're such a fascinating encapsulation of this new era of recipes that we're seeing, you know, in the age of social media.

• 14:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  Some recipes on Mob right now. Crispy mushroom and black bean tacos with pea guacamole. Oh, my God. Pea guacamole. No. Crispy cod with spring onion and sesame butter sauce. Hmm. 10 minutes smoky harissa creamy butter beans. They used to call me crispy creamy butter bean in middle school.

• 14:27Amory Sivertson?

  Honestly, you could do a lot worse for a nickname. I'd be proud to be crispy creamy butter bean.

• 14:41Amory Sivertson?

  I feel like I need to maybe profess my own ignorance as much more of a, you know, consumer, one who benefits from these kinds of online recipes than someone who tries to like make my own on my watching 10.

• 14:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  You're more of an eater than a cooker.

• 14:59Amory Sivertson?

  That's a good way to put it. I'm more of an eater. I'm, I'm, I'm the puppet whose strings are being pulled by, by people developing recipes online. So I don't feel like I even really understand the difference between a recipe created for the internet with certain goals in mind versus a recipe published in a cookbook.

• 15:21Speaker 09

  I mean firstly, I'm glad that there are some people out there not publishing recipes online. We cannot, we can't take more.

• 15:29Amory Sivertson?

  Good, I solemnly swear not to post my tofu bacon, my tofu lettuce tomato recipe.

• 15:38Speaker 09

  But you know, to your question, I think obviously there are some fundamentals of taste that you know cannot be changed particularly or improved. But a recipe in a cookbook is such a different entity to one that's designed for the internet, precisely because a cookbook is a product that you buy with let's say a hundred recipes in it. It is a body of work and it usually has a well-known food person attached to it. So what you are buying is a certain kind of authority, you're also buying an object and you're also buying whatever kind of overarching food philosophy is represented by the sum of those recipes. That's the product.

• 16:18Speaker 09

  Whereas a recipe online is detached from those things. It has to sell itself on its own merits, on its own craveability. It doesn't have all of this other stuff to fall back upon. And so what you have is recipes that are designed to be as instantly craveable as possible. So whether that's kind of certain colours being deployed again and again, certain adjectives, you know, crispy, crunchy chicken schnitzel, that kind of a vibe, I'm sure you've seen that kind of thing going around online. Like that's where we're going when a recipe has to sell itself.

• 16:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  A crispy, creamy, spicy shredded sheet pan second course after the break.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?

• 17:34Speaker 10

  Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 18:02Speaker 11

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• 18:31Speaker 12

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• 19:03Amory Sivertson?

  Getting recipes from the internet instead of cookbooks is one way our digital lives dictate what we crave. There are also viral videos of specific restaurants or food items. A lot of times, we don't end up eating the food we drool over online. It's almost more pure entertainment, like anything else on our social media feeds.

• 19:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  A food hype man that Ruby writes about in her new book, All Consuming, is Keith Lee. He's a former MMA fighter who now basically exclusively posts restaurant reviews on TikTok, often from the front seat of a car.

• 19:38Speaker 13

  Yesterday afternoon, I got an email from an employee of a family-owned restaurant here in Vegas. I got it. Let's try it and rate it 1 through 10.

• 19:46Amory Sivertson?

  Keith's reviews are usually wholesome and enthusiastic.

• 19:50Speaker 13

  Because places like this that don't nobody know of, this is a 9.8 out of 10. I'm a wholeheartedly agree with that.

• 19:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  They are also hugely popular. Keith has 17 million followers from all around the world. Most of them can't visit the places he tries, but the followers who can do, which means that for many restaurant owners, Keith Lee's TikToks have been life-changing.

• 20:13Speaker 14

  They're calling it the Keith Lee effect, and the owners here at this restaurant in Warner Robins say it may have just saved their business.

• 20:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Keith reminds me of the show No Reservations or that show Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, except led by somebody who wasn't part of the food industry until he started posting about it. Most of Keith's videos are about small, lesser-known restaurants, but he also occasionally participates in food trends that have already gone viral.

• 20:42Amory Sivertson?

  Ruby follows Lee, and she noticed that while he was in London, he visited the bustling Borough Market to try some fan favorites.

• 20:50Speaker 13

  This feel like we about to go on a ride at Disneyland that just opened.

• 20:53Amory Sivertson?

  Including some TikTok-famous chocolate-covered strawberries.

• 20:57Speaker 13

  It is a very high-quality chocolate. The chocolate is super rich. Very big and very fresh strawberries, though. I would say that.

• 21:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's a whack dessert, from my perspective. Don't need it. Strawberries are delicious. Chocolate's delicious. You don't need to dip one in the other. It's fine.

• 21:13Amory Sivertson?

  That's a bad take. I'm saying it.

