A Seat at the Table with Anthony Bourdain (Part 1)

How can a dish be fit for a king in one country and for the garbage in another? Find out when Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with world traveler, author and chef Anthony Bourdain.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Radio. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City. I also serve as the director of the Hayden Planetarium. And I have with me my co-host for this program, the one and the only Eugene Mirman. Eugene, welcome back!

• 0:41Speaker 01

  Welcome back to me!

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We so tap your talents for this, thank you. And this will not be the last, for sure.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  This would be a fun way to fire me.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're still on one of the voices in Bob's...

• 0:54Speaker 01

  I'm still one of the voices of Bob's Burgers, also not replaced.

• 0:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bob's Burgers?

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Burgers, we'll get back to burgers in a minute. Today's show, by the way, is about like food and nutrition. So I combed the land, then I found someone who actually has the title, Professor of Nutrition at New York University, Marion Nessel. Marion, welcome to StarTalk!

• 1:15Speaker 02

  Glad to be here, I think.

• 1:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She thinks, yeah, so you'll be the judge of that later, we'll find out. First, I'm intrigued and impressed that there's such a thing as a professor of nutrition. So I'm glad that somebody has that.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  You thought of it like alchemy.

• 1:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, so no.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Nutrition departments all over the country.

• 1:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I just never ran into one, and I'm glad you were here and ready for us.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Ready for you.

• 1:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because in this episode of StarTalk, we have my interview with Anthony Bourdain. He's the famous TV chef.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Travel chef writer.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Travel chef, in fact, you know, first he had a New York Times bestselling book in their year 2000 titled Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Bestselling book.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Which I understand is a very accurate account.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent. So he's been around a while, and he had a longstanding Travel Channel show called, of course, No Reservations, and he's moving from the Travel Channel to CNN.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he's gonna do a show, Cuisines of the World.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I just chatted with him about what made him tick, what got him interested in food. In particular, what intrigues me, and we'll get back to you on this in a minute, is just how cuisine can be so different around the world. What some people think is nasty, other people think is extraordinary. And how people just eat differently around the world. So let's go to this first clip right away, and we'll have a lot of time to talk about it and carry it into the other segments. My opening clip with Anthony Bourdain, chef extraordinaire.

• 2:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People always say, "Oh, I've been to this country, and this food is a delicacy there." That's cute to me, that the food tastes nasty, or some bug that they pulled out of the ground and sauteed. So what's with people saying something is a delicacy?

• 3:06Speaker 03

  Well, it's rare or expensive. You know, it's valued more than, you know, the way we look at shrimp, or lobster, or truffles as the good stuff. A lot of people in this world look at ingredients that many of us would probably have difficulty with. That's an attitude that changes really quickly the more you travel. Something I got over very quickly, particularly, you know, you talk about, "Wow, their food in Thailand is really repulsive to me." I mean, they eat bugs. But the Thais, who are largely a non-dairy culture, try to put yourself in their shoes. They're looking at us, you know, eating cottage cheese or Roquefort would be truly horrifying. And if you think about it for a second, what that must look like.

• 3:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so you get some milk, and then like turn it into cheese, and then let mold grow on it, then eat it.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, just hideous. I got over sort of using words like bizarre a long time ago when looking at how other people eat around the world.

• 4:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I do find interesting, though, is you go from one country to the next, and one of the simplest measures of this is, what is the assortment of flavors that they infuse in their potato chips?

• 4:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For example, right? I mean, you know, so in Japan, they have like fish flavored potato chips. This, I mean, we eat fish here, but I don't know that that would sell.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  There are whole spectrums of flavors that other countries, other cultures uh take for granted and and require in their diet. Uh, the Philippines, there's a whole bitter component that we are almost instinctively not happy with. I mean, they will they will introduce bile into dishes to give it that welcome bitter note. Cultures like Scandinavian cultures where there's a very limited spectrum of flavors, not a lot of spices traditionally, a lot of fresh fish, fresh fish, frozen fish, more fresh fish, maybe some preserved fish. As well as South Pacific cultures where it's all sort of sweet, fresh fish, not a lot of salty savory. There's a tradition of rotting things, like fermenting fish,

