Do Plants Think? & Why Dining Out Feels So Expensive - SYSK Choice

If you ever feel a wave of anxiety or that vague sense of dread, your first instinct probably isn’t to reach for a pain reliever. But there’s evidence that something you already have in your medicine cabinet may affect more than just physical pain—and the reason why is surprisingly unexpected. https://www.livescience.com/28770-tylenol-eases-existential-dread.html Plants don’t have brains—so how could they possibly be intelligent? Yet research suggests plants can sense threats, communicate with each other, and even change their behavior in ways that seem surprisingly strategic. Zoë Schlanger, award-winning writer for The Atlantic and author of The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth (https://amzn.to/4deE12f), explores this hidden world and explains how plants may be far more responsive and complex than we ever imagined. Dining out often comes with sticker shock. Between rising menu prices, service charges, and tipping, a simple meal can add up quickly. But what’s actually driving those costs? And why do some insiders argue that restaurants may still be underpriced? Andrew Friedman takes us behind the scenes of the restaurant industry and reveals the complex economics, labor, and logistics that shape the price of what ends up on your plate. He is author of the book The Dish: The Lives and Labor Behind One Plate of Food (https://amzn.to/3xWJjiE). Let out a good sigh—it might do more than you think. People all over the world sigh, often without realizing it, and it plays a role in both how we communicate and how our bodies function. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-babble/201304/why-do-we-sigh PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS POCKET HOSE: For a limited time, when you purchase a new Pocket Hose Ballistic, you'll get a FREE 360 degree rotating pocket pivot and a FREE thumb drive nozzle! Just text SYSK to 64000 RULA: Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high-quality therapy that’s actually covered by insurance. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Rula.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get started. QUINCE: Refresh your wardrobe with Quince! Go to ⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: See less carts go abandoned with Shopify and their Shop Pay button! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ PLANET VISIONARIES : We love the Planet Visionaries podcast! In partnership with The Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Listen or watch on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you are listening to this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:32Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, Tylenol can help you feel better, and it can also help you think better. Then, plants. They're a lot smarter and more devious than you ever knew.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  Tomato plants have been shown to exude a compound from their leaves that make the caterpillars look up from eating the leaves of the tomato plant and start to eat each other. It actually helps induce cannibalism in caterpillars.

• 1:00Mike Carruthers?

  Also, why people sigh. It's amazing what sighing does for you. And the business of restaurants. What goes on behind the scenes? And what restaurant owners really hate.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  The sort of albatross that the current generation of restaurateurs has been saddled with. They would never have had a tipping system in place. You know, that's a very unique thing to this country. If you go to most countries in Europe, the price is the price.

• 1:25Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 1:31Mike Carruthers?

  Now, here's something that might be worth a minute of your time. How would you like $1,000 to spend on shopping? Especially with the holidays coming. Well, the people behind Shopify have a shopping site called shop.com. And to celebrate the new shop.com, they're giving away $1 million in ShopCash. But not to one person. 1,000 people will each win $1,000 in ShopCash.

• 2:00Mike Carruthers?

  And shop.com is actually a really clever idea. It brings lots of different stores together in one place. So instead of bouncing around from website to website, you can search across stores, find what you're looking for, and track your orders, all in one place. Clothes, electronics, gifts, things for the house, all kinds of stuff. And whether you win or not, it's worth knowing. But with a thousand chances to win $1,000, I'd certainly take a look. Enter to win the $1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win.

• 2:44Mike Carruthers?

  That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today. Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

• 3:09Mike Carruthers?

  Hi. Hey, if you're a regular listener to Something You Should Know, but not yet a follower on whatever platform you listen on, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn, Castbox, wherever you listen, I invite you to do so. You know, with three episodes a week, that's a lot for you to keep track of. And if you become a follower, then those episodes get sent right to you when they're available and you don't have to remember to come back and listen. First up today, you know, it's natural for people like you and me to worry and get preoccupied with life and death and the state of the world from time to time. And research suggests that if that happens, taking Tylenol might help if you're feeling consumed with doom.

• 3:54Mike Carruthers?

  That's because feelings of distress and physical pain are both rooted in the same area of the brain. Acetylamethrin, Tylenol, numbs that region and can help to relieve anxiety or feelings of dread in much the same way as it reduces pain. While popping a pill's not going to solve the problem, it can take the edge off so you can think more efficiently and face the problem head on. And that is something you should know.

• 4:25Mike Carruthers?

  You don't have to look far from where you are right now to see plants. Perhaps you're surrounded by plants. After all, plants cover the earth. There are a lot more of them than us. And what you're about to hear will amaze you because there's a whole world in which plants live, thrive, communicate, defend themselves, trick predators, and do a whole lot of other cool things you've probably never heard about. Here to explain all this is Zoe Schlinger. She is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Time, Newsweek, and a bunch of other places.

• 5:05Mike Carruthers?

  She is author of a book called The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. Hi Zoe, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 5:18Mike Carruthers?