• 21:15Speaker 09

  No, no, I am afraid I agree. I think it's a terrible dessert. It is terrible.

• 21:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  Thank you, Ruby. Thank you.

• 21:23Amory Sivertson?

  I love it. Okay, why is it terrible?

• 21:27Speaker 09

  I mean, I think just fundamentally, on a chemical level, I do not think that strawberries and chocolate are good. That's just my opinion, you know.

• 21:35Amory Sivertson?

  One is more watery.

• 21:36Speaker 09

  Well, exactly. There we go.

• 21:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  What about raspberries and chocolate, Ruby? How do you feel about that?

• 21:40Speaker 09

  Oh, I would actually say that is far better.

• 21:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Thank you very much.

• 21:44Speaker 09

  Far better, but people sleep on it, but it's better.

• 21:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Please go on. Yes.

• 21:49Speaker 09

  But yeah, these, you know, strawberry and kind of chocolate fondue is it became this huge thing in London. It was maybe two years ago, two and a half years ago. And people were calling them, you know, the Borough Market strawberries. That's where you got them from. And they very quickly became viral for reasons I don't entirely understand beyond the fact that they just looked cute on camera. And I cannot tell you how big this trend was.

• 22:16Speaker 15

  Okay, we're in the Borough Market and we're gonna try the chocolate covered strawberries.

• 22:20Speaker 09

  There were thousands of videos racking up millions and millions of likes.

• 22:25Speaker 16

  Each strawberry is like they've been handpicked using A I.

• 22:29Speaker 09

  This kind of quickly turned into a slightly meta phenomenon as well. Where it wasn't just that people were going and posting about it. It's that people were deliberately going because it was viral.

• 22:41Speaker 17

  First things first, the chocolate covered strawberry thing that everybody's going crazy over. We're in Borough Market trying the viral chocolate strawberry shop.

• 22:48Speaker 09

  And so there's this kind of exponential hype mechanism. You know, and people were even making up stories like I flew from Australia to get the viral chocolate covered strawberries. Which of course wasn't true, but you know, those videos then did well because people thought that was outrageous.

• 23:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  The cronutification of.

• 23:08Speaker 09

  I mean, they make the cronut look like a kind of vestige of a more innocent time. You know, that's, they really do.

• 23:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  The rainbow bag, the cronut rainbow bagel. All of mine are New York based. That's all I got.

• 23:23Speaker 09

  It's funny actually that you mentioned New York, right? Because when I was trying to understand, well, where, why did we start getting into so into the idea of kind of having what is already quote unquote viral? You know, my research led me back to kind of New York in the early blogging days.

• 23:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh no.

• 23:42Speaker 09

  Because when you have like the first Shake Shack, I think you know where I'm going with this. And you had the

• 23:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep.

• 23:47Speaker 09

  The shack cam, I think it was maybe called at one point, you know, the webcam that monitored the queue. And that was like way back in, I don't know, two thousand and six or something like that. I'm terrible with dates, but in any case, you've got this physical line and then you have the representation of the line and all the kind of, the line becomes a character in itself, right? That is a turning point where the line is this wonderful character in any restaurant story. And, you know, now what we've got is the line takes this kind of slightly amorphous but extremely compelling form online, where it is, you know, the view count, you know, when you go on TikTok, you can see, well, how many people have viewed this? How many people have liked it?

• 24:28Speaker 09

  And often I find myself looking at that before I even watch the video. And that is, you know, where the hype train has gone now. It's it's really interesting, but there is that through line way back to the blogging days.

• 24:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wow.

• 24:42Speaker 09

  I sound geriatric saying that, but you know, there is a continuity, even though the mechanisms have changed.

• 24:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  The blogs, it came from the blogs.

• 24:51Speaker 09

  Back in my day.

• 24:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  Do you think there is a pre-internet version of that?

• 24:58Speaker 09

  The funny thing is that the pre-internet versions, I mean, I think in general, people are more interested in restaurants and stuff now. So that kind of explains why these things are more of a thing now, but it's also about the medium, it's what I was saying before about when food media changes or when platforms change and technologies change, so do our ways of relating to food. Because back in the days where restaurants by and large were reservations led and where you would make a reservation by calling up a restaurant, there is no visible manifestation of a hype line or a view count or something like that. There might be sought after recommendations, tables that are impossible to get, but there wasn't that visibility. And once you moved to a line being outside a place or whatever it is,

• 25:44Speaker 09

  that's when you get hype becoming its own driver of more hype. And, you know, what could be a better advert for a restaurant than a line out the door? That's that's where we've come to.

• 25:54Amory Sivertson?

  You know, I'm I'm aware that for me, social media has made me see and therefore think about food so much more than I would otherwise, I think. Um.