• 5:10Speaker 03

  getting it really offensively funky by our standards, just because I think out of boredom. It introduces another flavor. And it's worth noting also that we, Western societies anyway, used to used to do that. Roman times, the condiment of choice was essentially something called garum. It was essentially rotten fish guts and rotten fish sauce. This was the salt, the principal seasoning ingredient all across Europe. So even our own tastes have changed. For a lot of people, the last frontier is the textural thing. Particularly in Asia, they like, you know, squishy or even rubbery, chewy, or a lot of traditional European cultures, you know, cartilage texture, that's something that we really have a problem with. We tend to like crispy.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Once you cross that border, you you're really you're someplace special. To get back to you, so about delicacies and value, a lot of, I think, you gotta ask always, is there an assumed medical component to what we're talking about also. I think a lot of what we consider the really freakiest foods, the eye popping, what, why would you eat that? A lot of that has either folk medicine or uh Digestive. Chinese medicine applications or a regular feature in my life in China is if something arrives, still wriggling or there's a sex organ involved, it's usually accompanied by winking and banging on the bottom of the table. This will make you strong, you know, many, many sons, you know, it's like, oh, God.

• 6:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, so Marion, I gotta go straight to you on this. When we think of nutrition, I think of things that are tasty that might be good for me. And for so many of the cultures of the world, I don't know that they have an active science of nutrition, but they just simply know what has worked over the centuries, right? So, is a person more likely to think that something tasty is actually nutritious?

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Probably, but the point is that...

• 7:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The physiology of it.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  People eat what's available. You know, if you, before there were supermarkets, and before there was internet food, and before there was food on every corner, people had to eat what was available to them. So they learned to put together a diet that supported life, supported reproduction.

• 7:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the empirics of that is, if you died, you didn't keep doing it.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, they wouldn't be here if it hadn't worked.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  So, so wait, you were saying that, that people would eat healthy, you would think that some, like, you would think, like, ribs were delicious because they're, were healthy because they're delicious?

• 7:35Speaker 02

  If you had them.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  If you had them.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  If you had them, because these people survive. These cultures survive, these populations survive.

• 7:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's self-selecting.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  So it's self-selecting. So, and we know that healthy diets can be made out of almost anything, as long as the foods are varied.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  In India, they drink a bear aspirin soup.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you don't eat too much of them.

• 7:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On that note, we'll come back to StarTalk Radio after this break. We're back on StarTalk Radio, and I've got Eugene Mirman. Hello. And this show is about nutrition. So professor of nutrition here, Marion Nessel. Marion, thanks for being on StarTalk.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Pleasure.

• 8:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up from New York University. And in fact, you have a book just was published, Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  How about that?

• 8:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Awesome. Because calories do count.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  They do.

• 8:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, here we are talking about nutrition all around the world. And so here are people eating local foods.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're not thinking, "Does it have vitamin C? Does it have vitamin A?" But if someone gets sick, or the tribe doesn't continue, presumably they figured out that that diet wasn't good. And so over the generations, an emergent diet comes that happens to work out.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. If it didn't, they wouldn't be here.

• 9:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They wouldn't be here.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Everyone who tried to just only eat dirt is dead.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  All the religions and the people who just only...

• 9:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the cults and all the...

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, like suck on a weird rock and be like, "I still feel hungry." They're all dead.

• 9:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're all dead.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  All we have now is French food and a lot of Asian food.

• 9:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, here in America, I guess since the 1950s, but certainly in recent decades, fast food is a major part of the American diet. It's everywhere. And then with the American cultural influence around the world, our fast food restaurants are showing up in other countries. Is that good? Is it bad? I mean, do you have an opinion on this?

• 9:38Speaker 02

  It's business. There's only a certain amount that people can eat. Americans, they're maxed out on what they can eat. If these companies want to make money, they have to move it overseas.

• 9:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, they can't make us fatter than we are?