  So I love the title of your book. I love this whole idea that plants eat light because that's in fact what they do. So explain what you mean by that.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, so plants eat light. That is the coolest thing they do. They are the only thing in the known universe that can turn sunlight into usable sugars, the thing that builds our bodies, the thing that keeps us living. Plants do that. So this is about plant intelligence research and the world of botanists who are starting to interrogate whether or not plants have the capacity to behave, to behave with some sort of intention, to make smart decisions for themselves, live these dynamic, spontaneous, really strategic lives that we think of more the domain of animals and us. But these botanists are really considering that fact.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  But light eating is still, at their basis, the coolest thing despite all of that.

• 6:17Mike Carruthers?

  So when you talk about plant intelligence, that seems, I don't know, almost oxymorish somehow because there's no brain, right? I mean, I'm not a botanist, but plants don't have brains. They don't have the ability to think, well, I'm going to do this instead of that. So plant intelligence must be something else if it's a thing. So what is that thing?

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Exactly what you said, there's no brain there. We're pretty sure there's no brain in a plant. No one's ever found one. No one's probably ever going to find one. But what if the idea of a mind could be expanded beyond this idea of a centralized brain? I mean, there's good reason to believe we developed brains because we were a species that was very mobile, that we had to move around to both find our food and to run away from threats. And so when you have something that needs to move very fast to stay alive, it makes sense to have a sort of centralized processing area where all of our decisioning is happening and can be very portable. Plants don't have that constraint. They have a very different constraint. They are rooted in one place.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  So when you have a creature that's rooted in one place and their only means of movement is kind of growing very slowly in different directions, it makes more sense to have a more distributed version of awareness. This idea that plants have many limbs that stretch far and wide and somehow those limbs need to be able to communicate with each other. Somehow each part of that body needs to serve the larger goal of keeping the plant alive and thriving and reproducing. So there's a sort of distributed awareness in a plant. There's also a lot of thought now about fungi, the mushrooms that spread their underground parts over vast mats in the forest and that those mats are communicating with each other.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  It's one giant organism, but there's no centralized processing area. So thinking about plant intelligence falls very much into this domain of thinking about network intelligence and distributed awareness.

• 8:23Mike Carruthers?

  Well, if they have this intelligence, it's the intelligence to do what? You said that they communicate with each other, but do they have emotions? Do they feel things? Do they, do they worry about, do they worry about getting old? I mean, what kind of intelligence is it?

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Well, emotions, that's pretty hard to parse. I don't think any scientist would ever venture to say that a plant has an emotion, but do they have something you could consider a desire? Do they have things that they don't like? Perhaps certainly. I mean, you mentioned communication. There's so much evidence now showing that plants are able to warn their their neighbors of a threat. If one plant is being eaten by caterpillars, let's say, that plant most likely is going to produce a whole bunch of compounds that it exudes through its leaves that then tell other plants in the vicinity to pump up toxins in their leaves to make sure those caterpillars don't want to eat them.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  There's a million examples of that kind. One of my favorite examples of this kind of cunning quality that plants, we're learning now that plants have, is the way that plants actually deceive animals. Plants are constantly in conversation, in a way, with insects. That's the main animal they're encountering in their life. We know things like yellow monkey flowers are incredibly good at lying to bees. They've been shown to exude a chemical that to a bee brain translates into, there's heaps of pollen here. But they'll do that even if there's no pollen there. It's very expensive for a plant to make a bunch of pollen. It takes a lot of energy. And instead of bothering with that, they just lie to the bees.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  And it's a bit of a bait and switch. The bees show up and there's nothing there for them, but the plant gets pollinated anyway.

• 10:15Mike Carruthers?

  So I want to go back to what you said about a plant that like is being eaten by caterpillars will send a message to the neighboring plants. How is that message communicated? And how is it a message? When I think of a message, it's like, I better send a message. But how is this not just some sort of evolutionary reaction to the situation? But there isn't any like thinking behind it. It's just that's what a plant does when a caterpillar eats it.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  You're coming very much to the heart of the debate and botany over what could be considered intelligence and what is more just a rote reflex, like you said, a sort of evolutionary trigger that it comes with no sort of planning or thought, so to speak. I'm not necessarily saying that plants think, but there's a world in considering kind of foreplanning, pre-planning, using information about the past to make a decision about the future, that comes very close to these notions we consider intelligent behavior. So in communication, for example, a plant has an interesting relationship to often the thing that's eating it, let's say, a caterpillar.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  On the one hand, the caterpillar may become a butterfly that actually participates in the pollination of that plant. So you, the plant, from the plant's perspective, they don't want to kill all of these baby caterpillars because then they won't have a pollinator on the other side, or all of the fly's eggs that are laid on its leaf, because then they won't have a pollinator to deal with when they grow up. But they can't afford to be completely defoliated by these like gelatinous munching insects, so they need to hold out for a while, let some of them get themselves fed from their leaves, and then they start, let's say, killing them off by making a leaf less nutritious. So they sort of slowly starve the caterpillars to death.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Another tactic is tomato plants have been shown to exude a sort of compound from their leaves that make the caterpillars look up from eating the leaves of the tomato plant and start to eat each other. It actually helps induce cannibalism in caterpillars.