• 26:07Speaker 09

  Hmm.

• 26:07Amory Sivertson?

  And because you've been open in the past about dealing with an eating disorder. How do you think about the constant barrage of food content that any one of us might see just scrolling through social media any given day? And is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Is it something that we can kind of like take the reins back from? What do you make of it?

• 26:35Speaker 09

  Hmm. I mean, for me, I think it's funny. I guess I actually draw a weird distinction, and I don't know if this is a justified one, between kind of seeing food online and actually the way that I relate to food in my day to day life. So, you know, these days, my relationship with food is, you know, really peaceable and enjoyable and fun. But, you know, I think for a lot of people, you can spend all day browsing kind of hype bakery content on Instagram, and it really have no relation to the way you're eating. It's hard to figure out just like which parts of our online consumption like figure into our real life.

• 27:16Speaker 09

  But what I would say is that the content that is particularly enjoyable is actually, in a weird way, that all recipes style, um, you know, slightly old fashioned or slightly slower, slightly less glitzy food stuff where people will share a little bit of their lives. And they'll say, you know what? I make this for some woman at church and whatever. That is the kind of stuff that when you chance upon it, makes food seem very personal and very warm and, you know, almost familial in its way. And so, not that it's about advice or anything like that, but like those are the corners of the internet that I do try to encourage people to seek out if they're like, I am

• 28:00Speaker 09

  sick of seeing smash burgers, or I'm sick of seeing like whatever. Like it's a different tempo.

• 28:06Amory Sivertson?

  Dubai chocolate.

• 28:08Speaker 09

  Exactly. Don't get me started on Dubai chocolate.

• 28:10Amory Sivertson?

  I'm so curious to hear what you have to say about it now, because it has taken over.

• 28:16Speaker 09

  Here's the thing, I always want to kind of find out, well, what is the root of this particular trend? But I think, you know, do it enough times and you realize that there will always be a new trend. It will probably come up, you know, while you're halfway through reporting the first one. And that's why, you know, it's nice to go back to fundamentals, like what is the deeper thing happening here?

• 28:42Amory Sivertson?

  One of the realizations that Ruby came to while writing All Consuming was that she, a baker, cookbook writer, thinker of food thoughts, has "never had an original craving in her life." We asked her what she meant by that.

• 28:58Speaker 09

  I'm self-centered as much as anyone. And I thought of my food preferences as very unique to me. And so I existed in this little universe of my own cravings, my own tastes, the way that I like to do things. And of course, that remains something that's important to me. But as I was looking at how media and the internet and all of these forces shape our appetites, I realized that, like, you know what? I'm so a part of these broader networks of tastes. I am so a part of them. And my appetites are very much in conversation with those of not only people halfway across the world,

• 29:41Speaker 09

  but people 50, 75, 300 years back in time. It is such an incredibly connective force, the way that tastes change and all of this. And it actually made me feel very much less precious about my appetites. And that was frankly, a relief. And it's a really, really hopeful position to be in, to feel connected to other people through the food you eat.

• 30:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, Ruby, it's been a true pleasure speaking with you. And thank you so much for taking all of this time to talk to us.

• 30:20Speaker 09

  Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And thank you for engaging with the topic so thoughtfully. I really appreciate it.

• 30:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Grace Tatter and hosted by me, Ben Brett Johnson.

• 30:46Amory Sivertson?

  That's good. And me, Amory, what was that?

• 30:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  Souffle Sievertson.

• 30:53Amory Sivertson?

  Souffle, oh, that's good. Amory Souffle Sievertson, or cinnamon roll. I love a cinnamon roll.

• 30:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  Cinnamon roll.

• 30:59Amory Sivertson?

  Amory's cinnamon roll Sievertson. It was edited by Meg Kramer, mixed and sound design by Emily Dinkowski.

• 31:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Franny Monahan, our production manager, Paul Vikes, and our managing producer, Sumita Joshi.

• 31:12Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and soggy bottoms.

• 31:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or another story from the internet you want us to dust with some sugar and serve hot, you can hit us up [email protected].

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, executive director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education.

• 31:59Speaker 18

  I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context.

• 32:04Speaker 04

  And just to explain why you're excited about it.

• 32:05Speaker 18

  Oh, my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization, and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in, because it is very different, depending on where in that maturity cycle you are, in terms of how your brain develops.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 32:55Speaker 01

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• 33:25Speaker 02

  Ugh, I hate Mondays.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Swirl Bite?

• 33:28Speaker 02

  Uh, Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 33:34Speaker 04

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites.

• 33:40Speaker 04

  Taylor Hansen? Nice.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Try one.

• 33:43Speaker 04

  Mmm.

• 33:47Speaker 05

  King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites. There's nothing like it.