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. We've hit a fat max.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  And we now need to make everyone in Vietnam fat.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  We're working on it.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then when Earth is done, with the next planet, right? All right, but fast food shouldn't necessarily make a person fat.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Not if they don't eat too much of it.

• 10:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If they don't eat too much of it. So, the issue is not the existence of fast food, it's the regulation of the consumption of food.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Yes, and that turns out to be evolutionarily complicated because we have about 100 physiological factors that encourage us to eat more. And one or two...

• 10:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because historically, on the Serengeti, that's survival.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  If you found a McDonald's in the Serengeti, you would be like, "I'm gonna eat all I can." Because the next McDonald's is...

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Is far away.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Is centuries away, possibly.

• 10:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had a brother-in-law who grew up in Alaska, and every time we fed him, we said, "You want seconds?" And he said, "You never know when you're gonna eat next." But the fact is, he does know when he's gonna eat next, and it's in three hours when it's the next meal.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Right. So, we're not very well tuned to the environment that we're in. And our physiology is much better at saying, "Eat, eat, eat, eat, you're hungry. Better get the glucose to the brain quick," and much, much less effective at telling us when to stop.

• 10:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When to not eat.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Alas.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  We're like geese trying to turn ourselves into foie gras.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Yes, right. Ban in California.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're saying the ready availability of fast food is what's contributing to our inability to stop eating?

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, the things that encourage people to eat more are having it right there. If we had candy here, we'd be eating it. The fact that you could eat it anytime, night or day, 24/7.

• 11:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you've got the refrigerator that's got the food through the night, and there's a corner person selling you food, particularly in the cities.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  So that makes people eat more.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  You make it sound like this monster is surrounded by piles of food.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Which is to encourage to exercise our physiology.

• 11:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're not biologically prepared for the world we've created around ourselves.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 11:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I spoke with Anthony Bourdain about this, just to get his reaction to it. Let's find out what he said.

• 11:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what about the idea of what Americans have done to some foods? We put cheese in a can. Now, maybe the cheese tastes okay, but that's gotta be an abomination to the cheese cultures of the world.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  Increasingly, the French are doing it too. You know, the great cheesemaking cultures by joining the EU have agreed to bastardize a lot of their traditional artisanal products like cured meats, traditional forms of cheesemaking. They've been killing their own products for years.

• 12:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that not our influence, our cultural influence on them?

• 12:24Speaker 03

  It's a combination of convenience food culture.

• 12:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, who invented convenience food? Well, America.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  I think it's a byproduct of post-war affluence, less time to kick back.

• 12:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Second World War. Must specify for the current generation.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  People forget, they lose touch with their roots, they learn to demand newer, saltier flavors. So it's not just us, unfortunately.

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's not only a concept of fast food, to which there's been this resistance, I guess they're calling it slow food, right? I mean, has that movement caught on?

• 12:58Speaker 03

  People certainly talk about or think about where their food's coming from a lot more. And not just at the elite foodie levels. People, even if they're not particularly knowledgeable about organics or sustainable or local or artisanal, all of those very fuzzy words. At least they're thinking about it now. You only need to look at McDonald's has publicly forsworn any use of pink slime. Pink slime, it is not an ingredient according to the rules. It is a process that allowed ground beef manufacturers to essentially buy the outer cuts of beef that would otherwise previously have had to be discarded or used for pet food because they were more likely to come in contact with hides, excrement, other animals,

• 13:43Speaker 03

  and contain E. coli. They found that by introducing, as I understand it, an ammonia vapor, basically steaming this stuff, whipping it into a mulch-like paste with bits of extruded fat, mixing it into this slime and processing it with ammonia, that they were able to bring the likelihood of E. coli down. Now, it doesn't sound like good stuff, for sure. And there was clearly a backlash, though not a huge one. The fact that McDonald's and other major retail outlets are saying, "We're not using it anymore," it's not like they're nice guys. They're looking pretty far into the future and seeing that this is going to come back and bite us. We're saving money now, we're making money now, but this could really come back and

• 14:28Speaker 03

  hurt our brand. So clearly, that's one of many indications of this sort of thinking affecting the marketplace, you know?