• 12:27Mike Carruthers?

  What?

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's pretty gnarly stuff.

• 12:30Mike Carruthers?

  Is it ever the case, like, you have plants that speak different languages? You know, the pine tree wants to send a message to the daisy over there, but the daisy speaks daisy and the pine tree speaks pine tree, and they can't communicate because they don't speak the same language.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  There's really interesting research on this. So

• 12:51Mike Carruthers?

  Of course there is. There always is.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  I gotta stop saying that. That's one of those things. Before I answer that question, let's think about animal behavior for a minute because it's easier to think about with something that we think of as having a sort of a face and we're already used to it having language. Think about songbirds. Birds that sing songs, there's often information in those songs. Things like "danger" or like "mate with me." But birds have different types of song language in the sense that there's some phrases that perhaps only that bird's family, that literal kin of that bird would understand. Perhaps only its species would understand that type of bird.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  And then there's other things that are a little bit more like someone yelling "fire." Anyone speaking any language can understand it. Much like if someone screamed "danger," but it's in German and you don't speak German, you still know there's a problem. You'll still get that information that there's danger there. Plants appear to be very much the same. There are kin-specific communication where plants will exude chemical phrases that really mostly only their biological family, their genetic kin, will pick up on. Other ones are more general. Anything in that field would realize the meaning behind that phrase.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  And most often that's the danger signal. There's something eating me. That is the signal that comes through in basically any language.

• 14:26Mike Carruthers?

  So I remember hearing, and I don't even know if this is a thing, if this is even a question, but I think it was like in a, it was some kind of debate about people being vegetarians or something and that, that well, that actually when you, when you cut a plant, it screams and you, do plants scream?

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Yes, that's probably referring to botanist Jack Schultz was famous for saying that the smell of your cut grass is actually the grass screaming. If you could somehow build ears for yourself that picked up on chemical signals, uh huh, definitely, that's a scream. It's basically any scent coming off of a plant that you can smell. Most of them, we can't smell at all. They're much too subtle and complex for our noses, but there's a lot that we can smell and they all mean something. Most often, I'm freaking out and dying over here. Yes.

• 15:21Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I hate to hear that. I hate to hear that one of my favorite smells in the world, which is freshly cut grass, is actually the lawn is screaming, "Stop cutting me."

• 15:33Speaker 02

  It's pretty dark, huh?

• 15:35Mike Carruthers?

  But the grass isn't being killed. It's just being cut. It's like a haircut. And in fact, if you didn't cut the grass, I mean, the grass does better when you cut it. Lots of plants do better when they're pruned, cut, right?

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Totally. Well, grasses are interesting in that way. It's when you think of it not being able to grow right if you don't cut it, that grass, what that grass wants to do is reproduce. So when you don't cut your grass, it goes to seed. That's it's completing its life cycle. That's what it sort of evolutionarily wants to do. I'm putting wants in air quotes, but that is the tendency it has for itself. So its final form is making those seeds, which is very annoying for a lawn, for lawn maintenance. But you bring up a really important point, that grass is not dying by being cut. Plants are modular. Plants are built to be able to withstand having part of them broken off and, you know, carried away in the belly of an animal without the whole thing dying. Then that's a product of evolution.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  If you are made to be rooted in place, you have to be made to have parts of you be expendable. It's like, you know, we can't have an arm cut off from us and that not do something to our general physiology. Losing a limb for a plant would be a signal that there's an attack underway. So the plant's probably freaking out. It's boosting its immune system, but it's not going to die because of it.

• 16:58Mike Carruthers?

  Today, we are taking a peek into the secret world of plant intelligence and my guest is Zoe Schlinger. She's author of the book, The Light Eaters.

• 17:10Speaker 05

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy? You might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body. With a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors. Great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade: Hydrates Better Than Water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 17:39Speaker 06

  When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's Fall Drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy-to-layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon Fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store and on lululemon.com now.

• 18:09Mike Carruthers?

  So Zoe, it seems to me, and I'm no gardener, but it seems to me there are some plants that need to be pruned. And if they're not, they might die because they become so big and they could fall over and that pruning is essential to their survival.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Okay, so in my house, I can't prune my plants because of all of the research I've now read. My partner actually has to do the pruning. And even though I know it actually makes a hardier plant. It is interesting when you see a plant growing in a direction that's clearly bad for it, or you know, a plant that's about to topple itself over because it's made the decision to grow this really long limb out far away from its body and now it's counterbalanced the wrong way. What is going on there? Is that plant intelligence? It doesn't look like plant intelligence. I mean, maybe that's plant stupidity. We don't know.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  It's not a very satisfying answer, but I do think that that's, there's room for plants to make poor decisions in this spectrum of plant intelligence, too.