• 14:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so it wasn't, like you said, it was not a separate ingredient because it's still beef.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  Well, that's up to you to decide whether the introduction of an ammonia vapor or whatever is an ingredient or a process. Personally, I would like to know if there's ammonia in my cleaning product in my meat.

• 14:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so just kind of America's hallmark. Agribusiness, growing production and storage technologies, I think America has led the world in this.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  We have.

• 15:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I looked this up recently, we're spending... A third today of our annual budget on food compared with what we were doing in the 1950s.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Our single largest privately held company is a food producer. I think Cargill is the biggest American privately held company.

• 15:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so we're making more food on less land with fewer farmers than ever before.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  No doubt about it. You know, frozen food, surely a good thing, most of these things, but you know, with the good comes the bad, and the bad might be that it is in the financial interest of some very large, powerful companies that you continue to eat badly and too much. And they're going to spend a lot of money, as any company will do, to make you continue to buy their products. And a lot of these products are not ideal staples of any diet. We need only look at the way Americans look and the state of our health to see that that's the truth.

• 15:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is processed food bad? I like french fries. I like burgers.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Unfortunately.

• 15:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had a burger last night.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  It's not like cigarettes. It's a matter of proportion. It's not you can't eat it. It's you can't eat too much of it.

• 16:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  That's hard.

• 16:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it is so good and so cheap, it makes it that much harder to regulate.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  And the politics come into how come it's so cheap.

• 16:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what's an example of that?

• 16:15Speaker 02

  We subsidize corn and soybeans. We don't subsidize broccoli.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  And soybeans, what do we do with that that's so bad for people?

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Soy oil. It goes into processed foods.

• 16:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's your solution to this? Is it to make food more expensive? Is it to change the availability of it? What's the solution?

• 16:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, you want to change the environment in order to make it easier for people to eat more healthfully? That's what Mayor Bloomberg is trying to do with his 16 ounce soda cap.

• 16:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's trying to outlaw 20 ounce sodas in the city.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's trying to make fat people illegal, which I think is a good thing.

• 16:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So are you over that line? Are you?

• 16:50Speaker 01

  I don't drink a lot of soda. I'm just a regular fat person. But I think that ban sounds pretty good. But what if we subsidize parsley?

• 16:57Speaker 02

  It's not a ban. It's a cap.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a cap. It's a cap.

• 17:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there is a public good that laws conserve because somebody out there is more concerned about your health than you are?

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Yes, because they have to pay for it. If something goes wrong.

• 17:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, the insurance base, the tax base.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  I mean, there have been estimates, I don't know how good they are, that overweight costs America $190 billion a year.

• 17:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can go to Mars twice for that.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  I would hope so. Wow!

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Imagine if the trip was full of people who were overweight. The savings combined with shipping away the problem.

• 17:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a double.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Plus the exploration, it's just like, I'm full of solutions.

• 17:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So lately, fast food has been fortified in ways, so you are getting vitamins and minerals and things, isn't that right?

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Oh, it has vitamins and minerals and protein and other kinds of nutrients. It's not soda. Sodas are the only thing that have calories and no nutrients.

• 17:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And no nutrients, yeah.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  And alcohol, sorry.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so...

• 17:53Speaker 01

  You're saying there's no nutrients?

• 17:54Speaker 02

  There's no...

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Not even whiskey?

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Especially whiskey.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  What about red wine? It makes pregnant people run faster? Isn't that true? That's true.

• 18:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back to StarTalk Radio, more of my interview with Anthony Bourdain. We're talking about nutrition around the world, food around the world. More on StarTalk Radio when we come back.

• 18:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk Radio, and I'm with Eugene Mirman. Hello. And I've got Professor Marian Nessel, spelled like Nestle, I guess, but without the accent.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Without the accent.

• 18:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. Too bad, right?