• 19:09Mike Carruthers?

  Well, wait a minute. Now, you don't prune, why don't you prune plants? Why can't you do that?

• 19:15Speaker 02

  I had the experience of being in a lab in Wisconsin with a researcher named Simon Gilroy, who is studying plant touch, plant response to touch, and whether or not there is a possibility that electrical signals are moving through a plant's body from the site that they are touched throughout the body until the whole body is aware and responding to that touch. So I had the pleasure of pinching a plant under a microscope and watching a green luminance move through the plant from the side of that pinch. That experience permanently changed my life. To finally actually see in real time a plant responding to your touch makes you very aware that they are, nothing gets past them. They're noticing absolutely everything.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  And that's part of why clipping a limb off of a tree in my house is sometimes difficult for me.

• 20:05Mike Carruthers?

  Now, I don't know if this is science or folklore or whatever, but I think everyone has heard this notion that if you talk to your plants or that if you play certain music, that that helps them do better. Is that science or not?

• 20:21Speaker 02

  You are describing the product of a book that will make any botanist who you mention it to roll their eyes. It was called The Secret Life of Plants. It came out in 1973, I believe. And it was this wildly successful work of pop science about plants, but about half of it was really shaky science, things that couldn't be replicated, including this idea that plants enjoy you talking to them or that they prefer classical music to rock and roll. These were all things that were inside this book. It actually messed up funding for the field of plant behavior research for decades. The funding agencies that fund science in this country

• 21:03Speaker 02

  sort of backed away from funding that kind of research because it was such an embarrassing moment for science. Here was the first time botany burst onto the national scene and to the public consciousness through a popular book like this, and a lot of it was bunk. So The Secret Life of Plants is why people talk to their plants or one of the reasons. There is no evidence to suggest that talking to your plants is something they enjoy, but there is a lot of growing evidence that plants can perceive sound in different ways and that it causes things in their growth and their dynamics. I spoke to a scientist who discovered that These little lab plants that are in the mustard family,

• 21:46Speaker 02

  they are able to respond to the rhythm of a caterpillar chewing, just to the audio recording of it. The vibrations of that exact rhythmicity vibrated the leaf in an exact way that the caterpillar chewing would, and that prompted that plant to produce defenses to the caterpillars. So there is a world in which plants are very much alert to the audio inputs in their worlds. They are there, listening to their environment, so to speak, in many different ways. There's an evening primrose, this like teacup yellow flower that grows very close to the ground. It forms a perfect bowl with its flower, and it vibrates at the exact frequency of a nearby bee buzzing.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  And when it picks up that noise, that vibration of the bee buzzing, it increases the sweetness of its nectar within three minutes to become more enticing to that bee. And it'll do that just with the audio recording of a bee. So we know that it's about the audio. So plants do appear to have a lot of sensitivity to the world of sound. What we think of as sound, what they experience is vibration. And some researchers even posit that that means they have ears, so to speak, but the ear is their entire body.

• 23:01Mike Carruthers?

  Lastly, I wanted to get back to this idea of light eating, because it's such a provocative phrase. And try to understand better how that works. How do plants eat light?

• 23:15Speaker 02

  You've probably heard that plants produce all the oxygen in the world. Every molecule of oxygen you're breathing comes out of the body of a plant. The process that makes that possible is photosynthesis, and it uses light as a catalyst. So it very literally uses light as an ingredient in making the oxygen, but also the sugars that the plant uses to fuel its own body. The plant takes in CO2 from the air and water from the ground, uses the light to the energy from the sun to tear apart those molecules and repackage them into an oxygen molecule that floats out of the plant and into your noses.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  But then the rest of it becomes glucose, it becomes sugar. And that little package of sugar is literally the product of the sunlight. And that sugar is the building block for the plant. It ferries the sugar throughout its body. It uses it to grow more. And then when you and I eat it, or you and I eat an animal that has eaten it, we are just recycling that same molecule of glucose over and over to build our own muscle fibers, to make our own brain work. It really is the basis for every further life on earth, that eating of the light in the first place.

• 24:31Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I love the phrase "light eater." I mean, that just sounds so much better than photosynthesis.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  Thank you. Yeah, I think it speaks to how alien plants actually are. Once you take a step back and recognize that they eat light, it's like, what are these little alien creatures that we live with? That are absolutely dominant on the planet? There are so many more of them than there are of us. They are the backdrop of our lives, they power everything. But we barely understand them. They really are these aliens that we live with. And that's the biggest thing I've gotten from this process of learning more about them. Is when I walk into the park by my house, I feel surrounded by these alien creatures, each with their own cultures and sort of social lives and dramas playing out all around me. It's really changed my experience of every day.

• 25:19Mike Carruthers?

  But I think it changes everybody in the sense that when you walk into a park like that, or you walk into the woods, or you walk into anywhere where there's lots of wild plants growing, it does something to you. I don't know anybody that doesn't experience that thing.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yeah.