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 18:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's professor of nutrition at New York University, has thought a lot about this. And not only nutrition in general, but the role of food and its impact on culture and politics. In fact, you've got a book out called Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics. Excellent title, check it out. So what's interesting is different regions of the world have different diets, and you can look at how long those people live. And say, hey, maybe something's going on in their culture that's not going on in my culture. They've talked about the Mediterranean diet, that is high in, I guess, olive oils and things. There's the Japanese, broadly the Asian diet, which is very low-fat, high carbs. Let's hear what Anthony Bourdain had to say about it, and we come back and get some of the science of why that may or may not be true. Let's check it out.

• 19:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me about these diets, we call them diets, but it's just the mainstay culinary offerings in various parts of the world. There's a lot spoken of the Mediterranean diet, or the Japanese diet, and they live a long time, heart disease is low. From your life experience, is all that true?

• 19:48Speaker 03

  No doubt about it.

• 19:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, you go to Crete, for instance?

• 19:51Speaker 03

  I guess we know it's true, but are you a bit of a pet at the food, or because there's no stress, or because, how big a factor is the food? I'm guessing there's, you know, you're a Vietnamese rice farmer, you're working hard, you know, you are working hard, and there's stress in your life, especially if you've been through three or four wars in the last 30 years. I don't think that's it. I think clearly the ratio, in much of the world, the ratio of, you know, I'm a confirmed carnivore, but clearly there's something to be said for cultures where the ratio of meat, of protein, to fresh vegetables is completely different. Ours is distorted. Much of the cultures we're talking about, they use meat, or bone, or protein, almost as a flavoring ingredient,

• 20:36Speaker 03

  very careful, it's much more value. You have delicious, for the most part, vegetables, generally a filler, like starch, like whether it's rice, or cassava, or potato, wherever it is. Clearly, it has an impact on, you know, what your body looks like, and how long you're gonna live. You know, no doubt about it.

• 20:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, now, you're over six feet tall. In Japan, people hardly get that height. So, is it a trade-off between that kind of diet, and whether you grow tall?

• 21:07Speaker 03

  Well, I don't think it's a trade-off we make anymore, because they're getting taller and bigger, there's no doubt about it, as they become fonder of Western food and processed food. I mean, the same thing's happening there as here, the bulking of the world. But I think, uh, yeah, there clearly is. I mean, one of my favorite, I, you know, I, I'm not particularly well inclined. As much as it might be good to eat more vegetables and less animal protein, I'm not particularly well inclined towards really hardcore unwavering of vegans. So one of my favorite, uh, statistics is that apparently vegans in non-industrialized cultures seem to do very, much better than vegans in industrialized cultures.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  And people are trying to figure out why that was, why they're living longer and seem healthier and apparently the insect parts and, uh, carcasses, uh, in rice, uh, much higher in non-industrial cultures.

• 22:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's left in, it's left in the product.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, so basically they're getting a lot more animal protein.

• 22:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Insect protein. We're flicking away the insects out of our vegetables.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  Very high in, in protein bugs, by the way. People eat those for a reason.

• 22:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you know, I happen to know separately that little people live longer than big people. So if you have a culture where everyone's little, then maybe it doesn't matter what they eat.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Leave them alone.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  That's why babies live forever.

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, in, in, in certain cultures, their people are just smaller. Maybe that's the biggest driver for their longevity. Or is there much truth in these diets that, what can you say?

• 22:46Speaker 02

  Oh, the statistics all show that there are plenty of countries in the world that have much better longevity than we do. And they tend to have in common that they eat more plant foods, fruits and vegetables and grains, and they don't eat as much meat and they don't eat as much junk food. And as the American fast food and soda companies.

• 23:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not just fewer calories, it's the actual mixture of.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  It has a lot to do with calories.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  It's just harder to eat so much parsley than it's as many calories as a burger. I've tried, I've tried.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Really hard to get fat on parsley. You have to eat roomfuls of it.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  It's really tough.

• 23:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nabuda, last I checked, was a vegetarian and he's generally shown as quite chubby.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  Yes, but everybody was bringing him rice offerings.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, he had a very high carb diet.