• 25:42Mike Carruthers?

  But I don't know what that thing is. I have no idea what that thing is, other than the what you just described.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  No one quite knows, which is so intriguing. Being in nature, being in a green landscape, has been shown time and time again to reduce depression, to increase your immune response, to just generally make your mind calmer. And no one quite knows why, but I think there's something really to thinking about plants head on that helps re-enchant your world. And having the experience of wonder has definitely been scientifically proven to be a benefit. Makes you a better community member. It's just good for your health. It's truly, there's scientific basis for showing that. And there's no better fuel for wonder than thinking about plants.

• 26:32Mike Carruthers?

  Well, after listening to you, it's going to be hard to look at a plant or experience a plant in the same way that I used to. This has been really eye-opening and a real journey into the secret life of plants. I've been talking with Zoe Schlenger. She is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the book, "The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth." And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Zoe.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  It's been so great speaking with you. Thanks for having me.

• 27:06Speaker 05

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• 27:36Speaker 06

  When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's Fall Drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy-to-layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon Fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store and on lululemon.com now.

• 28:08Mike Carruthers?

  If you've gone out to eat at a restaurant in the last few years, you have no doubt noticed it's gotten pretty expensive. Some would say ridiculously expensive. Yet you'll often hear restaurateurs complain they can't make enough money. So maybe we need to get some insight into the restaurant business and understand how it works. Why is it that menu prices seem so high from the customer's point of view? And not high enough from the restaurant owner's point of view? And what about tipping and all the other things you've wondered about when you go out to eat? Well, here to help unravel the mysteries is Andrew Friedman. He is co-author of more than 25 cookbooks, memoirs, and other projects

• 28:50Mike Carruthers?

  with some of the finest and most well-known chefs in the U.S. He is producer and host of the podcast Andrew Talks to Chefs. He is an adjunct professor within the School of Graduate and Professional Studies at the Culinary Institute of America, and author of the book The Dish: The Lives and Labor Behind One Plate of Food. Hi, Andrew. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Thank you very much for having me.

• 29:16Mike Carruthers?

  So you say that restaurants are not overpriced, that menu prices are low, which I guess a lot of restaurateurs agree with you, but a lot of customers see it differently. So let's start with that. Explain why you think that.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  I can't quote an exact statistic, but having talked to a couple of dozen restaurateurs about this, the rate of increase of menu pricing over about the last two decades in the United States restaurant community tracks well behind the rate of inflation in this country. Restaurateurs live in fear of causing sticker shock among their guests. And this is an issue that has actually, many restaurants had to after COVID because of supply chain issues and whatnot, had to raise their prices somewhat. But most restaurateurs I know feel like their menu is actually priced about 30, 35% lower than it should be.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  And the few that I know who kind of ripped the Band-Aid off after the COVID lockdown, that's about the percentage that they raised their prices in an effort to get things back in line after they had some time to reflect and play around with their business model. So they track well behind inflation. That's the easiest way to explain it.

• 30:32Mike Carruthers?

  But in addition to the price on the menu, which may seem high, there's also the assumption that you will tip, whether the service is spectacular or not. And in some cases, you're forced to tip. There is a gratuity added, whether you like it or not. And some restaurants are adding service charges on top of all that. So it alienates people.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  I would agree with you that it alienates people. I would tell you that the sort of albatross that the current generation of restaurateurs has been saddled with is something if they could have designed the American restaurant system, they would never have had a tipping system in place. You know, that's a very unique thing to this country. You know, as a lot of listeners probably know, if you go to most countries in Europe, the price is the price. And, you know, waiting tables is not seen the way it was for so long in this country, which was kind of like, you know, something that out of work actors did, you know, because they could have flexibility to go to their auditions, you know, or something like that. It's treated as a profession on par with the way people think about chefs.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  You know, tipping is a very outdated system. Restaurants dislike it because it puts the servers in a terrible position. It creates this power dynamic between service worker, the waiter or waitress, and customer. And customers who look at it that way can very often make unreasonable demands. A lot of women servers will tell you that in the name of making the best living they can, they've put up with, you know, innuendos from male customers. This is a very common complaint. And they just don't say anything because they want to get the best tip that they can. If it were up to restaurants, they would

• 32:19Speaker 03

  just, most of them, would just have one price that covered your meal and the service team. But that has not happened. And places that have tried to do it, the most famous example is Danny Meyer, who has restaurants like Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern in New York City. He eliminated tipping for a while. And