• 23:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, alright.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  All day long.

• 23:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so you're prepared to say that if, in America, if we want to live longer, cut the meat?

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Cut the calories.

• 23:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, cut the calories.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Cut the calories.

• 23:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cut the calories and change the balance of the meat.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  And change the balance. Eat more fruits and vegetables, don't eat so much junk food, uh, balance calories and love what you're eating.

• 23:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What does that do for you?

• 23:57Speaker 02

  That's my advice.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Love, meaning eat, find ways to make foods that aren't burgers delicious.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, or just make sure that you enjoy what you eat.

• 24:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Burger is the reference frame for all of the food.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  I don't even, I mean, burgers are totally fine.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  Food is one of great, life's greatest pleasures. Enjoy it and not make it your enemy.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  It should be your friend.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  To be friends.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Right? Befriend food, you're like Yoda. You're like, befriend food, eat it.

• 24:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, more of my clips with Anthony Bourdain and my in-studio guest, Marion Nestle and of course Eugene Mirman. Be right back.

• 24:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Radio, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your host. Find us on the web at StarTalkRadio.net. You can download our archives of shows, great stuff there. Not only that, we're on Facebook, like us there. Just StarTalk Radio, you'll find us. And we tweet StarTalk Radio, of course. Eugene, you tweet?

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At Eugene Mirman.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  M-I-R-M-I-N.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  M-A-N.

• 25:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And my special guest today, right off-

• 25:17Speaker 02

  I tweet.

• 25:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You tweet?

• 25:19Speaker 02

  I do.

• 25:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A tweeting nutritionist.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Marion Nestle.

• 25:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Marion Nestle.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  At Marion Nestle.

• 25:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Came out of that TV segment, I called you Nestle, I'm sorry.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  Perfectly wrong.

• 25:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can't be the first one.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  No relation, you're not the first.

• 25:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm not the first.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  And you won't be the last.

• 25:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I surely won't be the last. By the way, we're also on the Nerdist channel of YouTube, check us out in video form. So we're featuring my interview with Anthony Bourdain.

• 25:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He gets around, he makes great food, he eats food that is prepared all around the world. And an intriguing subject, as you know, because not everyone eats the same way. My great disappointment traveling America is the same restaurants are in the same places. And I asked him about food that's sort of good or bad, you know, I mean, you can make that judgment.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  You mean like morally?

• 26:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because he travels the world and when you travel, you eat different foods.

• 26:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I asked him, what kind of good food did he have, what kind of bad food? No, just what didn't taste good.

• 26:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Taste of good, didn't taste good, that's all. But might be a delicacy in its land. So let's find out what he said.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  The fermented fish in Iceland is something I will never, ever be able to really, even many people in Iceland, probably even the majority, it's a celebrated national dish that they eat on their holidays and it's basically rotten, sharp. I'm not going to be visiting that again. I could choke down anything to be a good guest. The really, the only real problems are when it's a matter of freshness, you know, when it's a really poor culture with very limited access to ingredients.

• 26:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have a hardy digestive system?

• 26:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I mean, the two times that I've, I've been brought down and lost a day's work were both tribal situations. The whole tribe looking at me, it's, it's bush meat, it's whatever protein they could scrounge, it's not in good shape. There are cleanliness issues.

• 27:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You took one for the team.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  I absolutely did. The surprises are everywhere. Eating street food in Asia changed my life, it ruined my life in wonderful ways. When you've had a really well-made bowl of spicy noodles in Vietnam, even out of a chipped bowl on a low-plastic stool in the street. Your old breakfasts just won't cut it anymore. You cannot go back to be the person you were before when you've experienced some of the degree of spice, complexity, and even a little bit of pain. There's an element of sadomasochism in some of that food that's kind of disturbing and yet enticing.

• 27:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good and bad food around the world. I mean, this was parodied in or captured in the Indiana Jones.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Second of those.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Where he has to eat the little boy's heart? I can't remember what happens.

• 27:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why they pulled the heart out.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  They give him the Icelandic shark that's...

• 27:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He killed monkey brain and eyeball soup. And so, are these real foods out there? They must be.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Uh, whatever they're... If they're being served, they're obviously real foods.

• 28:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Unless they're trying to get you.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Do they do that? And you go somewhere, they're like, "We eat brains all the time." And they're like, "No, we don't."

• 28:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, is there study on the nutritional analysis of all these exotic foods?

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 28:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what do you guys find? I mean, I guess...

• 28:20Speaker 02

  They have nutrients. All foods have nutrients.

• 28:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the end of the day, they're just eating something that was once alive.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  How good are sweetbreads for you, would you say?

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Uh, I think in small quantities, I wouldn't worry about it at all.

• 28:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's neither sweet nor is it bread.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  No, but...

• 28:33Speaker 02

  It's neither sweet nor bread.

• 28:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There is organ meat of mammals.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  But if a tiny bit of it will make you strong and fast and outrun people drinking red wine?

• 28:41Speaker 02

  Wouldn't you love that?

• 28:43Speaker 01

  I'm just trying to have you go like, "Most people don't know this, but eating butter in the morning is very good for you." They're like, "Why won't you tell me this?"

• 28:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because they've got their safe secrets.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Oh, because I'm one of these people who thinks it's okay to eat whatever you like as long as you vary it and don't eat too much of it.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so, foods that are really horrendous. Do you think there's something... It must be cultural. I mean, a learned taste buds.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, if everybody... If you grew up on eating sweetbreads all the time, you would think it was a great delicacy. If you grew up on eating crickets all the time, you would think it was a great delicacy.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  You'd be right about sweetbreads, but wrong about crickets.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  Wrong, right? There you are. That's cultural relativism.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Just to give a world blanket statement.

• 29:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whether or not Americans are the right answer to this question, hold it aside. What country in the world has the worst health?

• 29:31Speaker 02

  The worst health?

• 29:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Excluding America?

• 29:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Oh, I would say the countries that are poorest.

• 29:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, poorest.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Poorest countries.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  So, poorest and then the fattest?

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  So go poorest, poorest, fattest.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  That, that, that too.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  And then just like vegetarian Asians.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  And what's happening, you know, and what's happening in the developing countries now is that as everybody gets a little money, they start eating more.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  They just, but then they just eat, start eating like Kit Kats and stuff.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  And they start eating like we do and they put on weight and develop type 2 diabetes. And there it goes. It even has a name. It's called the nutrition transition.

• 30:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nutrition transition?

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Where it goes from hungry to diabetes, to type 2 diabetes.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  In one fell swoop.

• 30:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, StarTalk Radio, we're talking about nutrition, my clips with Anthony Bourdain. We'll see you in a moment.

• 30:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I got Eugene Rehman and Professor of Nutrition Marion Nessel.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  The verb, not the chocolate.

• 30:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay, Nestle, that would be.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Is that what it says on your card?

• 30:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've been featuring my interview with Anthony Bourdain, the TV chef and world traveler, tasting exotic foods. And just interesting to hear how he got to where he is. Everyone's got a story. He's got a story and the story surprised me entirely. I had no idea this was in his, I guess I could have done my homework, but I wanted it all to be fresh.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  You surprised me because you didn't Google it.

• 31:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I didn't Google it. No, but it was all very fresh and it was, it was a delightful success story. Let's, let's check out what he said, what he tells us.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  I was angry, embittered, spoiled. I was a bad kid.

• 31:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where'd you grow up?

• 31:31Speaker 03

  Grew up in New Jersey in the suburbs, right across the river.

• 31:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What exit?

• 31:36Speaker 03

  I was just very disappointed with the way that the 60s turned out and I was a bitter, self-destructive, drug-seeking kid who really had a hard time finding anything to believe in. And I found a home, the way that a lot of people find a home in the military. I found a home in the restaurant business. I mean, this was a world of absolutes that I responded to. I, I liked the science of, to me it was a revelations working as a dishwasher. Why? Because plates went in dirty and they came out clean every time. And if I did my job of washing dishes, I got the respect of hardworking people in the kitchen and that made me feel proud of myself in a way I never had before. Uh, I'll tell you.