• 32:42Speaker 03

  The customer resistance was so profound, and he hasn't said this, but I also suspect he probably lost a little business because you're at a competitive disadvantage. If you've eliminated tipping, you've just simply raised the prices of your menu items. And when a customer looks at your menu, it seems out of whack to every other restaurant you might consider going to and what they charge. So he actually abandoned that system, which I think is remarkable, and I'm sure if he could have kept it, he would have. But if, I think for anything to change on that level in the United States, it's go, at least in individual localities, it's going to take the entire community making the change at one time. So the customers really don't have a choice. You know, it just changes everywhere at once.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  Everyone's on the same playing field. And what a lot of restaurateurs had said to me is they wish, I don't think this will happen because I don't think it's an issue most people think is important enough, but they wish that somebody would enact a city, state, or federal, you know, ordinance or regulation that simply forbade tipping. You know, restaurants in New York City that went non-smoking years ago did it when the city forbade it. So they didn't, it wasn't their decision. Customers couldn't really be upset with them. A similar example would be when people wanted to require guests to be vaccinated to come into their restaurants. When it was the restaurant making the decision, I mean, there were near violent incidents in New York when that happened.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  Once the city made it a rule, most of that stopped because no one saw it as the restaurant's decision. So that's what I think it would take for this to probably ever get better in this country.

• 34:23Mike Carruthers?

  Well, there was at one point tipping was considered something you did. You tip someone because they did something exceptional. Service well rendered, got a tip. Then somehow it morphed into it's just a mandatory fee. And now, I mean, if you're going to have to agree to pay a tip before the meal even begins, well, then you're not tipping.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  Well, what that service charge is that people are reacting to, it's like when you go to a hotel and or the best example is you go to a resort and they add a resort fee, you know, to the price of your stay. You know, and your reaction very logically should be, well, why don't you just make that the cost of my room? Because that's effectively what it is. Restaurants would rather just have a higher average price per dish out of which everybody simply gets a salary and there is no tipping. Or maybe there's voluntary tipping if you feel like you had extraordinary service. But what what the service charge that you're referring to really is, in most cases, it is a halfway house to not having tipping. Because they don't want to raise the menu price because people look at their menu and get turned off.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  But they also don't want to have customers kind of hold this over their staff to treat them in a in a abusive or disrespectful way. So they kind of see that as a way maybe to ease people into the idea of just, you know, paying a certain amount because they're used to that structure.

• 35:51Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, well, I remember talking to someone about, there was a hotel chain that did exactly what you just described where they, they said, you know, we're not gonna, we're not gonna nickel and dime people on every little thing. We're just gonna have a price. And it didn't work because the price was too high. And even though people paid the same, they didn't want that base rate to be so high, even though it included everything. They'd, so it's like the human nature screws this whole thing up.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I would, the only thing I would say to just slightly tweak what you said is I think human nature based on generations of experience, right? Because I think it's, it's unique to this country because we were all born into a world where this is how restaurants work.

• 36:37Mike Carruthers?

  Right.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  If we had never experienced that and and things, restaurant meals just cost more than they do, and that's the way it had been forever, we wouldn't, we wouldn't bat an eye.

• 36:48Mike Carruthers?

  So when I go into a restaurant and I open the menu, or I see the board with the specials on it, who comes up with those meals? And how do they come up with them? Do they go look in cookbooks like I do, or where do they come from?

• 37:02Speaker 03

  Well, this is one of the things I find interesting about the restaurant industry and the chef profession is there's a lot of different answers to that question. I mean, in terms of specials and restaurants that change their menu on a regular basis, the best of them, and I don't mean the most expensive, I just mean the ones that operate, I think, in the way that most people who really respect and understand food think they should. It starts with the ingredients. It starts with what's available at that time of year. And then in terms of who comes up with what, in some restaurants, it's just straightforward. It's the chef, and they communicate what's going to be cooked to their team, and the team executes it, and that's what happens.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  In other restaurants, it can be more collaborative. There have always been restaurants in this country, going back to places, like people may have heard of the Restaurant Stars years ago in San Francisco, or the Quilted Giraffe, which was a big restaurant in New York in the 80s, which it was kind of a communal thing. You know, they would stand around, the chef would say, "I have this idea", and everybody was invited to kind of give feedback on it and riff on it until they had an idea of what the dish should be. And, you know, there are answers that are everywhere between those two things. And then, of course, there are restaurants where they just kind of have a playbook that they go to each year on a cyclical basis. You know, when spring rolls around, you know, they do their spring pea soup

• 38:27Speaker 03

  and their asparagus salad, and they just kind of have the same go-tos all the time.

• 38:33Mike Carruthers?

  The recipes in the playbook, where did they come from? Are they grandma's old recipes?

• 38:37Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 38:38Mike Carruthers?

  Where did they come from?

• 38:40Speaker 03

  This rarely gets mentioned, but almost every cook and chef I know has a pile of notebooks that go all the way back to their first jobs and in which they have scribbled sauces, vinaigrettes, marinades, all kinds of recipes, dessert, pastry recipes from the various jobs they had. And over time, they might tweak those to make them their own. And then those get communicated to their team. And then when their team moves on and starts to become chefs themselves, they've made those recipes their own. And then some of them may have gotten their initial recipe out of a book. Or if they have an idea for something they may want to, a new dish they may want to do, just because maybe they had something similar when they were out to dinner, and it's nothing they've ever made before.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  It is very normal for them to look at a cookbook. That would give them sort of a baseline idea of, these are the ingredients that are in it. These are more or less the ratios.