• 32:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was transitional.

• 32:23Speaker 03

  Transitional. I went from a very unhappy, self-destructive college kid. A college dropout to a guy with a.

• 32:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Washing dishes?

• 32:30Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. And I live by those. The lessons I learned as a dishwasher were the most important in my life. Show up on time.

• 32:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sounds like a book.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  Have the.

• 32:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lessons I learned washing dishes?

• 32:41Speaker 03

  I've written that book. Um, and then at age forty-four, I found myself standing, uh, broke but reasonably happy, uh, next to a deep fryer at a restaurant in New York and I, I'd written an obnoxious, over testosterone account of my life that I didn't think anyone would buy and suddenly I found myself on the bestseller list and my life literally changed in the space of a week from a guy who never thought he'd see Saigon much less Rome to somebody who's now been traveling, uh, for the last ten years. Anywhere I want to go in the world, doing pretty much whatever I please.

• 33:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, not to over interpret what you just shared with me, but the fact that your life transformed at age forty-four.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's extraordinary. Look at how many people give up long before then saying, look, I'll never make anything of my life.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  I'd never had health insurance. I'd never, uh, owned a car. I'd never owned a home. Uh, I never paid my rent on time. I owed it to IRS ten years of back taxes. I went to sleep every night, uh, hyperventilating from fear for who's gonna call first, the landlord, credit card company, or the, uh, you know, uh, the IRS. Uh, I had no hope of ever changing that situation and that was good by previous year's standards. So it came as a big, big, big surprise to me to suddenly have the freedom to see this world and do the things that I'm able to do with the people I do it with. I think it makes me, uh, grateful in a way that I might not be had it happened earlier.

• 34:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So who would have thought food can change somebody's life that way? It was an extraordinary story.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was a dishwasher for like a year, but I didn't realize I could do this. I had six years before I'm his age and have to have accomplished the same stuff.

• 34:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta keep at it, keep working at it.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  You have to work on the dishwashing a little more.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  I know, I feel like I learned a lot, but not quite as much.

• 34:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Marion, I think most people who care about their health have either only a pseudo-scientific understanding of nutrition or no understanding at all. So you've gotta be disappointed with...

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Present company excluded.

• 34:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've gotta be disappointed with the state of knowledge out there.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  No, I'm disappointed with the state of science and knowledge in general.

• 35:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In general, oh yeah, yeah. It's just one aspect of it all.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Well, it's an aspect that hits people personally. We put food in our bodies and that makes it extremely personal.

• 35:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's some combination of protein, carbohydrates, fat.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean nutrition's complicated. There are probably 50 different components in food that we need in order to survive and it's hard to keep them track and to keep track of them and you don't know what's in food.

• 35:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I live off of any one of them if I want to just go all protein?

• 35:27Speaker 02

  No, no, variety, variety.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  You couldn't live off of just Diet Coke?

• 35:30Speaker 02

  It would be very difficult.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  For how long do you think if you just drank Diet Coke would you live? Like two months, a year?

• 35:36Speaker 02

  Actually, it's probably very close to 70 days.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  70 days, just Diet Coke?

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you...

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it has no calorie sources.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  It has no calories and no nutrients, so it's just like...

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, so you'd also have to eat bugs.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  So it's the equivalent of water and there've been studies, the Irish hunger strikers, for example, you know, they were very carefully studied and on average they lived about 70 days once they decided not to eat anymore.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 36:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so the Diet Coke experiment proxied with water would do that?

• 36:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, and if they ate something, then they would have lived longer.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 36:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta wrap up this hour. It's been, it's been an awesome conversation about food and diet. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio and I've had Eugene Mirman, you've seen him and heard him before, and of course Professor Marion Nessel. Thanks for being on StarTalk Radio.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  A pleasure.

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Contributing to the information surrounding my interview with Anthony Bourdain. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your host. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio, a show brought to you in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. And as always, I bid you to keep looking up.