• 39:35Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, I remember one time sitting at a restaurant, and it was like off hours. It wasn't mealtime. It was in the middle of the day. And I'm watching these two guys in the restaurant that worked there. And I could hear them. And they were trying to come up with ideas for specials. And they were thumbing through back issues of Gourmet Magazine. And it was like, kind of pulling the curtain back from what goes on in the kitchen. Because I'd never really thought, well, where did they come up with these ideas? Where did the specials come from? And these guys were just looking through Gourmet Magazine. And I'm thinking, hey, I do that. That's where I find recipes. I could do that.

• 40:16Speaker 03

  Well, you and I could do that. But we probably couldn't do it for, you know, 90 some people a night under intense pressure. But yes, you know, at some level, you can do that.

• 40:26Mike Carruthers?

  And so do restaurants keep score? Meaning, that pasta dish, really, nobody ate it. Everybody thought it sucked. So let's take that off the menu. I mean, are they keeping score every night? Is there what works and what doesn't? Or it just is what it is?

• 40:43Speaker 03

  Oh no, 100%. I mean, that process might start before something, a new dish even goes on the menu. If somebody has a regular customer, you know, in addition to whatever that customer has ordered, they might kind of discreetly bring over a dish that they're kind of R and D-ing, you know, doing research on development on and say, hey, you know, do me a favor, try this, let me know what you think of it. That's happened to me a few times. I think that's very cool when it does. It's a sign of, I think, respect that they think that customer has good taste. And then, once something does go on the menu, the first thing people look at is, does it sell? Because, especially now, when everything is computerized, you know, you can press a button and find out how many chickens you sold in a night, how many pastas, how many salads.

• 41:26Speaker 03

  And if there's something that's performing way below everything else, that dish's days are probably numbered.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  Or if, over time, if that dish starts to sell less, that probably means a lot of people ordered it and they didn't like it, so they didn't order it again. It's like, you know, like when a big movie comes out. You know, I've always thought that an opening weekend doesn't really mean anything in terms of how good a movie is, because the people paying for it haven't seen it yet. If, if there's extreme tail off in box office a week later, well, that probably means you had terrible word of mouth. And I think it's similar in how restaurants track how dishes perform.

• 42:09Mike Carruthers?

  So you mentioned that a lot of restaurants like to support local farms and, and that's why their prices might go up. But if it's so competitive, if the restaurant business is so difficult, why go that extra mile and add those extra dollars to the price? When you're trying to make your business a success, it seems like, you know, most businesses look for, they're gonna buy lettuce, you would think, well, lettuce is lettuce or close to it, and you just buy it from whoever's cheapest.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  Well, this will sound very corny, but I believe it is true. They don't want to do it any other way. It's a very hard profession. It's a very hard business. They would love an easier way to go about it. They simply don't believe in serving their guests inferior ingredients.

• 42:56Mike Carruthers?

  In a nice restaurant, where's the real money? Is it at the bar? Is it in the specials? Is it in, you know, the add-ons? Or where does, where's the real profit center?

• 43:08Speaker 03

  Well, the bar is huge. The bar is huge. I had a chance to interview a guy named Andy Bursh a few years ago, who for, for a long time, way back when, was the restaurant critic for Gourmet Magazine. And he actually had been turned off to restaurants because he felt like they were so bar-driven that they were scarcely about the food. I think that's a bit of an overstatement, but you know, the, the markup on alcohol, even just the markup on wine, which I wouldn't consider the bar, I mean, that's something a lot of people order at the, at the dinner table, is significant. There are often certain dishes that are more profitable than others. It could be different in different restaurants. In a restaurant that doesn't make its own pasta, you know, a pasta dish could cost

• 43:53Speaker 03

  just a couple of bucks and you might be able to charge $16 for it. But they make their own pasta, that's a significant commitment in terms of labor and in terms of the refrigeration's kind of system and climate you need to keep it the way it needs to be maintained. And that would be an entirely different story. Soups can be a huge markup item, things like that. And then, you know, you, you probably make a little bit less of a return on your proteins, meaning, you know, your fish dishes, your meat dishes, your poultry dishes.

• 44:24Mike Carruthers?

  I have a couple of questions about the wine list because I've noticed that often wine in a restaurant is maybe three times retail. And the, the restaurant can't even be buying at retail. They must be buying it lower than retail. So that's, and, and all they're doing is popping the cork and pouring. So that's gotta be a real moneymaker.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Yeah, no, I, yes, it is. Uh, and, and your, your guess as to the rough, uh, multiple is, is about, is about right on average. So yes, that's a huge profit center. I mean, this is why restaurants charge corkage, which for people who don't know, if you want to bring your own wine to a restaurant, I personally never do it. Uh, but you, you know, they will charge you for that and it's because they're, they're losing the sale and it's that important of a sale.

• 45:09Mike Carruthers?

  Right.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  Um, so that's, that's where that comes from.

• 45:12Mike Carruthers?

  The other thing is, you know, those restaurants that have those wine lists that just go on and on. And there's, you know, $3,000 bottles of wine. Is that all mostly for show? I mean, I can't imagine a lot of people are buying that really, really, really expensive wine very often. And, and it seems like an awful lot of work to carry all that inventory.

• 45:33Speaker 03

  In certain restaurants, I think people are spending that kind of money, you know, in a city like New York and a, and a city like Chicago. It's certainly in the Napa Valley at some of the restaurants there. You know, there are people, customers who are very knowledgeable about wine and who happen to be worth an awful lot of money. Uh, and a couple of thousand dollars for a bottle of wine is something that they don't feel, uh, at all, really in the big picture. Whereas, you know, I, I've never even pondered buying even a $500 bottle of wine. Uh, I've never even considered it and I write about these people for a living. So it seems if you're not in that class of, of, uh, income, uh, kind of crazy, but, uh, there are people who do love it.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  I was at a restaurant recently, it was a three-star Michelin restaurant and they had three different types of wine pairings that they could do for you where, you know, they, they picked different wines for different courses of the meal. And the highest level of experience was one where they would select and open bottles based on your taste and what was being served. Uh, they would open bottles specifically for your table. And the starting price for that experience was $2,000 per person. And, and everybody who comes to that restaurant gets that spiel and I can guarantee you they're not having their sommelier, their wine, uh, expert, uh, take the time to not be working the room and, and, and tending to other people's needs

• 46:59Speaker 03

  and refilling their wine glasses, you know, to give this presentation to every table. If a certain percentage of guests weren't saying yes to that.

• 47:08Mike Carruthers?

  What other little secrets are going on in a restaurant that may be behind the curtain that we might not know about that would be interesting to know?

• 47:16Speaker 03

  To me, one of the most fascinating jobs in a restaurant is dishwasher. The dishwashers who come into kitchens here in the United States in their teenage years because it's, you know, a job that a 15 or 16-year-old can get, and they unexpectedly fall in love with the kitchen. They fall in love with the environment, and some of the best chefs in this country, that's how they found the kitchen, you know, by accident, and they fell in love with the environment. I think the amount of coordination that goes on in the kitchen would be surprising to people. You know, when you order a dish, like, for example, in the book, it's a strip loin with a partially dehydrated tomato, a red wine reduction, and some sauraleaves. There is not usually, unless it's a very simple dish, it's, that is not, those dishes

• 48:00Speaker 03

  are not being produced by one cook. Probably one cook is grilling, or roasting, or whatnot, the meat, and another one is finishing the sauce. Maybe one of them, or a third person, might be rewarming the dehydrated tomatoes, and that all has to be synchronized enough to get onto a plate, hot, if it's supposed to be hot, at the same time, according to when an individual table is ready to be served that dish. And that is something that is happening for every dish, all night long, in most restaurants that operate in an à la carte way where, you know, you select, each person selects their own dishes, and each table moves at a different pace.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  And if you just imagine, you know, take one dish and then blow that out to, you know, several hundred dishes, or maybe several thousand, if it's a big enough and busy enough restaurant, in one night, the coordination required for all of that to keep happening all night long is something that I, even having covered the industry as long as I have, and observed kitchens as much as I have, I still find it hard to fathom.

• 49:07Mike Carruthers?

  You know, I've always been fascinated by the restaurant business. I mean, you hear the stories about how tough it is to make it in that business and how many restaurants go out of business. And it's interesting to hear your side, well, it's not your side, but more from the restaurateur's point of view, because customers are more interested in their point of view. But to hear the challenges that restaurants face today, it's interesting to hear. Andrew Friedman's been my guest. He is a writer, co-author of more than 25 cookbooks, memoirs, and other projects with some of the finest and most well-known chefs in the U.S. And his latest book is called "The Dish: The Lives and Labor Behind One Plate of Food,"

• 49:52Mike Carruthers?

  which follows all the steps and all the people that interact with the food on one plate of food before you get it at a restaurant. There is a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Andrew.

• 50:03Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for having me, Mike. It's been a pleasure.

• 50:09Mike Carruthers?

  Ever wonder why people sigh? Sighing is the universal language of disappointment, sadness, or frustration. And there's a reason that we do it, and it's all about self-help. When we sigh, we're actually regulating our breathing under stress. That stall in our breathing pattern can actually provide some mild relief. A sigh is usually a subconscious move and can act like a mental reset button while frustration is building. A hefty sigh is also an effective way of communicating a feeling of sadness or disapproval to others without actually having to say anything. And that is something you should know.

• 50:55Mike Carruthers?

  Hey, why not put your writing skills to the test and write us a quick review on whatever podcast platform you listen to this show on? Leave us a review. It helps us, and then you'll be famous for writing a review. I'm Mike Herbrothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 51:13Speaker 06

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